Hawken Blog

Back when I was learning a whole lot about music producing, I decided to change my artist's name from Synchroflash to Wizer. The reason being that everything I released under Synchroflash was super amateurish, and that what I am releasing under Wizer is now pro. I was very, very wrong. It didn't take me long to abandon it, but in the process I made some very cool album art, and I want to share how I made it. This was the end result: 

This is the texture that I used for the background:


I made this texture in a very very interesting way, using a technique I developed, and I use it a whole lot now.

I use a program called Adobe Fireworks for all of my 2d image processing. It is quite powerful and relatively cheap compared to their flagship products, Illustrator and Photoshop. It only costs about $300 (when compared to photoshop's old price, that's cheap) to buy it, and yes you can still buy the cs6 version. I plan on using it for a very long time, so I'm saving money from not getting a subscription.

Fireworks has a really interesting layering engine. You can use it just like any other program that has layers (one layer on top of another), but you can also do some weird image processing with this drop down bar here:

I went to many sites that had free royalty free images, and picked images that looked like it had the right colors/grain that I wanted. Also, through experimentation, I found random images that would tweak the image just the right way with the filters. It is really hard to explain, and is only something that someone would figure out through experimentation. But the concept can be grasped by looking at the edge of my texture, which doesn't look as polished.


Since I flattened the image (turning all the layers of images into one single image), I can't go back and show you the filters I used. But that doesn't matter, since experimentation is crucial, anyways. Here I will show you a section of the filters available.

Part 2 will include how to make a low res texture higher res using rendering, making the colors pop out more and add really neat lighting effects.

I wanted to share my last two logos I made. The last one I completed was for an artist who used to go by the name Archaeoptrix (this is one of my favorite songs he's made). He recently changed his artist name to Orno and now is making different styles of music. You can hear his work here.

Here is the logo I made for him:

It looks especially good on his "Fourths" album art:


And lastly I created my own logo for my music. Please not that this is still very much a work in progress, I haven't finished working on it, making sure everything is symmetrical. It is one of my favorite logo concepts of all time.

I recently created a banner for a really good new Minecraft mod named Femtocraft. This is what it looks like:

In this blog, Itszuvalex credits N0rw0lf. I have different names for different things, but lately I have been going by Hawken for everything, since that is my artist name on soundcloud (my logo was made by me, as well). N0rw0lf is just my minecraft community name.

I wanted to guide people through the process about how to make such a logo. Some of it is intuition, but much of it just comes down to techniques that you learn slowly learn.

At first, I came up with multiple rough versions. My very first prototype looked like this:
Not gorgeous? No, its not supposed to be. Its supposed to embody a certain direction, a certain style. Its a quick rough draft that I use to make sure that the person who I'm making the logo for actually likes the style I am aiming for.

There are a few ways you can make something like this. You can draw it by hand, scan it and then make a vector version (Using Gimp, Photoshop, Fireworks, Illustrator and many more). Usually you use the "pen" tool for this, the tool that allows you to make custom shapes by drawing the edges in. Another option is to just skip straight to designing it with the vector art. That's what I did. My weapon of choice was Adobe Fireworks, a very good underrated tool for web design, vector graphics and even image manipulation. It has a powerful layering system with different effects.

Usually, after a few revisions, you get a good prototype that they are pleased with. I ended up with this: These were the first 5 letters that I used as a demo, because they demonstrated the style pretty well. This one fit Femtocraft's style the best, so we decided to go with it.

Notice those blue lines? Those are guides, and they make all the difference between a cool looking logo design and a professional looking logo design. You want everything to look as proportional as possible, as lined up as possible and make sure the logo flows properly. Make sure to align similar features to these lines, and you will be golden.

Eventually, after aligning everything for a long time, you get this:
Notice how I left out the last F and the last T? That's because we already have designed those letters elsewhere in the logo. Certain (more extravagant) logo styles will require that you make a different design for that letter, but this logo was supposed to be clean cut with sharp edges, two different Fs and Ts would have looked weird. Also, why do more work than you have to do?

With that done, all that was left was to make textures for the background in the banner, but that is a topic for a different post at a different time.

I enjoy many different things. So many, that I often jump from one project(not hobby) to another. I don't call them hobbies because I feel that the word doesn't fit how I feel about them appropriately. Often, when people mention their hobbies, it means something that they just enjoy doing to pass the time. And while that is what I am doing, it is so much more than that. They are projects that I put myself into. Often, I work so hard at them that it doesn't feel like a hobby, it feels like a secondary job. A job that I enjoy doing and feel really accomplished when I reach my goal.

I decided to create this blogspot as an archive to share my projects, partly as a portfolio, partly just to share information and cool stuff with others.

I plan on sharing graphic design, web design, music, sound design and more on this site. Now, enough about this, on to the content.