Archives for category: Graphic Design
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Road to Perdition

August 5, 10 //
0

Road to Perdition [sketch]Every so often when I’m watch­ing a movie I get the urge to sketch, to cap­ture that par­tic­u­lar moment in the film.

As I was watch­ing Road to Perdi­tion the other night I quickly grabbed a note­book, one usu­ally reserved for actual note tak­ing and sketched this from one of the many piv­otal scenes in the movie, this one show­ing the main char­ac­ter and his son trav­el­ing to Chicago.

I hope to do more of these, in this style, over time and shar­ing them and hope­fully next time I’ll use higher qual­ity mate­ri­als, but that said I feel as though some of the charm is attrib­uted to the lo-fi feel of it.

Creative Redemption

January 6, 10 //
1

There are times when a design con­cept of mine fails to boil over in awe­some­ness and at that point I throw a sheet over it, shove it in a cor­ner next to the mutated Chihuahua-Goat™ and ask myself why I even attempted it.

It hap­pens so often, in fact, that I begin to doubt my instincts as a designer. It bog­gles the mind that a Design­ers Anony­mous group doesn’t exist for this very rea­son, but I digress.

This way of think­ing is ludi­crous because every­thing we cre­ate is vital to the design process, no mat­ter the context.

For exam­ple: That movie poster that you spent sev­eral hours on, the one that was even­tu­ally canned because the hero’s (or heroin’s) face ended up being badly con­torted at a spe­cific view­ing angle would prob­a­bly seem like a failed cre­ation. You might even be tempted to trash it from your hard drive, never to speak of it again.

But guess what? Hor­ri­bly man­gled facial crufties aside, you might end up recy­cling the type­face or that speck­led tex­ture for a future poster or project.

Make it a habit, if you haven’t already, to file away your delight­ful cre­ations for future use and avoid curs­ing your design work with voodoo.

It just never works, I mean what am I sup­posed to do with this Chihuahua-Goat™?

Just remem­ber the three R’s: Redeem, Reuse and Rejoice.

Turning the Tide

March 23, 07 //
14

After 4 years of writ­ing, off and on, about a vari­ety of things such as odd thoughts, close calls, suc­cess (and fail­ure) and other things now rel­e­gated to the archives, it’s time to switch direc­tions and start anew.

From the get go I’ve always envi­sioned this site as an out­let for exper­i­men­tal cre­ativ­ity and to share the results of such with whomever was interested.

This site’s focus was never meant to be excluded to just a blog, but due to my inter­ests in cre­ative writ­ing it just remained. Like Anton, I’ve been ready for quite some time to move away from just being a blog and realign (not that kind of realign­ment) my inter­ests and the inten­tions of this site.

For his­tor­i­cal preser­va­tion, I’ve decided to select the best arti­cles from the archives and com­pile them into a book because I’d hate to see those dis­ap­pear. Besides, I’d like to do some self-publishing and Lulu has me more than intrigued.

A Fresh Restart

What this means is that I’ll be tran­si­tion­ing the blog, or what you’re read­ing now, into a small, but impor­tant por­tion of the site. If you can think of it as the con­ver­sa­tion that takes place after you’ve con­sumed a three-course meal, then you’ll under­stand what its pur­pose will be.

The main course of the meal will be the illus­tra­tion and design, wrapped together in a fresh and fun lay­out that’ll hope­fully immerse you in what I’ll have to offer. (Speak­ing of which, have you seen the new Squidfin­gers design?)

As corny as this might sound, I do appre­ci­ate each and every one of you who con­tin­ues to sub­scribe to, read and inter­act with kar­tooner. There are plenty of you who should be proud of your design prowess and mea­sure of intel­lect. With­out you, I’d just be a guy with one of them-there blog thin­gies here in New York. In other words, chan­nel­ing the mantra of Chris J. Davis, “You rawk!”.

