Dylan Comstock

Dylan is a good friend and a talented artist who needed branding and a website to showcase his photography, video and visual art. We used the Wordpress template Contrast for the layout and tweaked the colors and logo to follow the feel of his work.
The candy logo is a composite of a photo Dylan took [...]

DC Agenda

by Aram Vartian
The total implosion of the Washington Blade, and the resulting creative force from the surviving staff that created the DC Agenda, were some of the most amazing weeks of my life. There were many stories about the birth of the DC Agenda, but none have talked about the design work that went into [...]

dcalcify

We spent a good month investigating colors, shapes and overall concepts to nail down the print, web and video promotional material for dcalcify, and are very pleased with our final result. The credit for the name goes to Michael Key and his scientific mind, while the design, logo and website work all fell on the [...]

Prop. 8

In the September 19th issue of 2008, the Washington Blade covered the ramp up to the now infamous Prop. 8 vote in California.  There was much optimism the week before, as was reflected in their opinion pages and the comments on the washingtonblade.com website, all of which added to the heart-breaking loss the following Tuesday.
I [...]

Capital Pride

BladeTV was the official videographer for Capital Pride 2009, and our coverage was unparalleled. We shot the parade and festival over two days amassing over 12 hours of HD footage.  The raw video files alone were over 300gb.
We spent another ten hours editing together several clips from the day, including a retrospective of the entire [...]

Jon Stewart vs. Mike Huckabee

An illustration the Washington Blade Point section cover, “Hounding Huckabee” about an exchange between Mike Huckabee and Jon Stewart on the Daily Show. Ours News Editor Josh Lynsen provided some commentary on the debate on washingtonblade.com (now defunct), and our television critic reviewed the debate latter that week in the print edition.

Dec. 19, 2008 Point [...]

Reel Affirmations

During the last few months at the Washington Blade, the video department was at full steam.  We had cut several BladeTV clips, and this 00:60 edit was to be show in theaters as part of a promotional exchange with the Reel Affirmations Film Festival.  It displayed our best work to date, and tied into the [...]

Houston Voice

Logo design created for the Houston Voice newspaper, a now defunct LGBT publication from Texas that was wiped out along with several other gay periodicals when Window Media imploded under the crushing load of mismanagement and debt. It remains one of my favorite identity pieces.

Houston Voice logo
Graphic Design: Aram Vartian

D.C. Marriage Bill Signing

History was made on December 18th, 2009 at All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington, D.C. The LGBT community and their allies celebrated as Mayor Adrian Fenty, flanked by members of the council, signed the Religious Freedom & Civil Marriage Equality Amendment Act.  I took these pictures while on assignment from the DC Agenda, and many [...]