What a crazy past couple of weeks it’s been. Work has been something else and I’ve been putting in an unethical amount of time on the clock. Thankfully, today was the first lax day I’ve seen for a while.

Although I had a few rush projects to get done, I was able to spend a significant amount of time on the Sienna promo video I mentioned months ago. I thought I was finished with it back in November, but in December the architecture firm dumped its current realtor and gave us the chance to rebuild the property’s identity/branding from the ground up when they brought in a new firm.

It was definitely a great experience and the new art direction we came up with is ten times better than the one we had before. After the edits today, the video is starting to look really sweet—especially with all the new motion graphics and art direction. When the piece is finished, it’ll have to post it here.

I’m also working on the new Sienna web site, which should also be pretty sweet once we get it finished. My creative director told me today that after the Sienna stuff is out of the way I’m going to put in charge of designing the new web site for the agency which should be a blast!

Oh, and happy birthday Chris.

Had the day off work yesterday to handle some issues with the utilities for my place so spent the day fixing up the site finally. I still have a few templates to fix, but at least the site is back up and (more or less) functioning. I’ll hopefully get those finished up later today yet.

I was lucky enough to receive a Nikon D80 from my parents over the holidays. It’s a beautiful piece of equipment and capable of just about everything I’d want in a camera. I’ve always been fascinated by photography and I’ve learned quite a bit from just the past two weeks worth of shooting with it. Check out the stuff so far over at Flickr. There’s not much there but as I get more time to play with the camera I’m sure more will come. I also received Envisioning Information by Edward Tufte, and a few other fun things. Definitely a great holiday!

At work, I’ve been buried doing banners and various signage pieces for the past couple of weeks. Today we installed some of those pieces over at a showroom in the Merchandise Mart. Absolutely crazy to see work that was originally inches on your monitor get blown up to be several feet wide. Once the showroom is complete, I’ll probably take a few photos of it. The work isn’t groundbreaking, but it’s quite different from anything else I’ve done so far.

On a side-note, I’ve been using the beta version of Photoshop at work and so far I’ve been really impressed with it. Although I haven’t played with too many of the features, it’s about three times as reliable as CS2. I think it’s only crashed two or three times.