about
Saldana Studios is an independent creative studio in Southern California founded by Brand Designer and Illustrator Ray Saldana.
Ray is a Filipino-Hispanic artist who specializes in illustration-focused graphic design with a love for creating visuals that end up on physical products.
He values human creativity and keeps all design work AI-Free.
Outside of creating, Ray enjoys retro playlists, black coffee, traveling, and Lakers basketball!
process
While every client project varies, I follow 3 core phases on all engagements:
Strategy, Design, Hand Off. Hover the tiles below to learn more.
1. strategy
Before any design work begins, we start by defining the creative direction and strategy for the project.
This is typically done over either a questionnaire or a live call (depending on the service) which I then turn into a visual mood board to be approved before we move to the design phase.
2. design
With the creative direction and/or strategy in place, I dive deep into design exploration and present you with 2 options.
You may be wondering, why only 2? The reason is it allows me to spend more time on each variation making them truly distinct from each other, and prevents paralysis by analysis in the decision phase.
Every project also comes with a set number of built in revision rounds in case we miss the mark.
3. hand off
After your design or illustration is approved, I deliver you with the original files via a Dropbox link.
For Brand Projects (Tiers 2 & 3) I also include an offboarding call where we go over how to implement your new assets. This way you're not left with files you don't know how to work with.