I Let My Fists Do The Talkin’

Season 2 Episode 2

click to go to my flickr for full sized version

I am applying for an art job at Google. I saw the listing and having a steady job with make my mother worry less. I got an email back of their “basic skills test”—

There are 3 parts to this test:

1. Develop an original, fun animal character illustration. – the animal should be a cat – the pose should be comical – free-hand illustration encouraged (instead of vector-based source file) – realism is preferred (but stylizing is okay) (??) – it should be full-color – image size should be: 1600 pixels x 1200 pixels – file format should be: TIFF

2. Develop 2 original icons that convey the concept of ‘Fast Download’ – File format: GIF – Sizes: 128×128, 32×32 and 16×16

3. Recreate the attached illustration in vector format
(a vector-drawn pad and paper, converted to .JPG that I have to redraw back as a vector)

My cynical nature’s first instinct was “they’re having me do spec work for free… then they will steal it.” I suppose I will watermark it, but is that going to insult them? (and how do you watermark a 16×16 icon?)

I’ve read way too many stories like this in illustrator’s and artist’s blogs. TRUST NO ONE!

There’s a week-old meme moving around artists’ blogs to draw yourself as a teenager (and usually contrast with now, but I haven’t gotten around to that bit). I have never participated in a meme before and I have absolutely no fond memories of this era, but I have taken a stab at it.

This is freshman year of high school; my main memory of this era is of my hair being huge and shedding like a Persian cat. And my repulsive school uniform was a magnet for it.

I drew this oddly… on paper first and then traced and colored with a mouse. Also, it much more resembles my drawing method when I was teenaged, so there’s some “synergy.”

(See other people’s take on it here, but be prepared to be bummed out when about half of the participants “looking back” are barely 20somethings and their “teen years” are when you graduated college)

I ordered 1000 Cakey vinyl stickers. I did the design the last two days, first thinking of using a different printer I had used before to make red/black/white stickers…

But they can’t print very thin lines or small text, which is a drag. I did a quick google to see if there was a place that could print very thin lines without a hassle, and found stickerobot.com. They not only don’t seem to care about line-width or small fonts, they do full CMYK, die-cuts, and high-gloss finish for the same ballpark price as the red/black dealie. So, I redid the sticker—

—and put in the order, which unfortunately will probably take more than a month to process. Doooiiing!

Should I enter this?

http://www.adcyoungguns.org/home/

This is last year I am eligible, but I don’t think my body of work is particularly exceptional compared to someone who went to design/art school and does it 100% of the time. There’s also the $125 entry fee… and the fact that most design competitions are scams (I assume. I’ve never entered one).

I’m doing prep work for the print materials for this year’s DCM. I try to do something different every year, just ‘cause it’s basically the same info and the same “sell” every year and I’ve done it ten times now. I always want to be more ambitious with it… a little slicker, better-looking final product, but I never manage to get it where I want it and some of the previous years ones I’m embarrassed by. (Caveat: I feel that way about 90% of my output.)

We did a photo shoot yesterday which I think will be really cool and different “image” to represent the show, and I want to combine that with hand-drawn text. Yes, I’m going to letter all of the flyer’s content by hand… all twelve billion hours of show names. Hand-lettering seems to be the “it” thing recently… just walking around this morning, I spotted three different national poster campaigns with all hand-lettered (or faux-hand-lettered) signage.

I’ve been doing my research (read: building a swipe file) I came across this designer—Parra—who seems mainly to work in the European skateboard/hiphop mileu. I mostly like his letterforms but the bird-headed vulva-bearing vixens look like refugees from a Ralph Bakshi-directed remake of Yellow Submarine—cute and offensive at the same time.

Bonus: Here’s a charmingly-monickered blog’s tour of his studio from last year.

The CD art for the Kung Fu Monkey’s singles and rarities that I’ve been working on and off for the past three years came out LAST WEEK and I highly recommend it. This is what it looks like:

You can order it at Whoa-Oh Records, for the low-low price of $10 (for 41 tracks! Less than a quarter a song)

Additionally, I did a very long and very lispy (hot mic) interview with label honcho Johnny Whoa-Oh. If you want to hear me talk about the history of the UCB Theatre and my involvement with it, all the record covers I’ve done for Whoa-Oh, as well as recollections of the Kung Fu Monkeys, click here (or get Whoa Oh Podcast 17 from iTunes)

I’m sure tons of people have already seen this video linked elsewhere (particularly those who browse to graphic design blogs), but I’m grateful to see lastFM did the legwork of researching the specific 1980s station idents/production company logos/early CGI wankery being graphically namechecked here.

What I wonder is if the swooshes, whirrs, and other associated “logo noises” are actually on the song itself.

When I first started hanging out with (read: drinking heavily in bars with) Mitch Magee two years ago, he used to rally everyone into toasts which for a brief window of time changed from the usual vagueries of “to a brighter tomorrow” to “to Barack Obama.” Like most people with better things to worry about at the time, I had no idea who Barack Obama was but I enjoyed changing his name into other things. So, the idea for this doodle has been discussed for almost two years and now that I’ve actually executed it… probably not worth it.

