Blah, blah, blah.

So I’ve been doing work for Red Watermelon since October. It’s been my biggest project lately. I’m designing and illustrating games for the iphone. The company is very new, but we’ve been very successful with Runway which currently has over 1.6 million users. That is really amazing. I’ve been working on the logo and creating an identity and website. So far we can check off logo and business card design and I’m almost finished designing the website. Currently the second game we have planned takes precedent and that is taking up approximately 125% off my time I enjoy it though, and I couldn’t ask for a better opportunity to not only develop my illustraton skills, but my game design skills and teamwork skills, project management skills, etc.

Here’s the logo and my business card! I’ll have more news about our upcoming game sooner then later hopefully

I did some new illos for Bop – I love doing their “Your Yikes” section, it always gives me the oppoturnity to be more creative with expressions and situations.

So recently I’ve had to develop a new style – somewhat more “teen” then pre-teen. It’s fun to have something challenging like that, so I was totally into it but kinda nervous cause I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to do it to my liking. I need to do some more pieces, that maybe have some of the detail I like to put in it. But these are what I’ve got going on that I did for Bop magazine.

I was recently commissioned to do a portrait of a client’s son and his father, which was super exciting for me. I love doing portraits, but most of my projects are more business related then personal related. I would actually love to do more portraits and am looking forward to expanding into that direction. Portraits are much more personal and I love how happy a client is when they see the end product – how I’ve captured a look, personality and mood!

This client suggested a soccer portrait, and since his son was still a young baby I thought it would be cute if he was cradling the ball. I wanted to create an open and serene mood, something with color, but not too much color. He gave me a handful of photos for reference and I created a sketch of the scene and took it to color in Illustrator. And here’s what I came up with! He loved it, btw – and I am so happy!

So the other day I was doing some work for our new site Folio Candy (where you can purchase premade portfolio sites, perfect for showcasing your creative work) and I came across an issue in Illustrator that I had never come across before. My Save for Web feature was not working properly. Save for Web is mainly used when saving images as JPEGs, GIFs, PNGs, etc. Losing this capability definitely makes my work harder – so it was frustrating. My boyfriend, Scott – a Genius at the Apple store – told me that I should try and clear out my preferences in my Library. I was like “hmmmm?” Well – that fixed it – so if you ever come across this crazy and frustrating issues, follow these steps:

1- First, go ahead and quit Illustrator.

2- Go to your Home and find the Library folder. Jump into that folder.

3- Find your Preferences folder inside Library, and jump in there.

4- And in Preferences you are going to be looking for something like Adobe Save for Web 11.0 Prefs. Delete that sucker, and restart your computer. Open up Illustrator and tada, you should be good as gold.

But it left me wondering, why does this happen … In my case, there was a file I was using, that every time I accessed Save for Web within that file, it would come across an error, saving improperly and then screwing it up every time after no matter what file I tried it with. So I just don’t Save for Web in that file. Sheesh.

So some few months or so ago, I started working with a small start-up called Little Passports. I really enjoyed what they were trying to achieve with their product, which was offering a fun and interactive way to educate young children about different cultures. The concept is that there are two main characters, Sam and Sofia, who travel around the world on their magical scooter, and children “travel” along with them by receiving monthly packages that include various things, such as activity sheets, “boarding passes” that contain a secret code to be inputed online which gives access to online activites, stickers and stamps, and other things too. The first monthly package comes in a cute little suitcase!

Sam & Sofia illustrated by Rhiannon Cunag

My role with Little Passports has been to create the look of the main characters, Sam and Sofia, and to illustrate and design many of the other pieces, such as boarding passes, stickers, activity sheets, etc. I feel like I’ve really played an integral role with Little Passports and I am really passionate to see them succeed.

Sam & Sofia illustrated by Rhiannon Cunag

I’ve been developing sites on WordPress for awhile now, and I love it for a number of reasons. It’s fully customizable, has an incredibly intuitive and easy-to-use interface, and the thousands of plugins available pretty much cover all the bases for any functionality you could possibly need.

I’ve also been learning lots of nice little tricks for customizing themes. I plan to occasionally post little tutorials describing some of these tricks. Hopefully, someone will find some use for them, and save themselves a little time!

One trick that I just used and that took forever to find is the ability to display the current category name somewhere on the page. Specifically, I wanted to be able to output this in an <h1> tag on my category.php page. I tried a plugin that was supposed to provide additional template tags that aren’t included in a native WordPress installation. That didn’t work; it kept outputting the default category. I tried lots of thing, and finally found the solution I was after.

<?php single_cat_title(''); ?>

Pretty simple, right? This will simply display the category name on the page based on the category slug on the current page. If you want to add some text to display before the category name, you would use:

<?php single_cat_title('You are reading about '); ?>

Which, if the current category was WordPress, would look like this:

You are reading about WordPress

Alternately, you can assign the category name to a variable for use in your code. That would look something like this:

$current_category = single_cat_title("", false);

Pretty cool, huh?

I’m pretty much a food freak, I love food, love eating, love watching about it, love the smells that come out of the kitchen, lol! Just love love love food! One of my favorites is peanut butter, can’t get enough of the stuff. Thought I’d share this cool brand of peanut butter I came across, called P.B. Loco. On top of your regular smooth and creamy, and chunky choices of peanut butter, P.B. Loco also offers some unique and sophisticated flavors, such as Asian Curry Spice and Raspberry White Chocolate. You can get some at their online shop or if you are fortunate enough to have a P.B. Loco Cafe nearby, you should stop by there and pick up a jar or two! At their cafes, you can do some sampling, as well as order a variet of peanut butter sandwiches! They’ve got some fun and crazy things going on, definitely make a point to check it out. Check out this lens I wrote about it on Squidoo!

Loco for Peanut Butter

We had the pleasure of our website being featured by Luc on his website Spicy Web Designers, and he approached us about doing an interview! This was pretty exciting for us and we more than happy to participate. The questions were mainly answered from my perspective, but I wanted to make sure that Valerie’s voice was heard to, from her perspective as a programmer! So check it out at Spicy Web Designers, and don’t forget to vote! And be sure to peruse Luc’s site, he’s got some great stuff going on there!

Okay, so I’m really digging this Squidoo thing! It’s not the first time I came across the community, I just hadn’t develope an interest for it previously, probably because I didn’t fully understand the concept of “sharing!” Lol! Basically, for those who aren’t entirely familiar with the Squidoo community, Squidoo gives everyone the opportunity to write up a one page web site about anything! It’s kinda like an encyclopedia of where every page is contributed by anybody. You can write about anything you know, and it’s best to write about something you’re really passionate about, that way the page is “meatier.” An added perk to the Squidoo thing is that you can make money off the advetisements that show on your page. A percentage goes to charity, and you can designate another percentage to go to you OR other charities of your choice! I joined a couple of days agao, and my first day as a memeber I wrote two lenses (a lens refers to the page of info you choose to write about), one about me (a lensography, if you will) and a lens on Tokyo, Japan (specifically my trip there). And the next day I wrote about how to get started in freelance illustration! Check out my lenses:

Rhiannon – Freelance Illustrator, Designer, Entrepreneur
Adventure in Tokyo, Japan!
Personal Guide to Freelance Illustration

Hope you enjoy them! Definitely join the Squidoo community, it’s free and helps you get the writing bug out of you, and best of all, unlike a blog, you won’t feel pressure to write “updates” on a daily basis. You just write about what you want, when you want!

Rhiannon