January 2022

It all started with a logo, as do so many stories about logos. Free Wheeler Pizza has been around since the ‘70s, and their logo—perfect for the time and audience—was needing a refreshing. Or a refreshment? No, that’s not it, it didn’t need a cold beverage, which can taste mighty fine with pizza, I might add. But it did need to be replaced.

Step 1: What are we selling? Food? Boring! Convenience? Getting warmer! What we are really promoting is fun. It’s party food. We don’t tell our buddies, “Hey, let’s order a combo with extra broccoli, hold the cheese, and watch that documentary about the tortured lives of city traffic officials.”

Other adjectives we worked with were “quality,” “fast” and “delivery.” Hm, maybe I can sell the unused logos to a birthing center. “Quality babies delivered fast!”

I showed a half-dozen ideas, but, like Miss America, there can be only one winner. I’m not counting the semi-winners, like Miss Congeniality and Miss Secretly Pregnant. Unlike Miss America, there was no losers’ dance or swimsuit competition. The thought of stuffing a pizza into a one-piece and watching it strut about on stage is too ​Men In Black​ for me to handle.

And the winner is: fun, fast, automotive, goofy, a little retro, a little dangerous, and the color of pepperoni. Will it hold up for 50 years? Will cars still exist? Will I be willing to update it when I’m 114 years old? I think I’ll just be coy on that matter for now.

Boxing Day

All this new logo-ry meant the old boxes were no longer worth a blob of day-old, cold cheese stuck to the inner lid that some people—not me, I promise—might want to scrape off for a happy memory of the night before.

The rules: We needed four sizes of box. All of them had to warn people that pizza is hot, and not to open the box upside-down. In case you were wondering, eating pizza does not require a master’s degree.

A round box was not in the cards, so I did the next best thing: made it square, with aspirations of roundness. and putting our two messages in the corner pieces. And what the heck, since there are four corners, let’s put in more important messages, like, “fingers not forks” and “don’t eat the box.” Each box gets different messages. Collect all four sizes! They’re just like baseball cards, only more cumbersome to store and lacking batting statistics.

Now this savory scion of the ‘seventies is ready to roll into the second fifth of the 21st century. Order a pizza (free delivery!) here: FreeWheelerPizza.com. We’ll work on the website another day.

Ha! Yes! Design

is Jim Hayes and some pencils and paints and a piano in a mid-century dwelling that’s half office, half home sweet home. After stints in design and ad agencies, I’ve succeeded as a free-lance artist for 30 years because my philosophy is to provide high-quality design, illustration and writing, within your time frame, at a cost lower than places with receptionists.

Not that there’s anything wrong with receptionists. I find them marvelously receptive.

I’m happy to meet with you, at no charge, to discuss your current materials, new projects, or how to juggle three balls in three easy lessons. Call me at 801-486-8444 or email jim@ha-yes.com.

June 2020

My web site was perfectly fine. But the makers of the WordPress theme said, “We’re done. Good luck keeping things up and running with no updates coming any more.” Then Sylvia said, “Your site’s looking a little dated.” What? It’s FOUR YEARS OLD! Even in dog years, it’s barely old enough to run for Congress. Sure it’s old—if it’s a fruit fly.

Yeah, it was time for a new fruit fly.

Fortunately, the webworld has become a rosier place for print designers that are used to putting things where they want, and having a choice of more than six fonts. Plus I’d been designing sites on a total boss-daddy platform and knew more/better was doable. I wasn’t on the part of the learning curve that demands a parachute, but I still brought pitons.

Step 1 was devising a color palette. Let’s use all of them, shall we? That ought to do it. Step 1, done!

Step 2: build the home page. Oh, yeah, let’s have lots of logos animate, appearing slowly against the background. So cool! It’s thrilling on my monitor, awkward on a tablet, and on a phone, it looks like all the elements were swallowed whole, vomited back up—and not in an a tidy way—then displayed under a microscope. Hm. Let’s revisit that later.

Nine years of newsletters had been sent out on three different platforms, so there are multiple looks. Hey, you can’t change history. Neither can I, so I won’t. Next!

Gotta have testimonials. If only I had head shots, to show they’re all real people. I’ll use pictures of their projects instead! So if one of my clients looks like Cosette from Les Miserables, that’s why. It may look like I’m accepting work from 19th-century fictional juveniles, but I’m not. That would be wrong.

The comic-story about the plucky marketing director translated from the old site well. Not needing to rebuild it means there is a god! Proof positive! Its name is Carl, and He feels beloved when His followers drink dark beer, as a form of frothy prayer. Don’t cut corners when researching which religion is right for you!

