I Let My Fists Do The Talkin’

84 knockoffs of Shep Fairey’s Obama “Hope” poster (via Design Observer)

For all the haters who dogpile on “Obey” for being the work of a rip-off artist, seeing all the parodies/tributes/cash-ins lined up, you get a sense that it’s not that fuckin’ easy to do. Most of these look like shit. There is a lot of craft that goes into the image-appropriation blender that takes more skill than pressing “posterize” in Photoshop. (I think Fairey is fun.)

Personal favorites from the list:

Runner Up (and best crafted of the lot)

Hope by 21st Century Filth

Ridiculous Grand Prize:

(Mavis) Beacon of Hope by Lonely Sandwich

I’m probably not going to put every wallpaper here as I do them. You’re better off just going directly to Flickr to see them. I’ve already missed three of them from last week.

Here’s one

Here’s this week’s:

You can go back and find the others I’m skipping yourself. I want to blog about other things, like Russian Law and Order (the show, not the concept) and my class performance last night (they did pretty well!)

Mad Men Season 2, Episode 8 Desktop Wallpaper. Currently untitled. I’m working on it.

Well into Tuesday and still no Episode 8 on iTunes. Luckily I saw it on Sunday at Nate Shelkey’s, but I don’t have an reference images to draw from. I found a bootleg low-res version of the episode on the internet but it was far from ideal.

This is my first new wallpaper after the SURGE of viral interest and I can’t help but feel I didn’t rise to the occasion.

Incidentally, you know that unseen "Mitch" who’s unhappy about Harry’s raise and is rumored to accuse Harry of "gold-bricking?" It’s totally this guy.

The dorkiest ever rock parody version here, or for iPhone.

Order a prints of this series from zazzle.com or download the Mad Men Icons.
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Next week is a rerun, so you tell me what desktop wallpaper you want to see. It can be from this season, last season, a made-up scene… some different show entirely. Leave a comment and I’ll consider it.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/11/champagne-supernova-in-the-subway/ (12 down)
http://www.kottke.org/08/09/mad-men-wallpaper
http://www.kungfugrippe.com/post/49482430/joans-new-technology-this-is-already-making-my
http://www.designobserver.com/ (side bar, about 7 down from top)
http://meghanagain.tumblr.com/post/49478045/mad-men-illustrated-a-set-on-flickr
About 50000 mentions on various people’s twitter (no link for that)

This was an odd week.

This is what was going on inside the casting room… a yellowish featureless void of infinite space where Harry spent the whole episode rather than appearing in any scene in the actual show.

iTunes didn’t put this one up until midday Tuesday, so it’s slower than I’d like… both the delivery of the episode and the content of the episode itself. Huzzah!

I also made a set of Mad Men OSX icons, which I haven’t quite figured out how to distribute.

Finally! An episode where shit happens instead of foreshadowing and brooding! Hooray for drunk driving, boo to no one being killed and Don having to hide the bodies!

I got so into working on this one, I stayed up most of the night starting work on next week’s…

A gallery of images from the “Crazy 4 Cult” sequel show where artists pay tribute to their favorite cult films.

Brandon Bird’s offering is typically genius, but there’s a lot of other great and unexpected stuff in there. A little heavy on the Kevin Smith and Wizard of Oz, but there is a “Strange Brew” one in there so all’s right with the world.

A week ago, rather seredipitiously, both Buzzfeed and Laughing Squid featured my Mad Men doodles. I got a great flurry of hits on the Flickr and like a magnificent brain fever, it was all over in three days. Despite that, I’m going to stick to it and do one spot a week for the duration of the series. Click the picture to download the full-size.

Episode 4

And from last week, in case you missed it—

Episode 3

(The whole set is my Flickr set “Mad Men Illustrated”)

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.