Earlier this summer I began working on a new design for chuckp3.com in hopes that I would one day leave blogger behind for the promised land of WordPress.  So I got work in Photoshop and eventually came up with what you see now.  The next step was to turn this visual image into a working, functioning blog.  This is where my friend Stephen Reinhardt comes in.  Stephen took my photoshop file and made it into a working blog template.  Check out Stephen’s WordPress theme site www.wpzone.net and I hear his band In Reverent Fear is going to be dropping a new album sometime soon… you will NOT want to miss that.

Today my graphic design venture, Red Coyote Studio, has officially been launched. Check out the site here.

I’m taking a break from researching for a term paper to rant about two of my favorite things: Hockey and Graphic Design. I’ve got hockey on the brain because as I’m sure everyone in America knows… the Stanley Cup Playoffs begin tonight. But how does graphic design come into the mix you ask?

The Buffalo Sabres, that’s how. They introduced a new logo this year, which is beyond comprehension in it’s complete encapsulation of all things lame. I came across this news via a graphic designer’s website dedicated to getting his logo put on the Sabres jerseys, and I’ve got to say he has done some great work.

Below are three logos. First the original Sabres logo, dated but still classic. Second the new “evil flying banana slug with horns” logo. Thirdly, John Slabyk’s modern interpretation of the classic logo. In a word - awesome. If you care about hockey and you care about web design you can even sign his petition to have the logo changed.

Thanks to my expanding knowledge of CSS I was able to do a complete site redesign in just a few hours. Just as simple as a new mock-up in Photoshop, slicing and dicing, and then working a bit of CSS magic and voila!

As the graphic design business picks up and is becoming more and more viable as an actual legitimate source of income, I’m devoting more time to learning more advanced techniques like CSS and the like. I’ll soon be (re)designing and (re)launching my freelance graphic design site (currently here).

But I need your help coming up with a great name for my new and budding company. If you often find yourself thinking “that would be a great band name!” then I’d love for you to put that same creativity towards helping me come up with a name for my design co. Some guidelines… it should be something that I can depict graphically, it should be brief.

So to the winner will go an iPod shuffle (color is your choice of course!). Be sure to give me your email address along with your name idea. I won’t give out any iPods to “anonymous.”

[Update: Brandon McDonald won the Shuffle.
The name will be Red Coyote Studio.]

After doing quite a bit of work on websites this past year, someone pointed out to me the obvious: I need my own professional design site. Well as of today, I’ve got a nice clean simple site dedicated to my graphic design buisness.

design.chuckp3.com

Spent some time up at the youth room at church tonight working on a Celtic Cross that will be the focal point of our room. I’ve uploaded a ton of pics of the progress we made today on the cross. Check it out on my Flickr page here.