Catch­ing up with Goals

Part of the rea­son I’m so adamant about chang­ing some things is because I need to finally meet my goal of fin­ish­ing my comic. Yes, that comic, the one I’ve been talk­ing about for a lit­tle over 2 years! After mix­ing it up with my friends at SXSW this year and absorb­ing the enthu­si­asm, I’ve come to the con­clu­sion that I need to not just pur­sue, but chase after and tackle my goals.

I could just keep mak­ing excuses or con­tinue play­ing trash bas­ket­ball to bide the time, but that wasn’t why I chose this career in the first place. This is a jour­ney of explo­ration and fas­ci­na­tion that we’re all on, and I’m mov­ing up a cou­ple seats to see the full view.

Process and Innovation

On my panel at SXSWi this year I men­tioned doing con­cep­tual sketches for Sidev­ille, using the movie Pirates of the Car­ribean as one of my source mate­ri­als. I fore­see using the blog to post my work in progress, kind of like Car­son System’s Bare Naked App but with­out the app and the bare naked­ness. It seems like peo­ple are inter­ested in the process and craft of devel­op­ing a project and appre­ci­ate that mis­takes are made along the way.

As per­fect as the end result might be, suc­cess needs to be con­stantly fine-tuned and rec­og­niz­ing trail and error is part of that process. Every bril­liant and suc­cess­ful busi­ness or idea has to be built from the ground up and the vision­ary at the fore­front of things needs to keep inno­vat­ing and mov­ing forward.

Sure, a lot of what suc­cess can be might seem serendip­i­tous, but it’s the cru­cial ele­ment of keep­ing one’s eye on their goals that makes it both chal­leng­ing and rewarding.

To sum it all up, I’ve got an idea and it’s time to take that from con­cept to real­ity. Join me. 

The Influence of Art in Design

March 2, 07 //
9

Over the past cou­ple of weeks I’ve eluded to the fact that I will be par­tic­i­pat­ing on a panel at this year’s SXSWi called The Influ­ence of Art in Design.

Here’s a descrip­tion of the panel (straight from the horse’s mouth):

Fine arts have long held a sub­tle, yet influ­en­tial grip on both infor­ma­tion and design. From car­toons, illus­tra­tions, dig­i­tal art, pho­tog­ra­phy and more, you’ll hear first­hand from some of the best in their fields, have a chance to explore the past, present, and future of the tech­niques that you see around the web, and how it can improve your own work and get both sides of the brain work­ing bet­ter together.

Turn­ing Thoughts into Reality

To backpedal a bit, before I made the com­mit­ment to go to last year’s SXSW Inter­ac­tive con­fer­ence — my first visit — I made a promise to myself that come the next con­fer­ence I would be on a panel. Cer­tainly it’s fun to actively par­tic­i­pate as an observer, but to present your thoughts to peo­ple, to engage them, to make them think and all said and done, if they can get some­thing out of what you’re say­ing, well, that’s say­ing something.

I kept that thought in the back of my mind, that I would some­how, using some force of nature have the oppor­tu­nity to be up there amongst a group of my peers and share some­thing, even if at the time I hadn’t any idea of what that might be.

Months later dur­ing a late night IM con­ver­sa­tion with Anton Peck he men­tioned the con­cept of the panel to me and it didn’t take much con­vinc­ing on his part, I was hooked..

The Dream Team

Next week I will be shar­ing meat­space with the fol­low­ing creative-minded people:

Come join us on Sat­ur­day, March 10th (11:30–12:30pm) and be sure to mark it on your SXSW cal­en­dar.

It’s a win-win; you’ll have a blast, learn a thing or two and I can gen­uinely promise your cre­ativ­ity will kick into overdrive. 

The SXSW Experience

March 6, 06 //
7

SXSW StickyIn roughly 3 days I’ll be enroute to Austin, TX to take part in the SXSW (South by South­west) Inter­ac­tive con­fer­ence. I’m bound to be a bit over­whelmed by the fes­tiv­i­ties and elbow-rubbing par­ties, but I won’t lie, I’m pretty excited to meet in per­son the numer­ous amounts of online bud­dies I’ve made and col­lab­o­rated with over the years.