What should be the main image on my “About” page? Why, a 30-year old drawing of my ear, of course. That one was obvious. Despite its age, it still looks like me. My family is blessed with ears that maintain their youthful vitality and vigor well into the wrinkly years.

Okay, now that everything’s done, I have to go back to that home page problem. The solution: make three images, each for a different device, with each made invisible on the machines that it doesn’t look good on. Shown here is the back end, seen at monitor aspect ratio. Since the tablet and phone versions have been trained to go into their rooms and keep quiet when the big screen is active, they’re meekly grayed out. We’re live!

The best part about having mind-twisting technical problems, is when they’re finally solved, it feels so good. I don’t keep hammers around the house because I’d whack a finger or two on a daily basis, just to experience the pain melting away.

Need a website tailored to your niche and tells your story?
Hey, I know a guy. He’s here.

February, 2020
Kirsten gave me a call because the excellent New York-supplied art for an upcoming comedy at Pioneer Theater was unconscionably lewd and needed a thorough de-lewdifying, and perhaps a strong bleaching and de-wormer.

The show tells of the Bottom Brothers, playwrights who are aiming to dethrone their rival, Shakespeare, by inventing the musical. The official cartoon art has the brothers on stage, but the one who is bowing has breeches with a strained seam! This horror may be just fine and dandy for craven, baby-eating New Yorkers, but our Utah sensibilities refuse to don stained galoshes and splash around in their pornographic duckpond.

My job: Make the hideous rip go away. And turn the tomato on the sign into an egg. I thought Utahns were okay with tomatoes, but okay, I can do that. I’m having second thoughts about planting tomatoes in public view, now.

So I drew a splattered egg and well-sewn bloomers. Then, since the original painting is a watercolor, I pulled out my Alice In Wonderland watercolors and painted the drawings to match the original palette. Even though I know very little about painting, I know a lot about faking things. Like my driver’s license from when I was 12 years old, and that one orgasm.

It all turned out well enough that I’d dare flaunt it in my newsletter. Pioneer was pleased, and even the New York producers were impressed, as they said, “Not bad, for a bunch of western troglodytes. Now throw it away. We have an illustration with just the Bottom brother with less bottom. That’s what you’ll use.”

My masterpiece of fakery was dumped, and the capital city was not subjected to the promise of a hint of a whiff of a glancing peek at a butt. And somehow the tomato was reinstated. What I don’t understand? Pioneer’s preceding show is called Ass and its illustration is what you might expect. Hey, Pioneer, I’ve got some bloomers I can put on that.

You can see Something Rotten! in May. Click here for more, less-buttocky details.

Jim Ure is at it again, with his novel-writing high jinks. But this time, it’s a WWII home-front romance, so I had to move out of my comfort zone of designing covers for him that feature cartoon fish (see newsletter #8). It’s about a woman who needs to find herself—away from home, away from the husband who pilfered her job, away from the memory of the romance that crashed in France. Or was it Belgium? Is there a difference?

I kept waiting for a fish to become a major character, but alas, this was not to be a second installment in The Laughing Trout trilogy. Mr. Ure was deaf to my suggestions to have the pilot be a halibut in a Hawker Hurricane. Authors!

This is a self-published e-book, so we didn’t have the advantage of Random House’s budget. But we had the decided advantage of Hilary, who has a collection of photos of herself taken in vintage outfits. She’s the one in the vintage outfits, not the photographer, just to be clear. Or maybe they both are. It’s always a mystery what the photographer is wearing. Why the secrecy?

One of the front-runner layouts has take-your-pick-of-the-many-faces-of-Hilary with her head as a tunnel. You see, the heroine flees on a train, the disappearance helps define who she is, it shows mystery and that she’s far away, there’s the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, and she may or may not be a cyclops. (Spoiler: like a halibut, heroine Helena has a minimum of two eyes, but not as weird as a halibut’s.)

An ideal picture of a 1940s train station appeared in an image search. I tracked down the artist, a 3D illustrator in Sussex, England, and learned this was a rendering he made in school, 10 years ago. He said to feel free to use it, but what I plucked from the Internet was the best resolution I’d get. It had to be blown up 3x, which would usually melt it into a puddle of cheesy grits, but it looked surprisingly not-horrible. Not-horrible isn’t as desired as, say, exquisite, but it’s better than horrible. One must have standards, even if they have the flexibility of Gumby’s Slinky.

