A year ago, I asked Scott if he wanted to start something with me. He was freelancing with shady clients, I was working in house with an insane, bipolar australian, when it hit me. Why not start our own studio and work for ourselves? So thats what we did, we started lost penguin studios with high hopes, but as the market in Vegas has shown us, it is not so hopeful. We have always wanted to use LP as something more than just a design studio. We wanted to use it as a resource for other designers, animators, developers and average internet schmucks.

The Present

Which brings us to here and now. We are in the middle of development of a suite of internet applications. The Tuxedo Suite. We have completely re-evaluated the options for content management systems that are available, and to us, they seem to be over crowded with features nobody uses. So we have set our to develope our own. The Tuxedo Suite will feature 3 applications which will work with each other as one complete solution to web design and development. The first application which is in testing phases is Little Penguin, a stripped down content management system. Its light weight, (only a fraction of the size of joomla, wordpress and other CMS) and simple to use. The second application we are working on we are calling Adelie, which is a project management system. I have been doing some research on project management systems, and nothing I have come across is client oriented. We will be using the PMS as a place for clients to view and check proofs, leave feedback to designers, and upload files. We are also working on implementing a time tracker that will install on the designers desktop and the client can track hours spent working on a particular project. And the final application we will be throwing out with The Tuxedo Suite, is still under brainstorming phase, but will be an intertwined shopping cart application. We are hoping to get Adelie and Little Penguin out before end of August, but with what we have planned in the very near future, it might set us back a bit.

The Future

We are happy to announce that we will be opening a second office. Where you might as? No, not on the distant planet of Tattooine. We are opening a second LP office in Seattle, WA. As of the time I’m writing this we are scheduled to open September 1st 2008. So throughout the rest of 08, I will be working furiously on a new plan. A site redesign, releasing The Tuxedo Suite and some new branding efforts.

Just wanted to let everyone in on some of the things we have been working on and what we have up our sleeve. I have a meeting with a client in 10 minutes, so I will leave you with this.

” Mark my words, we’re taking over the world”

It gives you the ability to add new tabs and define what browser to display in individual tabs.

My friend just showed me this other program as well. It allows for more versions of IE, again its PC only. http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE

Alas, I found a program that does the same thing for OS X http://www.kronenberg.org/ies4osx/

Check them out… I’m going to start using the Multiple IE on my windows and the other one on my apples.

testing testing testing.

So we have ventured a little farther onto the web and here is a list of links for you to check out!

Lost Penguin Studios on Logo Sauce.
Lost Penguin Studios on FinalCrit
Lost Penguin Studios on Myspace
Lost Penguin Studios on Behance Network

So I’ve been wanting to use our toybox for something more than just some kick ass tutorials, and provide some insight to the wonderful world of graphic design. Today I’m going to share with you some of my personal experiences I have had working as an inhouse graphic designer and some of the pros and cons that go with it.

Let’s hop into the delorean and travel back to 2005, I landed my first “real” design job working as a graphic designer for a local Las Vegas publication. At the time i though life couldn’t get any better. I was earning well beyond my friends at a whopping 12$ and hour, dual CRT monitors and all the red bull I could handle. I was young and wasn’t really aware of some of the horrors that come with it. Unlike a corporate gig with an agency or casino, working for a small company can be really tough. You see and hear things, and everyone knows everyones business. When the company is struggling to pay it’s bills, you know it, and that puts uncertainty in your head. My biggest pet peve working for this publication was watching the company get caught up in the glitz and glam of the las vegas lifestyle and pissing company money away on hummers, limos, and fully stocked bars in the office, when the hard working designers, writers, editors and photographers could all do with a raise. I remember working late one night, ( 2am was typical on monday night as we had weekly email blasts we were responsible for putting out, and the content writer was usually too drunk to deliver content on time.) and happened to “find” the company payroll. Boy was I amazed. It’s silly that the woman who gets coffee makes more than the people putting together your source of income. But thats life.

I had been with this publication for about 4 months and was put on salary basis. Salary has its ups and downs. While it’s nice getting paid for not coming in when you are hung over, it also sucks working 16 hours a day and not getting paid for the over time. Employers will abuse this to the fullest, and I have found that everywhere I have worked.