To be hon­est, I’m clue­less in regards to the sem­i­nars and pre­sen­ta­tions tak­ing place due in part to the mess of infor­ma­tion on the SXSW site. If any­one has put together a “SXSW Guide for Dum­mies”, let me know, since I’ll be run­ning around try­ing to fig­ure out what seminars/presentations/discussions will be worth attending.

If all goes as planned, I’ll be hang­ing with my travel pals Dave Seah and Eric Shep­ard and will most likely doc­u­ment the entire expe­ri­ence here, over a series of 5 days with exclu­sive pho­tos and anecdotes-o-plenty.

Let me know if you’re going to be there since I’d like to meet and greet as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble so I have some­thing to write home about.

Austin here I come!

 

Newborn in a Bottle

February 19, 06 //
10

Ever think you suf­fer from too much sleep? That your nights are never really rest­less and that you might have too much energy? Would you like to change this immediately?

Boy, have I got a solu­tion for you! Fresh from the aroma-scented boxes sit­ting on our shelves comes a new one-of-a-kind prod­uct for those who don’t suf­fer from sleep deprivation:

 

Sketch Fever

August 4, 05 //
10

To pre­pare for the next ver­sion of kartooner.com I’ve been doing a few sketches to get the cre­ative juices flow­ing. This sketch in par­tic­u­lar, which I’ve enti­tled “School Office” just came to me last night after watch­ing an episode of CSI where a spikey-haired blonde kid acci­den­tally stuffed his best friend into a com­mer­cial washer.

I’m not sure how that was the basis for inspi­ra­tion, but it was.

School Office 

Firefox in the Ghetto

May 6, 05 //
5

Firefox in the Ghetto (hi-res)

A lit­tle bit of time, patience, imag­i­na­tion and a copy of Pho­to­shop CS2 cre­ates play­ful results like this. At the time I believe I was chan­nel­ing East L.A. (Cheech Marin would be proud). 

Girls are Weird

April 15, 05 //
8

The fol­low­ing comes from an email inter­view I had with John Martz of Robotjohnny.com for my Typog­ra­phy course.

Around 1997, Cana­dian graphic and font designer John Martz decided to design a type­face which would be inspired, in part, by his child­hood and his bewil­der­ment with the oppo­site sex. Accord­ing to Martz;

It shares its inspi­ra­tion with a lot of my work, which is the stuff I grew up on as a kid — Hanna Bar­bera car­toons, lit­tle Golden books [and] Looney Tunes. A fun, almost retro style.

The font would be called Girls are Weird and lit­tle did Martz know that for the next 7–8 years it would become one of the more pop­u­lar free fonts dis­trib­uted on the Inter­net due to an unusual and refresh­ing usage agree­ment; that is, if the font is used for com­mer­cial pur­poses all that Martz asks for in return is a pur­chase from his Amazon.com wishlist.

Girls are WeirdGirls are Weird is a curly-q font made purely for dec­o­ra­tive or dis­play pur­poses with a rel­a­tively large x-height. When Martz was design­ing Girls are Weird he men­tioned that he never thought about its intended use, instead focus­ing on the fact that he was just moved by the fun of cre­at­ing it. On that note he also acknowl­edges the fact that the font itself wasn’t dif­fi­cult to create;

I cre­ated it almost 10 years ago before hav­ing any for­mal design edu­ca­tion or real grasp of the soft­ware, so it’s a bit rough around the edges. I’m both pleased and sur­prised that it’s still kick­ing about.

