This is a letter of recommendation from Matt Rand describing Eric Ortner's qualifications as an Art Director

I received the following recommendation from my former employer. It’s pretty glowing so I decided to share it with the World Wide Web.

“April 18, 2013

To Whom It May Concern,

I have worked closely with Eric Ortner for the 7 years he was employed as Art Director at my company, Rand Realty. Mr. Ortner excelled in this role and completed hundreds of design projects for our company, on-time and on budget.

Eric is well versed in both print and online design and is exceptional at creating well-conceived design themes around loosely defined specifications. The quality of Eric’s work, organization and attention to detail are excellent. He has been a great steward of our brand and maintained consistency to our brand standards across many platforms.

I volunteered to write this recommendation for Eric because I am very grateful for his contributions to our company and am very confident that he has the intelligence, work ethic and design skills to add value wherever he works. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions about Eric.

Sincerely,

Matt Rand
Managing Partner

Branding ad for Better Homes and Gardens Rand Realty

Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate has created a large number of videos for the purpose of attracting a web audience to their site. These videos are also a great opportunity for the company to increase brand awareness, so they opted to create some on-air marketing to promote them. Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate then in turn syndicates the videos out to their Franchisee’s. Rand Realty used the opportunity to drive some more web traffic from their print campaign in a few local publications in Westchester and the Hudson Valley with the print ad displayed on the left.

The Power of Color certainly appeals to a graphic designer’s sensibilities. This video explains the basic principles of color theory and how to apply it in interior design. I also clearly used some color theory in the design of the ad. Three instances of Better Homes and Gardens green were placed over a black and white CAD rendered image adhering to the law of thirds. This has resulted in a logo that really stands out and text that is easily readable.

While working on this project I was both under time and budgetary constraints so I used my trusty flatbed scanner for the image of the fanned out Pantone book. This, of course, required some moderate retouching and color correction in Photoshop. The background image, Pantone book, logo and text were all assembled into the final design using Adobe InDesign. Certainly a fun project to work on and the end results make for a great looking ad.