Of course, my motto is, When life hands you blur, make blurmonade. I wanted Hilary to “pop” anyhow, so I made the closest and furthest points even more blurry, making the middle ground seem relatively normal, and the whole thing just came into focus. Metaphorically. Making it more blurry didn’t literally make it more in focus. This isn’t Schrödinger’s Train Station.

Let’s rebrand “blurriness” as: a lonely ambiance, the chill atmosphere that rolls in with the fog of war. Now we’re playing with intent!

The only thing left was to alter the overall color, move the train and benches closer together to better work on a vertical cover, change the color of Hilary’s shoes to match the coat, shade her to match the dim surroundings and splat down a shadow to attach her to the floor, since her method of escape isn’t to float away as a human Hindenburg. And because I needed more ownership, I made it so she has just eaten a halibut fillet on toast for lunch.

Read Helena is Missing here!

Leslie’s gallery is near a grocery store. Sometimes people who eat food also buy art. Additionally, all art buyers eventually eat food, so how about them demographics? When Smith’s told Leslie she should advertise on their shopping carts, and they would make the ad for free, how could she say no?

Leslie contacted me one evening, to get my blessing or any suggestions regarding the ad that was supplied to her. It was to be printed the next morning. Unfortunately, the ad was a brimming bowl of clean-out-the-fridge soup. Pictures! Words! Social media! More words about things we don’t care about!

March 2018
Bonnie’s careers as cellist in the Utah Symphony and a music teacher gave her the perspective that, sure, anybody could practice 10,000 hours and get their strings to vibrate, but would it pluck the listeners’ heart strings?

So she wrote her magnum opus, a volume on how to add passion to your passion, and dressed it in…a home-made cover. My soul screamed like acne-faced girls at a Bieber concert, but with “Psycho” strings in the background. (“Reet! Reet! Reet! Reet!”) If “You can’t tell a book by its cover,” the writers of clichés win and you lose.

I eventually convinced her to let me design the covers, though only after I’d crushed her in a who-is-taller contest. Her design parameters were: no, you may not eliminate half of the verbiage, and please use her clever design of the two bass clef signs forming a heart.

Next up: How do you visually express the flow of feeling in music? How it moves you, as if you’re on a boat made of ears? How to show that the act of listening to something well played can make you want to pee? Of course, the answer to all of those, especially the last, was running water.

Stock photo catalogs did not fulfill my needs—there are so many needs they never fulfill, but usually they’re good at having pictures—so I grabbed my trusty Canon and headed to Sugar House Park, which is endowed with a lovely creek that I don’t even have to convince to sign a model release.

I was able to let go of my irritation at the damn leaves that insisted on mucking up my shots—it was early November—once I let go of my preconceptions, and said aloud, “These are exactly the leaves I was looking for,” and realized the book would now employ a yellow palette. The leaves on the creek’s bottom now represent depth of feeling, and the ones floating show that life, like music, is beautiful, then turns yellow and mucks up your shots.

When life hands you leaves, make leafmonade.

Now, to sell the book

Now that the book had a skin worthy of its internal organs, it needed a sales piece. So Bonnie and I had a goatee contest. Bonnie flat-out sucks at growing facial hair.

The author’s photo was another thing absent from stock photo sites, so I shot that, too. Well, no, I didn’t. I missed our appointment because I got an offer I couldn’t refuse—a fun, fun ambulance ride! So, while my pants were being cut off (It turns out that underwear qualities have little effect on survival rates), Sylvia greeted Bonnie, both of them wondering where I was, took the shot, then got down to quietly freaking out until I was located.

It shows exquisite attention to detail that the author headshot accidentally shows the same autumnal quality of the creek. Thanks, November!

The brochure looks just like the book, only different. Sure, consistency ties them together and looks professional, but the dirty secret is: it’s also easier. Why have two ideas when just one will work even better? My accountant has warned me to not draw concepts out of my idea account faster than they earn interest, or soon enough I’ll be in overdraft, and it will be time to become a potato farmer, the kind that specializes in growing curly fries.

This is why creatives call it “bouncing ideas off you.” Because every new idea gets them closer to bouncing payments from their brain bank.

To find out more about Bonnie’s book, find “Journey Into the Heart of Music” on Amazon.

January 2018
When Judith called and asked if I could create a large piece of corporate-themed art for the lobby of a downtown building, I thought of saying, “Yes,” but instead opted for “Ha! Yes!” It’s important to keep consistent with your branding, even if it makes you seem over-enthusiastic.

Of course, I’d never done anything like what she requested, but that’s been true of everything at some point.

