New ad about to be submitted

It's actually an advertisement for the company I work for. Pending my CEO's approval, it should get submitted tomorrow. To give you an idea where I started, this is what sparked the final idea (created with Photoshop)

http://www.alaron-nuclear.com/adverts/p ... nance8.jpg

Initially the logo was much larger and didn't contain a slogan. My CEO and I were talking about it and he wanted the logo smaller and wanted to add the "Looking into the future" slogan, because he thought the sphere resembled a Palantír (i.e. crystal ball).

It only took me a few minutes before the idea popped into my head to actually make it a Palantír. Similar to the photo here at Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palant%C3%ADr

So I pulled out a trusty Terragen image that was crying out to be used, and this is the final result:

http://www.alaron-nuclear.com/adverts/p ... nance9.jpg

The submition to the publisher will be an 8.5x11 full color in 300dpi. The res is much much higher quality than what I had to reduce it to for web. (I also added a bit of a drop shadow to the slogan that isn't in the web version.

Hope you enjoy it.

Wow, well done Mark. I love what you have done to the graphic.

Thanks Craig. I did take a real close look at the logo tonight and I need to redo that tomorrow. At 300dpi it's very "fuzzy". Not gonna look sharp and clear in print. For the recored UNFLUX designed that logo, and we incorporated it into a lighted sign outside our building as well as our letterhead, etc. (He doesn't know that yet lol - about the sign part that is)

It's a vector graphic UNFLUX created in AI so it resizes nicely, but unfortunately it's a white background and I need to constantly remove the background to do anything with it in ads. And to be truthful, I really did a sloppy job on resizing that this time.

Oh and I did center up the slogan a bit too. It was off. I'm keeping everything slightly to right of center because of magazine page folds. So End user appears to see it centered.