Good morning! How are you? I hope the week is off to a good start for you. I just wanted to let you know that you can now visit the eight new monsters above at Art For Empty Walls. These are the first drawings I've ever put on sale anywhere---not just of the monsters, but of anything. So.. it's a first! I hope you'll enjoy the drawings! As always, 5% of my cut goes to 826LA. Please remember, even when I'm on sale 344 LOVES YOU
Good morning. Please forgive me for posting very little this week. Some very exciting things are happening that have dominated my time. As some of you already know, the Daily Monster Book is on! The book will be called 100 DAYS OF MONSTERS and here is the updated cover. I redrew the main title type Monday night:
HOW Books is going to publish the thing, Ze allowed himself to be drafted to write the foreword, and it'll be in bookstores this coming February---complete with a DVD of all 100 Daily Monsters. So instead of flowers, why not plan on giving your sweetheart some inky creatures? (Just a thought... :^) I've been working on page layouts all week, and on putting together the first of a few planned user charts---who sent in the most posts during the original 100 Monster period.
I have downloaded the whole blog and have started the process of editing all the materials for the book. I'll feature two or three stories with each monster, but the plan is to put all the posts onto the DVD, so that all of your cool stories and comments will be on the record! Of course, you can still submit stories for the original creatures now, but they won't find their way into the book. (Not into the first one, at any rate. ;^)
The book will be chock full of new goodies, too! Bonus Monster Films! And lots of new creatures! Just tonight I made 48 new monsters in one long drawing session! My head is throbbing, and my back isn't all that happy, but who wants to stop when the ink is flowing? I need another 13 creatures for this particular element, and then many, many more for something else... but that will have to wait until Monday. :^D
Man, I wish I could show you some of these creatures. I think they're some of the best yet. But I want to make sure there will be some real surprises in the book. So I'll fight the urge to post these particular monsters here. Please forgive the tease.
I will, however, post some great new Open Source Monsters:
Aren't these excellent! Thank you so much for sending them in. Now, here's OPEN SOURCE BLOT 08, ready for your monster creations! Let me recap for those of you who may be new to the Open Source Monsters: Please print out the PDF of this week's ink blot, do with it what you will, then send me a scan or photo of your piece and I'll post it on the site! I hope you'll have fun!
It's 4am and definitely time for me to call it a night. I hope that, wherever you are, spring has sprung and that you have a lovely and leisurely weekend ahead of you! And hey.. birds know it, bees know it, even educated flees know it: 344 LOVES YOU
Good afternoon, again! It's a day of lots of little posts. I hope you don't mind. I'm sneaking a few minutes of blogging here and there amidst lots of Big Deadlines.
I just received an e-mail from Curtis Elliot, a friend of the Monsters:
A few months ago you inspired me to start my own blog and do fun design for myself just like you do with your monsters. I originally thought a robot a day would be fun but I hardly kept up with it, so I did a robot poster whenever I had the chance. Pretty soon I had a small collection of these and decided to make a little book of them and published them on Blurb.com. If you wana see it you can check it out on their Book of the Week page.
He also sent me a few pictures of the book. I think it looks great!
How sweet is it that the Daily Monsters are spawning new projects? That's very, very cool! I wonder if there's an Emily Wong Monograph in the offing... Or the Sam Berkes Companion, perhaps... I think champion Open Source Blotter Georg von Westphalen was already well on top of these things before the monsters.
Hey, by the way... if you ever have any monsters that you want to send in that aren't Open Source or part of the Tallest Monster, please don't hesitate. Labels, shmabels! Uncategorized monsters get love, too! And so do you, of course... You haven't forgotten, have you, that 344 LOVES YOU
Good evening. The new issue of New York Magazine is now on the stands,
and right there on page 95 are the monsters.
I hope you'll like the illustration. Please take a look:
Now, I must say a few words about the cover:
There are three very nice details going on here that make me think that folks
in the New York Magazine art department have some serious game.
First off, notice that the downward swash of the N goes behind Rainn Wilson's hand.
That in itself is nice, and certainly well executed, but kind of a common effect
on magazine covers:
But now take a look at the end of the N's tail. See how it connects to the shadow cast by Rainn's glasses? And how the left lens becomes the terminal of the swash? Now that's subtlety! Genius!
Finally, check out how the curve of the Y's descender is covered by Rainn's shoulder, but gets picked up by the highlight. I suspect that this was a lucky accident. If it wasn't---if they actually manipulated the photo to make that happen---then we all must bow to the person responsible. Because that's just scary good!
If you live in the New York area, or near a well-stocked newsstand, I hope you'll pick up a copy! In the meantime, whether you live in New York or not,
you surely know that 344 LOVES YOU
Good afternoon. I just finished an illustration for New York Magazine to head next week's THE WEEK section. It'll hit newsstands next Monday (April 2nd). The whole thing took 23 hours of work and turned out quite nice, I think. I'll post a jpeg in a few days. (I don't want to give away any editorial content and piss off a new client in the process. :^) But I will show you the three new monsters that make an appearance in the piece. I hope you'll like them.
I have more of your excellent Open Source Monsters to post tonight.
Please check back for them tomorrow!
Have a great night and remember that 344 LOVES YOU
Good morning! A belated HAPPY HALLOWEEN to you. I hope you had a great time being spooky. I'm working on a number of cool projects at the moment and they've kept me from posting. My apologies for leaving you alone for so long once again.
For one thing, I'm designing the signage for a new 826 store here in Los Angeles. I can't tell you the theme just yet, but this one follows the Brooklyn Super Hero Supplies Co., the Pirate Supply Store in San Francisco, and the Greenwood Space Travel Supply Co. in Seattle... so you know it'll be pretty cool! The logo is already done and we're on to designing the products. I'm getting copy from a team of comedy writers and they've got me laughing out loud. Which isn't easy to do. It's a great luxury for me to work on a job that puts me on the side of the angels AND makes me crack up with some frequency. Please stay tuned for visuals.