Judith, a former gallery owner, selects and places art in buildings. Sometimes, the business wants something custom-made, something that reflects their history. Her usual artist was becoming less and less available, and since I have a home-study course degree in Showing Up, it seemed like a good fit.

After a few layouts that determined I really didn’t know what they really wanted, I finally knew what they really wanted and laid down a long rectangle that showed the company’s history, overlaid with circles that highlighted each of the major businesses overseen by FJ Management.

But I didn’t really know what they really wanted, because nobody did. Hey, they’d never done this before, either. It’s a family business, so requested in the next round were the addition of many family members’ pictures, because who knows who will be the CEO in 50 years? But it got to where it was becoming a family portrait, more appropriate in a living room right beneath the “live love laugh” affirmation cut in blobby oaken letters, so we went back to just the founding and current titans, plus more airplanes.

The whole thing was originally set up to best use the first batch of photos and make the elements blend smoothly. But when the pictures keep getting swapped out, the original layout can lose its joie de vivre, which is the wrong phrase, but since it’s French, it gives this article more je ne sais quoi.

The answer to that is my secret weapon: blue. Or, as the French and dyslexic Americans say, bleu. I just slathered it on. I have more blue at my disposal than you’d expect due to my connections with the blue black market. I should say no more about that.

When Newsletters Go Biennial

This started out as a monthly exercise, but like car washing and cuticle maintenance, the fallow periods grew more and more lengthy. Then, a year ago, I got set back by that brusque encounter I had with a Nissan while crossing a street. I got metal screwed into a leg, and I can only assume that, in parallel fashion, the car was healed by having bones spliced into an axle. It was not a time to hop back on the metaphorical writing horse (subtle pun alert). 

Now, with this new newsletter app that only has two font choices that change size at its whim and zero layout choices (farewell, sweet sidebars!), I am perfectly poised to less-perfectly resume my regular output. Actually, it was never really regular, so that’s a vague poising. Let’s just say the next one will be before 2020.

February 2016
See how-to video by clicking here

A Tale of Two Drawings, but Mostly One

Since so much of what I do is design, it can be hard for me to remember I’m also an illustrator. It’s like when you eat cereal for every meal and someone shoves a papaya in your face and you realize that your teeth will work on that, too.

Kirsten, the marketing demi-goddess at Pioneer Theatre, gave me a call last summer and said, “Do you want to eat a papaya? How about two?” Seeing that our fruit metaphor needed a change of direction, I said, “Sure, I’d love to illustrate your cranberries.”

One of them was relatively simple, done in a woodblock-print style. Here’s a peek at the image for Two Dollar Bill. Mostly, though, we’re taking a look at the other, which utilizes a variety of digital techniques, in much the same way a papaya smoothie might blend rich tropical flavors with secret herbs and a hint of smoked iguana.

How it was done is too much to show in this newsletter, so if you want to see a layer-by-layer breakdown of how it came together, click on this YouTube link. There’s a chance it won’t be the most stimulating 11 minutes of your life, but it will be better than that time when you were doing 5-to-30 in Angola prison and “Turk” Hurtwurm sold you that bad pruno.

The project for An Inspector Calls started with pencil sketches of concepts, including the bottle-of-poison-between-two-wine-glasses idea. It was heartily rejected in favor of a sketch that featured the Georgian house where the action takes place, the roof peeling back to show the dark corruption within.

I feel that “Dark Corruption” would not be a good name for a metal band, but “Idle Hands” would. Both are far better than “Fruity Papaya Smoothie.”

The house was constructed in 21 layers in Illustrator. It looked pretty slick when it was done, but too clean and sterile. I was just thrilled to have something in my life be clean and sterile, but took it back to the drawing board and into Photoshop, where it was soon soiled enough for the good patrons of Pioneer Memorial Theatre. Even the stars in the night sky look like they could use a good scrubbing behind the ears.

If you want a print of this, you can get one on the cover of your program when you see the show. It opens February 19, 2016 at Pioneer Theatre, on the University of Utah campus. Yes, I’m as comfortable offering a shameless plug for them as I am with talking about my work in comparisons to the denizens of the middle of the food pyramid.

My Dirty House

There I was, with a snappy picture of a six-bedroom Georgian with three full baths, sauna and walk-in servant throttling room. But it didn’t have the gritty quality needed for a show about genteel-yet-horrid social climbers.

I found this photo of some filthy old paper, because my own, personal filthy old paper wasn’t quite up to par. It was overlaid onto the illustration and given an effect called “hard light.” There’s also one called “soft light,” and even a “linear dodge,” but the names, clearly, are gibberish (or possibly Icelandic). Your best bet is to audition them all and see what exudes just the right touch of whatever weird you need.

