MS Word and the Adobe Designer

What do you do when you are required to design a document in MS Word, when you'd rather do it in InDesign?

Me? panic.

But I'm trying. I'm working on a doc that is roughly 24-30 pages, and is a 5x7 piece. So itty-bitty fonts, with .75 gutters on the sides. And is clean. I mean, real clean. Boring clean. 

Forwhatever reason, I can't seem to design worth a flip in Word. It's clunky and boring. But then again, it may just be my lack of using it that's hampering me.

Oh well... we'll see.

Round 2: The same... only different

Ok. So I got an email telling me that the client is not ready for a bottle redesign as much as they are just some simple cosmetic changes.

Ok.

I can do this.
But they need it for a meeting this morning at 10:30am.

Oh cool. I look at my watch(8:45am). Loads of time.
We need it by 9:30 so we can prepare.

Oh...crap.

No worries!

I took their basic yellow(which is the bottle they're using) and pantone matched it.
Guessed at the specs(aka the live area) for presentation and came up with some real simple designs. I have some that have the full wrap to show the continuing design but they mainly want to have an initial "here-it-is-look" for their presentation.

What do ya think?

Logo redesign? Hmmmm

Here's a few ideas I've had for redesigning a logo and incorporating my look with other items.
Links, prices, and so forth. For web and letterhead.

Weird... here's how it should look.

An update/correction for the tanning product

Got changes but forgot to post them here.
Here's an minor change I did for one of the bottles.

Photoshop practice

In doing my job searches, I find that I don't use my regular skills all the time. When I did my packaging stuff below, I actually forgot some of my shortcuts/macro's. It was quite sad.
So I'm renewing a promise to myself to keep my skills up to date by doing at least one tutorial a day. Here's one that I worked on today. I stopped, and didn't add the fonts for this. I like what I did, and had fun, but some of the variations I stumbled upon were pretty cool too.

One post before I go go...

Quick before I go to the DMA with my son's 6th grade class, gotta post a couple of the revised designs with faux bottles(which are bad-bleh).