Lets Jump ahead to the last year, July 2007. I was contracted to redesign a certain photographers website and was happy to do so. The gig was an inhouse contract, which was awesome, fastest mac pro machines, 30 inch displays, what could be better right? WRONG! so my contract redesign was to last about 3 weeks, but before I finished the art director quit and i was left in limbo of staying on contract or coming on full time. so for another 3 weeks, I wasn’t sure if I should be looking for more work. I was finally added to payroll about a month and half after I had initially started.The atmosphere in the office was, interesting, to say the least. I can recall being called ( stop reading if easily offended.) a cunt at least twice a day. While all is fun and in a playful manner, you see just how unprofessional people conduct themselves. The hours there were absolutely ridiculous. I would arrive bright and early at 8:30 and just as I was getting ready to head home for the night, the boss would pop in ( around 4:50) and pretend to play art direct. Now I don’t know if you have ever had the unfortunate opportunity to have someone breathing down your neck telling you how to design something and had absolute NO CLUE what good design is, but it’s stressful. I dubbed him what we called a “picture pusher.” instead of letting us work and design he would come in and just move pictures around the document we would be working on. This would go on for hours, days, weeks and even months. The same project, with no progres.

Our department was literally only 3 people, myself, another designer who was forced into the roll of art director when the actual art director quit, and our “photoshop guru.” Oh thats right…. don’t for one second believe a photographer when they say they’re photos are 100% natural.. Saturation are these guys’ best friend. So as I was saying… our department was 3 people, and only 2 of us did design. Our workload was easily enough for 4 people. And did we ever see a raise when the work load increased and we were putting in more and more and more hours… Nope, not a cent. Although other people in the company were getting free iphones, new cars on the company card. It really dampens your spirit. The company was at the verge of collapsing because of certain peoples spending habits and using company funding for houses, cars, and strippers. So what happens? Insert downsizing here.

I’ve taken alot away from these two experiences. I’ve learned exactly how NOT to run this company. I promised my self that if I ever saw any kind of success from this, every penny is going back into it. I can’t stand when people only see dollar signs. It eats you alive and I’ve witnessed first hand the consequences of it. I’m not saying all small inhouse jobs will be bad, I’m not saying everyone is money hungry. I will say be very weary of small companies. You don’t have as much security or as many ways to defend yourself against being mistreated.

We hope you enjoy them.

-Scott

We just posted a few new tutorials for photoshop, illustrator and mootools. Check em out and let us know what you think.

Drew

Oh and if you live in Las Vegas, check out our friends in The Countdown.

After you’ve downloaded mootools you need to download Hover Fx > download hoverfx.js here

Ok, now that you have the scripts we can begin! First, open hoverfx.js in the text editor of your choice and find then line that says:

‘color’: ‘#0f0′ //Edit this to change the hover color

You can change the hex code to any color you like. Can it be anymore obvious? I didn’t think so. 6 lines down find the line that says

‘color’: ‘#000′ //Edit this to change the normal color

This controls the normal link color. OMG! Now to set up your html and css files. To add Hover Fx to your page you only need to add the following to the <head> section of the html document.

<script type="text/javascript" src="mootools.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="hoverfx.js"></script>

Make sure you upload the files to the same directory as your file. If you want to put them somewhere else make sure you change the code accordingly.

When setting up your css make sure you DONT SET THE A:HOVER STYLE. If you do, the browser tries to do both effects at the same time and you wont see the hover in effect. The link styling should look like this to work with the original colors in hoverfx.js

a, a:link, a:visited, a:active {

color:#000;

}

1. Let’s open up the photo we want to convert to black and white. For this tutorial I’ll be using a photo I took in Seattle.

2. Now that we have our photo open, create a duplicate of it in our layers pallet.

3. While we are still in our layers pallet, we are going to select the circle with black and white halves. These are our adjustment layers. You can add these adjusments from Image > Adjustments but you won’t have control of it after the adjustment is applied. So click the adjusment layer icon in our layer pallet and we are going to select “Gradient Map”

4. A dialog box will appear with a gradient, click the gradient and you can now customize your gradient map. I’m going to use a very dark brown to white gradient to give our image a bit of tone. Once you are satisfied with your gradient click ok. I would like to add that you can now adjust gradient maps opacity as you would any other layer if you want to leave a tiny bit of color in.

5. Ok, next are a few tricks which aren’t mandatory but i find make a better image. Back in your layers pallet, select the adjustment layer icon and select “Curves.” A simple S curve will bring out the highlights and add some dramatic lighting. Again, since this is on an adjustment layer we can adjust the opacity of the layer.

6. Next I like to add a bit of focal point to the image, so let’s select our copied image in our layers pallet the go to Filters>Distort>Lens Correction. The lens correction window will open and here we can add a vignette. Adjust the sliders according to how much vignette you want to add. I am going to set the amount to -80 and the midpoint to +24. Click ok. You can adjust the opacity of the affected layer.

7. Last step. I like to sharpen my images a bit so I will show you the sharpening technique I use on a frequent basis. With our copied layer selected, ( the one we just added a vignette to) and go to Filter> Sharpen> Unsharp Mask. Use these settings. Amount: 20%, Radius: 50.0 px, Threshold: 0. Click your preview check box on and off and you can see the difference.

And there you have it.. you should have a dramatic looking black and white photo now.