I can’t send cards to everyone, but I thought I’d post the image I created for my holiday card this year. It’s the first time I’ve made a physical card and I’m quite happy with the results! I’ve posted some process and photos of the end result under the cut.

Like I often do for illustrations, I started with good ol’ fashion pencil and paper. I played around with a few layouts and came up with the above image. Then I scanned it into Photoshop and used a tablet to paint it up using a variety of textured brushes.

I then scanned in a sketch I made of some cheerful looking lettering I made for the cover image. Please excuse the poor quality Instagram photo, I cleaned house and deleted the original scan. From there I traced out the image in Illustrator and ended up with a simple vector version. I imported the lettering into the finished illustration and found a nice placement for it. I thought the lettering was getting a little lost so I had a little fun with some frosty fills to make the text stand out a little more. With that done I whipped up some text for the interior and made a fun variation of my logo for the back and sent it off to the printer!

I’m always looking for new printers, not that any others have been bad, but it’s always a good thing to keep an eye out for others and know what they’re capable of. Juke Box had recently done some nice looking business cards for me, so I gave them a shot at the greeting cards too. While I had a little grief with their online card maker, their Prepress department was great in helping me make what I uploaded the same as what I wanted to print.

Here’s a few photos of the end result, and now I think it’s time to kick back with a glass of eggnog with a splash of spiced rum in it! Happy Holidays!

Steve LeCouilliard contacted me on the weekend asking for a little help on a cause that I’ve increasingly been worried about. SOPA, or the Stop Online Piracy Act is a bill aimed at fighting online piracy in all shapes and forms. Which in itself is not a bad thing. Creators deserve to be paid for what they do, and protections against out right theft should be in place. But in it’s current form SOPA goes too far. I could explain the whole thing, but I’ll just copy and paste a bit of the wikipedia subject on the matter:

The bill would allow the U.S. Department of Justice, as well as copyright holders, to seek court orders against websites accused of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement. Depending on who requests the court orders, the actions could include barring online advertising networks and payment facilitators such as PayPal from doing business with the infringing website, barring search engines from linking to such sites, and requiring Internet service providers to block access to such sites. The bill would make unauthorized streaming of copyrighted content a felony. The bill also gives immunity to Internet services that voluntarily take action against websites dedicated to infringement, while making liable for damages any copyright holder who knowingly misrepresents that a website is dedicated to infringement.

Protecting whole works would be a good thing but this would also make it illegal to post a a video of your child walking up stairs for the first time and have it set to ‘Eye of the Tiger‘. It would make it illegal to draw a picture of Batman and post it online. It would make your college’s lip dub that’s going viral on Youtube illegal. It would make it illegal to link to any one of those.

It scary when you find out that your online account or personal website can be deleted or blacklisted for hosting or linking any offending material. It gets scarier when you find out that a copyright holder can potentially have your Paypal account suspended because you had a donate button on the same site you hosted or linked the offending material. It gets even scarier when you find out that the restructuring needed to put these ‘protections’ in place would amount to the US equivalent of The Great Firewall of China. The government would have the ability to censor websites at their whim. At first to stop you from going to torrent sites, but could also block you from going to sites with anti US sentiments. The potential for censorship is huge!

I could ramble on for pages, but I won’t. Google is your friend (I think.) and here are some handy links to quickly catch up on the situation:

A handy infographic.

A Boing Boing article on the subject.

A Tech Dirt article on the hearings.

Some tools for taking action.

If you’re into the whole petition thing.

Back to Steve. Steve had an idea and asked for a little help in the graphic design end of things. He wanted to make a mock software expiration page for Freedom of Speech and post it online as a fun and slightly inflammatory image to get people talking and motivate them to educate themselves on the subject and hopefully help maintain a free and open internet where new ideas free expression and creative projects can be shared without fear of prosecution.

I liked his idea, so I set to work using a quick mockup Steve sent and went about creating the image at the top of article. Did some research and found out the fonts used in OSX windows, (Lucida Grande which is pretty close to Lucida Sans) and i doctored up some screen shots, established some margins and fake buttons and tossed in some text that was based on Steve’s original. After a few back and forths we made a good looking fake expiration and it was unleashed on the internet.

We had hopes that it would go viral to help spread the word, but you can’t force anything to go viral. You just have to put it up there, link to is as best you can, then see what happens.

This happened:

Almost did a spit take at work when I saw that. I’d never had an image go viral before and the fact that Wil Wheaton, one of my favorite and respected strangers I follow online, (That sounded creepy.) helped make it happen was a giddy little moment for me. To see this idea linked by him meant it was indeed going to go viral to some degree. 854 people saw it (at post time) and saw fit to either like it, comment on it, and best of all, repost it.

Then Steve let me know about this:

His Google+ post made it to the What’s Hot section of the site! Even better. 1339 people have shared it on there!

