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Randal was looking through some “pen and ink” art books and decided to try his hand sketching a man in one of the books. This sketch was done 20 to 25 years ago and probably took about 2-3 minutes to complete. That’s really the whole idea. Just do it - quick, sketchy, loose, free… and know when to stop! The original was done with a fountain type pen with sepia ink on white “trash” paper. For some reason this guy looks like G.K. Chesterton.

Randal did this project for a graphic designer, who had a design project for Kemper Insurance. He needed a series of illustrations depicting the process an employee would go through if they were injured on the job. (1) The injury. (2) The doctor visit and treatment. (3) The occupational or physical therapy. (4) The employee is back on the job - good as new. Of course, Kemper Insurance makes all this possible!

I did the first stage illustrations in Adobe Illustrator. Then I rasterized them into Photoshop, and added some texture and noise to the images.

Back in the 1990’s, I did a series of illustrations for a designer friend of mine, who was designing some print brochures for Exelon, the energy company. The illustrations had to communicate about business, energy, technology, manufacturing, building relationships, etc. He wanted them to be very stylized, strong, colorful and punchy.

I used Adobe Illustrator to develop the three images to the right, because of the vector based art capabilities of that software. I delivered the images as EPS files to my designer friend to be imported into Quark Xpress, and he delivered them to the printer for final proofing and printing, and delivery to the customer.

Randal Birkey is not really known for doing “cartoon” illustrations, but back in the 1980’s he did a whole series of them for Ameritech Mobile Communications. They were used in various brochures and company print communications.

Here are a few examples. Notice the relative size and shape of the cell phones back then!

Men looking at a paper with options.	Man looking pleased with his cell phone bill.
Man happily driving and talking on his cell phone.	Man using cell phone to get help for a flat tire.

These were done by hand using Rapidograph ink pens on cold press illustration board. In those days, art was photographed and then pasted in place as a part of preparing final reflective art boards. These were then photo processed into film by the printer to make the printing plates.

I (Randal) sketched this image of a crazy cartoony car while flying from Chicago to Denver.

Seems like I am always making these little sketches to show people I am talking with, some of the ideas and concepts behind the type of websites we build at BIRKEY.COM. I made this sketch recently when explaining the difference between a typical classic Microsoft .ASP/SQL Server website architecture, and one that incorporates the newer Microsoft ASP.NET technology.

• The box labeled “Front” at the top of the diagram represents a public website. Could be any size, large or small.
• The “can” at the bottom represents a SQL Server database that is behind the scenes. The website user really doesn’t know or care that it is there, holding all the data for the website.
• The middle area represents what can be done with ASP.NET technology. The boxes represent little “engines” of code that do specific things. One might process a credit card. One might add an item to a shopping cart. Another might list items on a page with a thumbnail image next to them. The list is endless.

The point here is that with ASP.NET, all these “engines” can be ready at anytime for use by themselves, or in combination with other “engines” to perform website tasks, and features. This lessens the amount of special code that needs to be placed inside the actual web pages represented by the top box. It is a far more efficient, and much faster technology, especially the more complex and complicated a website may be.

Just thought you might like to know that.