Post Number 1000: High Frontier

It has been almost three years since I started "Art By-Products." I have posted almost every day for those three years. Now I've reached a milestone: this is posting number 1000. I'm kind of amazed that I've managed to keep posting a different piece of art or graphics each time. I thought I'd run out of images before now, but I seem to have plenty to spare and plenty more to post here. The act of putting up an art post every day is a discipline that has kept me from being too lazy about my art work. So I'll continue to offer up Art By-Products until something essential to this project changes.

I debated what to put up as an image for #1000. Perhaps one of my extravaganza fantasy cities, or some lofty Angel, or even an elaborate sketch of some architectural monument. But I decided to retrieve this simple image from the ancient library of my CorelDraw-using PC instead. This is the first digital image and graphic I ever created. It was done on CorelDraw 2 in 1991. It was a proposal for a logo for an organization dedicated to promoting missile defense. Their website still exists but it seems to have been abandoned in 2003. My logo design, which was ignored, was requested by friends at the Frontier, who have long since dispersed to other places, still dreaming of missiles, this time for private space exploration.

From this distance in time I can see that this logo would be unusable because it resembles too closely the famous logo of Paramount Pictures.

This image needed a lot of restoration. It doesn't look exactly the way it did when I created it, because I had to replace the stars and the type with modern equivalents. Some elements are the same as I would do nowadays in Adobe Illustrator: curved abstract shapes and simple but effective two-color gradients. In 1991 the Web we live with didn't exist yet, but now "High Frontier" has caught up.