In the cre­ative process, Martz explained that he first starts with sketches. From there, once he’s pleased with a sketch, he’ll then scan the draw­ings into the com­puter and work in Illus­tra­tor to con­struct the font visu­ally. Like any­thing, his ini­tial attempts at font cre­ation used more arbi­trary methods;

My first exper­i­ments in cre­at­ing fonts [were] done in stone-age ver­sions of Corel­Draw, which had an option to export draw­ings into .ttf files with very lit­tle con­trol over any­thing. I soon grad­u­ated to a com­bi­na­tion of Illus­tra­tor for draw­ing and Fontog­ra­pher for the con­struc­tion and out­put of the font. I now use font­lab because of its com­pat­i­bil­ity with OS X.

Since Girls are Weird is fea­tured on a mul­ti­tude of free font sites it’s not sur­pris­ing that the font itself has been seen in the wild. Martz has seen it used on toys, games, books, comic books, CDs, store­fronts, sig­nage and even on Television.

In regards to offer­ing his fonts for free online and his Amazon.com share­ware model, Martz explains that the only real issue he’s run into is when peo­ple don’t abide by the rules;

… part of the prob­lem that the Inter­net presents is that peo­ple love free stuff, so my fonts get passed around and they show up on free font web­sites and CD-ROMs often with­out the orig­i­nal copy­right infor­ma­tion, so it’s a dif­fi­cult thing to police. I know that every time I see one of my fonts out in the wild that often­times it’s by some­one who didn’t pay for the font, but I ulti­mately can’t com­plain because it’s still excit­ing to see my work in the wild and I can’t guar­an­tee that it was my own site that the font came from.

Despite this issue, Martz has been impressed by those who do abide by the share­ware model; “the hon­est and good nature of peo­ple con­tin­ues to impress me, and I get sev­eral things pur­chased from my wish list every month, so even if I feel I’m get­ting ripped off by the peo­ple who don’t read my copy­right info, there are still a good bunch of peo­ple out there who do and they keep my book­shelf stocked!”.

Finally, Martz offers a piece of advice for cur­rent and bud­ding graphic and font designers;

Detail. Don’t skimp on the details. Good design is made by peo­ple who pay atten­tion to the lit­tle things, whether it be kern­ing, mea­sure­ments, colour, etc. Iron­i­cally, its advice I wish I was given when I cre­ated these fonts, some of them in high school, because I feel they’d have a longer shelf life, but I’m still happy Girls are Weird is still popular.

 

The Crest of Visualization

March 11, 05 //
24

Crest of VisualizationOne of the most impor­tant pieces of the kar­tooner redesign is the addi­tion of a medievil crest. A few peo­ple have emailed me about the crest image which serves as part of the kartooner.com logo and instead of email­ing every­one indi­vid­u­ally with the same answer I’ve decided to explain how the crest came to be and what it means to me as an artist and visionary.

For starters, Wikipedia defines a crest as being:

[…] a com­po­nent of a coat of arms. It is a fig­ure (or group of fig­ures), often but not always a beast of some kind, depicted atop the hel­met placed above the shield. The crest has been tra­di­tion­ally used by men only, with the excep­tion of queens of Eng­land or Britain, who have been treated heraldically as men. Some armigers used their crest as a per­sonal badge, which led to the erro­neous use of the word “crest” to describe a shield or full coat of arms.

The crest adorn­ing the header of this site was inspired in part by a crest I had seen on a cover of an old book. The orig­i­nal images on the cover were sim­ple pic­tographs resem­bling medieval scenery, includ­ing an image of a joust and a plate full of grapes. When I began the ini­tial sketch, I decided to use four com­po­nents that make up the core of my cre­ativ­ity and these include:

Crest Components

Truth­fully I could have gone a lot deeper as far as the imagery is con­cerned, but my goal was to keep it sim­ple and allow the image to con­vey itself with­out com­pli­cated expla­na­tion. Fur­ther­more, my imag­i­na­tion com­bined with pen­cils, paper and ink allow for unlim­ited explo­ration and cre­ation. Inspi­ra­tion is every­where you look and for me, no mat­ter where I am or what I’m focus­ing on it’s just a mat­ter of pulling out my sketch­pad and cap­tur­ing that moment on paper. 

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