I’m sure I’ll redo this at some point.

I’ve been up to my eyeballs in little annoying lingering things that need to be taken care of on the SuperDeluxe show, but it’s as boring to talk about as it is to listen to, so I’ll skip it.

I’m doing a CD package for my friend’s band. It’s a collection of all their vinyl releases going back to 1996, plus unreleased tracks. We started getting this ready as far back as 2005, but it, for whatever reason, never really happened. It’s massive… 13 pages of liner notes, 41 tracks; but nobody had any cover ideas. (The one we wanted to do was stolen… by Smashmouth).

It got a title the second time around, “Christmas for Breakfast,” so going off that I looked around for an idea. I found a kids book (the band self-describes as “kiddie pop”) from the 1960s (the main era they lift style cues from) with “breakfast” in the title, so there you go. I ran it by James, and he was game.

I drew the lettering from a vintage magazine headline which I had downloaded as research for the Madmen xmas card I did last year. Making lettering brings out the obsessive-compulsive tendancies I mostly keep in check. I can do it for hours.

So, as of about the third day working on it, this is the progress. I’m going to put some other stuff on the table. Textures and shading I’ll put in afterwards, using photoshop airbrush. The kid needs eyebrows, too.

That flicker widget on the left has been broken forever. I really should fix it.
In the meantime, check out these February calendar flyers for UCBLA that I spent ten billion hours on this week. I think they need more flowers.

My art indirectly made it into the Chicago Tribune!

http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/entertainment_tv/2008/01/mad-men-comes-b.html

Mad Men, in my humble opinion, was the best show of 2007 and when I got a chance to design a Christmas card for cast member and former NY improviser Rich Sommer, I jumped at it.

click the pic to see it giant sized

I didn’t take any money for it because it was fun and I wanted to do it. I was also working at an ad agency at the time (September) and had a lot of downtime. It gave me cabin fever, totally, to sit at a desk and wait for work to come and I realized the day went a lot faster if I just took a lot of freelance work to stay occupied… and I took a lot of questionable design work that I would have steered clear of in normal life.

The trade off for Rich was he had to endure weekly Q&A emails about behind the scenes Mad Men gossip and insider track backstage plot secrets (he didn’t know any). And when iTunes totally got behind in updating their episodes, he got AMC on the horn and straightened that shit out (or, his boss did, really). Aaaaaaand… he sent me a DVD screener for Xmas and a copy of a shooting script (“The Wheel” aka the season finale) for me to put in my hope chest. And I did this with it:

(I hope this satisfies loyal reader Monique’s need for inanimate objects with sexy legs)

I don’t think any other designers read this blog… or any actual people read this blog at the rate that I (don’t) post, but in case there are, I’m pretty psyched about this list of public domain, high-res photos free from your US Government.

The Best Copyright Free Photo Libraries

This guy is my desktop wallpaper right now.

For the first time since the ‘72 Olympics, the mascots are not barfy*.

Kawaii powerhouses meomi designed 3 (or 4) bizarre Canadian creatures for the 2010 Olympiad in Vancouver, including a half-orca half-bear which looks like a skunk with a faux hawk. But, by god, theyare cuuuuuuute!

*I concede Hodori the Korean tiger was ok, but he was no Waldi. Also, he seems to have eaten his mate—there was a girl tiger mascot initially who vanished completely with no explanation.

I like hand-lettering a lot, especially the kinda off not-too-slick kind where you can tell it wasn’t done on the computer. I attempted it (and then over-burdened it with photoshop effects) in this “Longest Sketch Show Ever” logo:

To see a real pro and sweet hand-lettering, check out the artist Linzie Hunter takes inspiration from SPAM headlines and renders them as whimsical art

The SPAM I get tends to be much dirtier. And in Chinese. Still my top headline: “Punish her meat tunnel with your husky third leg”... which my mail viewer cut off the last two words of making the horrific “Punish her meat tunnel with your husky”

I spent a full day working on this card—

I like it for 3 reasons and dislike it for 5, but I’m not going to get into that.

Then I made another version to use in the program—

It was originally going to be like a call-out diagram like they have in encyclopedias and Penn & Teller’s How to Play With Your Food, which a caption explaining what each of the things was (or maybe the titles of the sketches each of these things appear in), but I didn’t feel like drawing all the other stuff.

It has the added “activity page” quality of allowing you to draw new faces on Hines & DeCoster and give them new names… they’re all blank and ready for crayons.

I’ve been working days the last three weeks, and by virtue of forgetting my login anywhere I haven’t already saved the password I can’t update my blog there. So, the audience benefits of not having to read repetitive gripes about the bullshit of the fast-track world of pharmaceutical advertising, or “pharma” as the go-getters call it or maybe “phad” as no actual person would ever call it.

I managed to squeeze out this chunk of genius while I was “on the clock.” So, like, you’re welcome.

Much as the “swoosh” was to the late 90s and the “glassy reflection” was to 2 years ago, here’s the latest done-to-death graphic conceit, the speech bubble.

Bubble Logo Insanity