It was linked elsewhere and made some traction in those places too, it was amazing to see our little message go so far so quickly. Relinks of relinks, jumping from one social network to another, it was awesome to see it take on a life of it’s own. Let alone  the fact that I had a hand in creating it.

It reaffirmed the power of good design for me. In this age it doesn’t take celebrity status to get a message across (but one certainly helped distribute it) or a giant corporation with accompanying budget to get a message out there. Well written text and thoughtful design built on a clever idea can spread a message and hopefully make a better world.

The original image link.

I saw Tangled on the weekend. I was really surprised by how much I enjoyed. I’m by no means a film reviewer, so I’ll leave that to the professionals. But do yourself a favour and go see the film, I say it in 2D (not much of a fan of the 3D) and had a great time! Another reason you should really go see it though is for the credits. At least the first bit, before it switches to standard credits.* Here’s a somewhat poor quality YouTube video of them:

I was blown away by the life in the drawings, the energy in the brushstrokes, though probably digital, are beautiful. I would watch an entire movie animated with those brush strokes as a model. So like I often do, I got momentarily obsessed and made it my mission to track down the illustrator behind them. Google don’t fail me now!

Who I found was Shiyoon Kim. Can’t find much out about him besides his love of animation and pop locking. But he has an art blog! And there’s a post featuring a few of the illustrations (which is where I linked the top illustration from. Go check it out!

*But from a typography and design perspective, the post illustration credits were really well designed too! The gentle undulating centre margin running down the screen did a really good job of evoking Rapunzel’s hair.

A little wind up bird that sits on my desk at work.

This is also an excuse to test the WordPress app on my phone…

I was so strong. I watched the keynote, saw the specs, and came away impressed. But what surprised me was that I had no intention to buy an iPad. I don’t have a lot of disposable income, and between a smart phone (can you guess what it is?) and a desktop ( yeah, I drank the Kool-Aid ) I couldn’t justify needing an iPad. So I ogled from afar, tracked the buzz, and hoped I would trip over a bag of money on the street.

When I first saw the iPad, I thought it’d be great for me with only two App additions (AppAdds?): a portfolio app, and a good sketchbook app. The current lineup of apps offered neither ( I suppose Photos would work as a stop gap portfolio in a pinch and Brushes could be a decent sketchbook ) until today when Adobe had to whip out Adobe® Ideas 1.0.

It looks like a great rough sketchpad for on the fly doodling in colour with resizable vector based brushes, plus some handy little features for building a colour palette and exporting the whole thing to Illustrator or Photoshop. This little app could potentially become the replacement for the trusty pencil/sketchbook combo most designers and artists rely on. Here’s the feature list:

Features:
• Simple vector-based drawing tools
• Zoom control without jaggies or big pixels
• Variable-size brushes using multitouch control
• Vector eraser
• Huge virtual canvas
• Automatic creation of harmonized color themes from your photos or images
• Ability to email ideas as PDF files for editing in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop or for viewing with any PDF viewer
• Gallery-style organizer to quickly scroll through your ideas and color themes
• Separate drawing and photo layers
• Easy creation of multiple versions of design concepts
• 50-level undo

Will I buy an iPad now? Probably not. Will I buy an iPad when they’re available in Canada? Probably not then either.  As a tool for an artist or designer it’s still a little lightweight for what I’d really want it for, and for what most of my peers would want it for. Which is essentially a powerful laptop with an accurate touchscreen. The iPad is not the hardware. Nor is Adobe Ideas the software that would replace  the scribbly nature of a pencil on paper sketchbook. I can still get ideas and annotation down faster in an analog. My ideas flow too fast for a capacitive screen to pick up my nuanced scribbles of my hand and still have me decipher them later.

In it’s current state, Adobe Ideas looks like a great… I hesitate to say it: toy. The hardware is too limited, to let the software be a true viable replacement for a professional to replace a small sketchbook and pen in a pocket. But I can see the day coming when apps and hardware will slowly replace my trusty 2B pencil doodles on a collection of spiral bound paper; and I’m pretty certain some future version of Adobe Ideas will be a part of it.

Saw this video and had to share! Created by Rethink Communications for Design Currency: Icograda Design Week In Vancouver. It’s a beautiful piece and kind of blew my mind when I first came across it. Here’s the blurb:

Design Currency 2010 is a conference taking place in Vancouver April 26-30. To promote the conference we developed a stop-motion video showing the value of design. Using 2218 individual bills, 1 money counter and 1 long night of filming we came up with the following. Have a look.

There’s also a great set of behind the scenes photos on Flickr! Lots more just like the one above. I’m still trying to figure out if they filmed a short stack at a time, or if the whole thing was stop motion like it mentions in the description. Either way it’s a really cool animation. The technical trial and error must have made the project a blast to work on.  Sadly a lack of funds (curse you mortgage!) won’t allow me to register to get past the velvet rope of the event itself and meet other creative people like these! I wonder if they take design currency?