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.

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.

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. 

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:

• Dan Rubin (our fearless moderator)
• Glenda Sims
• Anton Peck
• Dave Shea
• Patrick Haney

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. 

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!

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:

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

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). 

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 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.

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:

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.