Juliana Egley

I’m excited to share my body of work with you. As a freelance graphic designer with a particular focus on working-class imagery and style, I am drawn in particular to design that serves the music and theater communities. I am available for freelancing in most fields, and have a diverse body of work and design to draw from.

This is a component of a larger design that I didn’t have time to finish.

This is kind of a cheat, since I had the concept a long time ago.

Front:

Back:

I’m trying to create and upload a thing a day for the month of September.  Doesn’t matter if it’s great or awful, just do something.   So, here’s today’s (just under the wire, whew!)  Lyrics courtesy Lucero.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about color perception and theory lately.  It’s fascinating to me that people’s brains interpret the same objective, concrete value (like, say hex code e22023,  in such wildly different, subjective ways, and then the same brains assign emotional value to that color.

Case in point: Rihanna’s new hair.  She went from her blonde-brown to a fiery red, and pundits promptly proclaimed Rihanna’s rebirth into a sultry siren.  (Sorry, sometimes I read too much Variety.)

Rihanna on June 7, 2010, courtesy Pacific Coast News Online

The commentary stuck in my head, because Rihanna’s hair color is the one I’ve been sporting for the past few years.  Mine is not as bright, because I don’t bleach my hair pre-color, but it’s darn close.  I love having that vibrant red on my hair, and I’d say it reflects my fiesty nature pretty well.  (Look, an emotion attached to a color!)

But – at work the other night, I was complimented on my hair.  The woman was saying that she loved the red, and I said, “Thank you, I really enjoy having bright red hair.”

“Oh no,” the woman said, slightly aghast.  “Your hair isn’t bright at all.  It’s too dark.” And then she went on for a good five minutes, telling me how my perception of my hair color was wrong.  Admittedly, my bar is rather dimly-lit, but it still struck me how what I think of as bright (which is more a measure of the vibrancy than the value) is the total opposite to someone else.

It makes me think about how attached people are to their perception of color (and, therefore, to their perception of the world), and how societies settle on interpretations/definitions of color.  What do you people think?  What color, if any, do you think you perceive or interpret differently from the norm?

I’m reading “Gimme Something Better”, which is a fantastic oral history of the Bay Area punk scene, from the very beginnings up in North Beach to the Gilman Street scene.  The prologue (“Turds On The Run”) is people like Jello Biafra, James Stark, Jennifer Miro, Penelope Houston, et al., talking about the horrible corporate arena rock that was dominating at the time punk began.  Klaus Flouride says: “When people say, ‘What got you into punk?’ I say, “The Eagles.” Nothing in the mainstream that was calling itself rock ‘n’ roll was really rock ‘n’ roll. It was easy-music listening at that point.”

Even though I have a serious soft spot for Southern and Americana rock, Klaus absolutely has a point.  Something that was edgy, progressive, thought-provoking, full of the “I’m going to do this my way, not the way I’m told it should be done” attitude got watered down into pablum.  Which is not unlike what happened to punk.  Pretty much any anti- or counter-culture movement or revolution eventually gets co-opted by the power structure and defanged for mass comsunption.

Which leads me to Ed Hardy.  Except that tattooing wasn’t quite a revolution, but it did used to be a way to mark yourself as outside of the mainstream.  It was a signifier of being willing to take a step outside that box.  Now, not so much, especially in urban centers.  You almost stand out if you don’t have a tattoo here in San Francisco.  That is not Ed Hardy’s fault – what is Ed-Hardy-the-brand’s fault is the number of people walking around with Ed Hardy paraphenalia thinking that they are cool or edgy because they own something that has some flash on it.

Ed Hardy the artist has some amazing designs.  The influence from both Sailor Jerry and Japanese tattoo master Horihide make his designs visually compelling, with intricate lines and beautiful, delicate shading. I will confess to some neighborhood loyalty, since he owns and operates a parlor in North Beach, but really, his training and cred is impeccable.  I love his artwork, even though it’s not my style at all.

Ed Hardy the brand, though?  Is shit.  Especially once Christian Audiger got his slimy, Von Dutch-encrusted hands on it.  It started as a bunch of flash put together in a non-meaningful way, flattened so the colors are easier to reproduce, and then bedazzled onto shirts that rip at the drop of a hat.  Now it’s on notebooks, trucker hats, candles, cellphone accessories – fucking everywhere, so that people can buy this crap and feel “edgy”.  It’s not edgy, it’s not meaningful, and it’s certainly not aesthetically pleasing.  It’s a montage of crap consumerism at its lowest form.  These manufacturers have figured out that people aren’t going to spend much time analyzing the meaning and symbolism of what they are wearing (and, by extension, consuming), so they’re just throwing a bunch of brightly-colored shit up there and calling it a day.  Even manufacturers of baby clothing and toys think more about what they’re doing than these people, and babies are not known for their fashion discernment.

It would be a really boring world if everyone dressed in the best of taste.  I get that, and I like it.  All I’m asking is that there is more care, more thought put into what is put out and what people decide to wear.  Good design isn’t that expensive, not if you know what you’re doing, and the world will be a better place.  I promise.

Sons of Anarchy set piece, courtesy http://sutterink.blogspot.com/

Sons of Anarchy is a show about a fictional motorcycle club in a fictional small Northern California town named Charming, and is entirely and wholly one of the best shows on television.  Kurt Sutter, the creator and showrunner, has crafted an unbelievably believable world with multiple shades of grey in every action.  I could go on about the awesomeness of the writing, the acting, the motorcycles, but I wanted to talk about the visuals, and specifically the light.

Jackson Teller on his Super Glide

Despite a lot of action taking place at night, in the clubhouse, in Jax’s or Clay & Gemma’s home, or in the hospital, the overwhelming lighting impression I always walk away from is that bright California sunshine, the one I ride through when I turn my bike east.  It’s not the harsh, desert, orange-tinged light of Nevada or Southern Cali, but almost a lemon-yellow light – still bright, still unforgiving at times, but infused with its own sense of hope and freedom.  Seeing that light always makes me want to ride, to see what’s around that next corner.

I love package design, and liquor package design in particular. I want to do a more in-depth piece on the entire industry, but until I find the time, here are my thoughts on a new(ish) rum out of New Orleans.

Unleash The Kraken!

It’s no secret that a lot of money goes in to the marketing and packaging of liquor – sometimes more than goes in to the development of the liquor itself.  The Kraken Rum has done an insanely good job of packaging their product (which is actually quite tasty) – the jug evokes old-timey shipboard connotations. the label design looks wood-cut. and their website is an appropriate homage to movies like “10,000 Leagues Under The Sea”. Making it look older, like, say, Captain Nemo’s diary, would have been too obvious a choice, and the mash-up of fonts, color palette, and illustrations nicely places it in an ambiguous timeframe, thereby allowing it to feel almost modern.  I love it.  It’s the kind of amazingly detailed yet still clean-feeling design I aspire to.

Lyrics from “Same Blood” by The Academy Is…

This actually turned out a lot differently than I first imagined it.  The first draft used a very romantic, swirly font, and I had a lot of curlicues and flourishes coming off of the letters.  Maybe it was the fact that it was a grey day when I sat down to finish it, or that I just inescapably associate August with lazy summer heat (which does not correlate with SF’s August weather, as a rule), but the piece ended up being a postcard from the summer instead.