My Graphic/Web Design History » Northrop Grumman (2003-Present)

Carroll College Football (2008)

John — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 23:15:15 +0000

Days before Carroll College was set to attempt to repeat their NAIA Championship from 2007 (immortalized on the cover of Sports Illustrated), Northrop Grumman was offered the opportunity to place a very special ad on the front page of the Helena Independent Record. The ad area was a narrow strip along the bottom of the page, well “below the fold.” With very short notice I had to come up with two ads, congratulating them on their win or their loss. I post both here for review and posterity. We were able to obtain photographs of the Saints in action, and with approval of the head of the athletic department, I created what you see here, including re-creating the Carroll College logo from scratch in Adobe Illustrator because a suitable version with decent resolution could not be found quickly.

Unfortunately they lost. Unfortunate for me because I liked the “win” ad better.

(click the image at left for a larger version)

Economic Impact Summary (2007)

John — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 23:07:29 +0000

Northrop Grumman in Helena publishes a summary of how our company and group of employees effects the local economy. It includes everything from education information to home remodeling dollars spent here. Most years I’ve designed a cover for the document, usually involving a theme of growth or partnership with Montana. After the purchase of TRW by Northrop Grumman in 2003 there were a more stringent set of guidelines for designing any corporate materials.

This version is my attempt to break out of the corporate design standard just a little without abandoning it completely. We are still focusing on kids as in (a) previous version(s). I will shamelessly admit my web design experience creeping in with the gradients, the oversize text elements and the reflection effect. Nothing like a little cross-pollination.

Chamber of Commerce Ad

John — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 23:00:37 +0000

Since 1998 I have created countless advertisements for local publications with public relations, community involvement and marketing in mind. This is one such ad. The copy has changed little over the years, except for the number of years. Every few years I try to redesign the ad. Before this it was the eclipse theme, “Defining the future.” At left is an example of the current theme as of this writing, with more of a focus on children and families. I’ve probably made a dozen variations on this design due to the varying size constraints in different publications. I won’t be posting all of them here.

Economic Impact Summary (2006)

John — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 20:42:47 +0000

Again, a rather plain design. This year they said, “Do something with children.” Make sense as we create a lot of systems that cater to the needs of children, mostly child support enforcement and welfare related.

Economic Impact Summary (2005)

John — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 20:40:18 +0000

I debated including this example because it really isn’t a design. Management said, “I don’t know, come up with something ‘techy’.” This is the photo I came up with, given my limited budget and available materials. Some times just just have to fish or cut bait.

Treasure State Development Web Site (2004)

John — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 20:34:08 +0000

Treasure State Development was one of the few private sector web sites I did at Northrop Grumman. They were already a client of our Network department, and this was low budget follow-on work to that contract. The entire design was based on their logo, the woodcut in the upper left corner combined with the text in the masthead. I dissected it, pulling the colors out of it and other graphic elements such as the masthead background and bullets. I used a third-party javascript slider to make the menu bar at the top slide into place at the top no matter how much the user scrolled the page. I also used a third-party random quote script in the left sidebar. The site was constructed with semantic markup and entirely styled with cascading style sheets (CSS). No content management system was used, although the site was built upon a basic template structure using server-side includes (SSI) for common elements.

Apparently the site no longer exists. I never heard what became of the family-based company.

Economic Impact Summary (2004)

John — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 23:04:08 +0000

Repeat after me: blue horizontal bars. ::sigh::

So my job in subsequent years consisted initially of finding something to stick in between the bars. A photo or some sort of collage. Later I tried to find ways to spruce it up a little more.

“Defining the Future” was a corporate slogan (I still see it pop up 5 years later). In 2004 we were looking for something “futuristic” to go with it. Sorry, no rocket ships allowed (darn). I was fiddling around in Photoshop and came up with the planetary eclipse graphic. Management liked it and we used it not only for this EIS cover, but a myriad of other local advertisements for about two years. I haven’t decided how much of the “eclipse series” to include here, but I’ll probably include at least one example of some sort of advertisement.