Every year, something happens on March 2nd. Today is March 2nd. Today is my birthday.

When I first moved to Calgary five and a half years ago, I knew one person who had a birthday on March 2nd… me. Only a few weeks after moving to Alberta, I found two other people who shared the exact same birth date as myself (the story in which we all found out at the exact same time in the exact same room is a good one, so if you’re ever having a beer with me, ask me to tell it). One of them, David Gluzman, has since become one of my best friends here in Cowtown. But believe it or not, I have since found others with the same birth date as us. People I know personally too, including iStock’s famous Brentman. Pretty awesome.

Beside the fact that I know a lot of March 2nd birthdays, I also know at least one person who has a birthday for every day of the first week of March, 1st through 7th. I won’t list them all, but yesterday was the birthday of my friend Mikael who is an Information Architect. Tomorrow is Troy, a designer at iStockphoto, and in a couple of days I have two more friends sharing yet another similar birth date. One of them is my very good friend Adrian Bryksa, who is more knowledgeable about wine than I am about my own shoe size. The other is my friend Marisha, who is more commonly referred to as The Lotus Queen, due to her being the host of Calgary’s longest running drum n’ bass show called Remote Emissions.

Marisha loves to model, and since I love taking photos, it was only a matter of time before we got together to create some awesome images. I don’t want to show them all, but I have posted one of my favourites from a shoot we did together recently to prove to people that the stereotype we’ve all heard is in fact true… female DJs are always hot. Be sure to listen in to Marisha’s show which can be heard every Friday from 10:30p – 12:00a (MST) on CJSW Radio 90.9 fm in Calgary, or check out her MySpace page for more info.

Aside from all of the friends who have March birthdays, I even share the month with my entire family… my mom, my dad, and even my younger brother. Happy birthday to us all and to all of the other Pisces out there.

PS – I might continue to play around with image sizes/placement a bit more, but for now, I’m liking the large format as seen in this post.

I have been uploading photos to the internet for while. On April 3, 2005 I uploaded my first image to Flickr. But only since July 2009 did I start including a watermark on my images. I felt that because I was starting to shoot more popular events such as the Paskapoo Downhill Rodeo and Alberta Fashion Week, that I wanted people to be able to see who took the photo when and wherever they saw them. And, I obviously wanted a way to somewhat protect my images. After AFW last year, my photos have been popping up all over model sites such as Model Mayhem and Model Republic, so I am glad I put my name on those images.

However, I still find the application of a watermark to be a challenge, as it needs to serve a purpose without distracting from the content of the image itself. Some people just include their name faded back and either centered or in one of the corners, while others put a whole bunch of information that I find can really distract from the image.

I feel that the challenge of designing a watermark is that I need to figure out how to inform the viewer of who took the image, while not distracting from the image itself.

Some questions I’ve been asking myself are:

1) What is the purpose of my watermark?
2) What information do I want to display?
3) Do I keep the watermark statically positioned in a corner or centered?
4) Do I move the watermark around depending on the image content?
5) Do I keep the watermark one standard colour or change it to match each image?

I also realize that one of the roles of a watermark is to simply be a deterrent against people wanting to steal imagery. Like many others, I have had various situations where I have found my imagery with the watermark half-assedly removed, so I fully understand that a watermark is not a fool proof way to protect my work.

I have played around with various options and am still not 100% satisfied with my results. I like one of my first versions (seen on my AFW images), but now I have an awesome new brand that I want to start spreading the word about, so that version no longer serves the purpose I want. I think my new goal for watermarking my imagery is to drive people here, to my website, while creating brand awareness with my new logo.

Anyways, I would love to hear your thoughts on this topic of image watermarks. Do you use them? Do you not? If you do use them, what purpose(s) do you apply them for?

Five years. FIVE YEARS! That is unfortunately how long I went without having an up-to-date personal website.

I know, in today’s world, that is five years too long. As a design professional today, it is essential that you have an online presence. However, I blame two things for my lack of abiding by this fact. 1) There are so many social websites out there that I am a part of already, I’d say its pretty easy to figure out who I am, what I do, and to see what I’ve done and am doing at any given time. 2) When I was in school, large portfolios containing your best design works, printed on high-end paper, was what you hauled around to interviews when job hunting. Today, people just say, “Go visit my website!”, and for the longest time, I viewed a personal website as a tool related to job hunting. So I only ever updated my site when I was in fact job hunting.

Not so anymore. As a graphic designer working for iStockphoto.com who has developed a passion for photography, it was simply about I got off of my ass and designed something for myself again.

So here it is and here I am. Ian Harding, branded and ready… and with a blog. First, I realize that my logo is quite cliche, and I know what you’re thinking. “Hey, he simply merged the first letters of his first and last names together. Thats lame. Everyone does that.” Yeah, well, not every “logo” (if thats what people call them) that are created that way look good and function properly. Even though it has been done a million times over, I did not simply type the letters I and H into Photoshop and then overlap them. In fact, mine is actually quite well designed, strong, and very functional, which is why I really like it. I have posted an image of my development and staging process to show you how I went about constructing the final version.

Anyways, the blog. Five years ago when I first moved from Kingston to Calgary, I swore that I would never start a blog. I disliked the thought of sharing my displeasures (and sometimes pleasures, I guess) to all of internetland. Well, yes, I do now have a blog, but I will not be posting personal rants, poems, or stories about why the really cute brunette never called me back. No, I plan to use this blog as a means of sharing new design and photography related work, sharing great accomplishments like summitting mountains, world travel stories, and possibly posting the occasional “retweet” of really cool articles that I may come across in my daily travels around the web. Essentially, as recommended by photographer Scott Bourne in one of his helpful Photofocus blog posts, I plan to show my work and show it often.

And thats it. A new era in my life has begun. I have some work showcased in both my design and photography sections, so check those out. Will I be able to manage keeping a blog up to date? Lets just say, if you continue seeing new information being posted a month or two from now, there is a good chance I’ll continue to keep at it.

This is… Ian Harding.