The effect gave it a textured, almost painterly quality. And after that—it being a British mystery and all—the only thing left was to spray in a good dose of fog.

Saved by the Sleeve!

When someone called Sylvia, the inventor of Inquiry Cards, “the Queen of Questions,” a light went off in my head. Or on in my head. I can’t tell the difference. The light said: why not make a playing card, with her as the queen? I don’t know how we’ll use it, but hey, it was a slow day, and there was a talking light.

The first step was to study cards. They use rotated images, plus graphic elements that weave between the two ladies, tying them together. I looked through a hundred images from a photo shoot and chose the shot with the best sleeves. Many of my decisions are sleeve-based. I thought the way they flowed would be the tying-together element needed to make it read as a playing card.

Next up was cutting out the image in a way that captured half the woman and all of the sleeve, and flopping it. Like many queens, she now has two heads and no legs, a product of inbreeding.

That weavy-sleevy thing needed to happen, so one sleeve got copied and rotated and put into position. Now they’re all in place, and with a little more judicious slicing and dicing, they form one smooth unit. Finally, adding shadows where the sleeves overlap make the sleeves look natural, like a totally realistic, floating, all-head woman in huge sleeves in the forest.

Photographs: They’re Liars

Remember when people said, “Photographs don’t lie”? If you do, you’re in line for an AARP membership. Anybody born since the advent of Photoshop knows that a picture is worth a thousand lies.

A camera’s lens isn’t a human eye. It reads things differently, so it’s never been completely truthful. Even Honest Abe told his wife that no, that bustle didn’t make her butt look fat, can we just go, the play is starting. That’s the brand of almost-honesty cameras have. Except they’re more likely to make your butt look bigger.

A really good lens means you can experience the joy of portraits where every line and crack in your face becomes a focal point, especially in an outdoor setting, where there’s no control over the lighting. Each pore can look like the Grand Entrance to the Empire of the Moles.

This is why portrait photographers take a bunch of pictures, find out which ones you like, then they spend a bunch of time making them good.

The real beginning of the playing card was tweaking the photo, using tools with names like dodge, burn and airbrush. Her teeth came out dark, as did her eyes. They got brightened. Laugh lines sobered up. Her un-made-up Scandinavian eyebrows and lashes got some darkening. A queen is born!

When Modest HAS to be Hottest

What could be more sexy than personal finance software? Well, everything, of course. But if you’re enticing buyers with a free Hawaiian vacation, you might think it’s okay to shed a layer or two. You might think wrong, Buster.

The client was really not the culprit—but their client, a reseller of the software product, is a very conservative religious organization that would much rather see fabric than skin. I, being slow on the uptake, plus an ardent skin-lover, often had to make more than one attempt.

Above is a web page with contest rules. The hula bobble-doll had too much potential to drive lascivious home accountants mad with desire, so we replaced her with a pineapple, known for its anti-aphrodisiac properties. I tried a tiki-glass drink, but that was just promoting a different brand of sin.

Onward to the home page beach scene. I knew that bikinis would spell trouble. I believe there’s a biblical passage regarding 2-piece swimwear and stoning. So I used this happy couple in shirts and shorts. But there was trouble in paradise, in the form of too much leg. And legs lead inexorably to Satan’s playground.

So I scoured clip-art photos of women in shorts until I found someone in a similar pose. I carefully snipped her shorts off and put them on the beach woman. FYI, the woman whose shorts were removed had, literally, nothing under the shorts. Just blank whiteness. No ethical boundaries were crossed.

All ended well, with both models attired in baggy shorts, an effective form of birth control. But to be safe, I had a backup plan, which involved pairing our guy up with this woman in Victorian beach attire. Just in case.

Household Finance’s Mortal Enemy

By the time I finished creating the below banner ads (same client as the Hawaii promotion) I knew that the only thing worse than legs, in the exciting world of home accounting, is breasts. If you absolutely can’t avoid owning a set of these nurturing appendages, you will find greater success in using financial apps if you disguise said protrusions with more clothes or a mask. Please, no clown masks.

This woman’s strained jacket was too titillating for our use, but various poses of her were used in other banner ads, so we really needed this vertical shot, to stay consistent. Fortunately, she’s wearing black, which hides the folds and shadows that fabric produces. I selected an area where her jacket might drape if it were not produced by Victoria’s Secret, matched the color and easily painted it in.

As with the beach scene (to your left), I had a backup version in case my alterations weren’t conservative enough. One can’t be too careful.