Got a call a couple of month’s ago. The Dr Joseph Mercola group needed to have a storyboard created based upon their script. Having an extensive background in cartooning, character design and storyboarding, I was an obvious choice.When I read the script I was thrilled. It was tight, funny and relevent. Politically and socially the commentary was right up my alley.

I created 13 panels for what was originally going to be a static slide-show type of presentation – See Here
Untimately the storyboards were converted to a full blown flash movie with an awesome soundtrack and lots of action. See Here

Here’s what my client had to say:

We reviewed Clay’s extensive portfolio of previous cartooning work and especially appreciated the emotion he draws forth in his characters and in his captivating use of colors and lines. We were also extremely impressed with the rave reviews Clay’s other clients gave him. Due to these factors, plus Clay’s own enthusiasm and attentiveness to our needs, we knew we had to hire him to develop the cartooning for our “The Town of Allopath” video. And to say we are glad we did is an understatement. Clay is a pleasure to work with and he knows how to translate needs into powerful results. Mercola.com’s “Town of Allopath” presentation has spread rapidly across the Web, many hundreds of thousands have viewed it already, and it has received widespread critical acclaim for its visual power — for which Clay’s exceptional cartooning laid the foundation.

Brian Vaszily, Consulting VP of Marketing and Editorial for Mercola.com

www.mercola.com/townofallopath/index.htm Fully Animated
www.mercola.com/townofallopath/index2.htm Oringinal Storyboards

These days, it’s not often that I get to draw skeletons. When I was younger my illustrations were frequntly on the macabre side and usually based around, sci-fi/swords and sorcery themes. This illustration was a great way to spice up an already exciting month of projects. First I created a really tight pencil drawing then scanned it, touched it up in Photoshop, and added the color in Painter. The Artwork was then exported as a TIFF and the layout and additonal color tweaks were done in Photoshop.

Here’s what Steven Hagy, the author, had to say:

“I love the book cover that Clay designed for me. He listened patiently as I described my vision, then, he illustrated it. I made suggestions, and he fine-tuned it. His illustration accurately depicts the contents of my book and by trying various color schemes, he was able to reflect its mood also. The illustration is a beautiful work of art and… it’s on my book. I’m very happy.”

Steve Hagy Author of “A Pirate’s Fate”

Buy it at Amazon

Mistie and Jennifer of Beyond the Words Inc. came to me with an interesting verture.They wanted to creat ASL (American Sign Language) themed wrapping papers. So instead of text it would have hands spelling out the letters in ASL. A significant reason they were drawn to me was they really liked the way I drew hands. I’ve been a professional illustrator since 1984 and have over twelve years experince with professional political cartooning. It was this blend of realism and cartoon style that they felt was the perfect match.

First step was to create the entire alphabet. I sketched them with pencil and inked them with a Kurtake brush pen. The inked drawings were then scanned, cleaned up in Photoshop, and then converted to vector images using Illustrator CS2′s incredible new feature “Live Trace“. A bit of gradient was added as well as some soft shadowing effects and then the corresponding letter was added in the palm area to help those who can’t read ASL. In a sence these hands are bilingual.
After that I just had to create the cake, candles and serving plate and go nuts and have fun with it.

Here’s what Mistie and Jennifer had to say:

“Working with Clay has been a wonderful experience for us. This is a new venture for our company and Clay was very informative about the design and layout of our product. He gave us such excellent direction and the samples he created for us to choose from really hit the mark as far as what we had in mind for our customers. He has a gift of taking the vague, simplified idea of what the client is looking for and turning it into a vibrant, unique and professional work of art. We couldn’t be more pleased with his work and we look forward to a long and successful partnership with him.”

Mistie Glass & Jennifer Lazarev, Co-Founders, Beyond the Words, Inc.

Just wrapped up the rebuild of www.qualitywatertreatment.com. The old site had several major issues that needed to be adressed:

1. Poor branding

2. Poor navigation

3. “Buy Now” buttons that didn’t work properly in Firefox

View screenshot of old site.

Solutions included a completely new navigational structure, new logo, a new contemporary design, and “buy” buttons that are fully functional in all browsers.

New features include a custom built water softener sizing tool so customers can easily determine the appropriately sized water softener by pluggin in their GPG hardness, their mg per liter iron and number of people in household. The calculations are handeld automatically…no more complicated mathematical formulas!

See it in action here: Sizing your water softener

This what my client had to say:

Hi Clay,

Even though its only been a few weeks since our newer web site that you built for us has been up and running we have seen a 20% increase in business. Our on line E-commerce orders have increased by 100% so we do not spend as much time on the phone which gives us more time to focus on projects that will increase our business even more.

You took a extremely difficult web site that was partly homegrown and turned it into the best website that our industry has to offer, we get this compliment from many of our customers and it is obviously making a big difference in our sales… and this is before all the search engines have crawled our site for better rankings. We can’t wait to see even more increase in business after our search engine rankings get better, along with the big saving of not having to pay for search engine pay per click advertising.

It’s great to find a company that will actually take the time to learn our business, which is very complicated and complex, and then design a web presece that will exceed and perform better than our competition.

We have hired several companies in that past and have always had to redo there work do there lack of understanding of our business, which always turned out to be not only a waste of money but a lot of re-design work on the site to make it some what use able after they were finished with it.

We will be hiring you again in the near future to add more product pages to our site.

Thanks again for all the personal attention you gave us and the great job.

Sincerely,
Craig Phillips
President
Quality Water Treatment

When searching for competent individuals or companies on the internet to hire for various needs it has been my experience that you need a certain amount of luck. I have had both negative and positive experiences. I would say without question the most positive experience to date was the hiring of Clay Butler to design a new logo for my recently launched website Madwinners.com. A picture says a thousand words. Look at our logo and you will understand why I feel so fortunate to have stumbled across Clay’s portfolio on the net. In just a few short days the perfect logo was created for us.  Clay incorporated all of the ideas we gave him for the design, and created a logo that far exceeded my expectations. Thank you Clay for delivering exactly what you promised, a highly marketable character and logo.

Al Price
www.MadWinners.com