In other news, I've rebooted the UPSTAIRS NEIGHBORS book. Talking with three editors over the past few weeks led to all kinds of changes to the text and structure of the book and it was getting a little out of hand. It's easy to make so many small tweaks that you ultimately end up with a product that's no longer true to what it was supposed to be.
So I cleared the slate and rewrote the whole thing. In verse, no less. Now it's funnier than it was and fits into 36 pages. It's also a little bit less bizarre, as I've eliminated all the funny creature names, and that's a shame. They just didn't quite fit in this incarnation. But the last word isn't spoken on any of this. I'm set to be introduced to some very interesting people outside the publishing industry next week and I'm sure that will provoke further developments. My little monster sprint is turning into another long distance race, and I'm trying to maintain my energy level. Once again, please stay tuned.
On Friday I'm off to judge the STEP 100 competition in Lake Forest, Wisconsin. Start time on Saturday and Sunday will be 7.30am. Heaven help the poor entrants who come before me in those first early hours. How can I possibly like anything when I'll hardly be able to stand up? I'll do my very best to be merciful. I'll fill up on an emergency Danish to bring my sugar level up to something manageable.
Right now it is, once again, time for me to call it a day. Once I get the laundry out of the dryer that is. Such is the life of a man who prefers to work alone. I started the evening with high hopes for writing the next STEP column today, and once again I got scared of the white page and pointed my attention elsewhere. But that's another story.
For now, I hope you'll have a great rest of the week and an un-bleak month of November. Do remember, please, that even in the autumnal gloom 344 LOVES YOU
Good morning. Right now, I'm coming to you live from Tucson, Arizona. I'm giving a talk for AIGA Tucson tonight, and another one tomorrow night in Phoenix. If you look back a post or two, I had told you that I'm also doing a mural here in town.
Val and Aaron from AIGA Arizona did a fantastic job setting up everything on the ground here (with the help of Tig and Gabriele at Art Fare). We traced the design onto the wall Monday night and were up on the cherry pickers from 10 am until 2am yesterday to paint. We had some volunteers---Kim and Natasha, Kerrie and William---who helped out on the painting. William, in particular, stepped up to the plate when a few other signed-up volunteers didn't show. He signed up for a two hour shift and ended up staying from the afternoon until the bitter end. As did Aaron, who was on the rig the entire time and then went home to stitch together a cool little time lapse movie of the whole thing. It's an 8MB Quicktime clip that you can download right here: Download mural_elapsed.m4v
After spending hours on a swaying cherry picker, it's very strange to go back on solid ground. Everything was spinning by the time I crawled into bed last night. Might just have been exhaustion, of course.
We're having a little dedication ceremony this afternoon. From what I've been told in advance it'll definitely merit its own post. So stay tuned and please remember 344 LOVES YOU
Good morning. The last few weeks have been eventful. Travel and the inevitable post-travel race to catch up have kept me from being a good blogger. No discipline. No discipline at all.
As you can tell from my last entry, I had a great time in New York. I got to introduce the Upstairs Neighbors to a number of great publishers---several of which, I'm happy to report, have shown serious interest in the book. A frequent comment was "We love the creatures and we already have all kinds of ideas for the book." Uhm... well... my idea for the book was that we'll print the thing just as it is now and then I get the Caldecott Medal a couple of months from now and sell the film rights to Tim Burton.
Naïve author fantasies aside, now it's about converting "serious interest" into actual offers and finding the best home for the Neighbors. Where will they need the fewest changes? Who will produce the best book? Who will do the best job distributing the thing? Last night I submitted some exploratory rewrites to one of the interested editors. Funny stuff, I thought, but I'm eagerly awaiting the official reaction. There is potential all over the place. Please keep your fingers crossed and stay tuned.
In other news, I'm going to visit the AIGA Chapters in Tucson and Phoenix on the 18th and 19th of this month respectively to unleash the 344 Dog and Pony. The event invitation crowns today's entry. What do you think?
I'm actually flying down a few days early to produce a mural for the Tucson chapter. The good people at the Tucson ArtFare were nice enough to volunteer the marquee of their upcoming street café for a new 344 piece. Needless to say, I'm hard at work designing something special. If you're in the Tucson area, come visit. I'll be on site from the 16th to the 18th. Come to the talks, too. We'll have fun.
A "before" view of the future mural site
One last thing: I finally got my hands on a copy of the Chinese edition of my book
and I have to share a few images. How cool is this?
So there you have it. Lots of fun things are happening and I'm happy as a clam to be back in the office for a few days to make some fun new things for you. (Some interesting new jobs are starting to materialize, too, and I hope that I can tell you about them soon.) For now, it's time to call it a day. I hope you're enjoying the early days of fall and that you haven't forgotten that 344 LOVES YOU
Originally posted on September 8th, 2006
A slice of the movie poster for THE FALL (Yes, that's the same ornament as in the new Ink & Circumstance column. I'm feeling Victorian right now.)
Hello again. Please excuse the days of silence between posts. It's been a busy week, indeed. Many projects demanded my attention into the wee hours and left no energy to do anything but shuffle into the bedroom and keel over.
That said, it makes me want to sing the praises of the Machine. For the first years of my commercial work I never had a computer. I did my drawings on paper and that's where they stayed. Everything was black and white. (Google Letratone, why don't you, and have a laugh at my Amish beginnings.) In the rare instances that I had a second color to work with, I made a second plate of sorts, by inking it on tissue paper with handmade registration marks.
I got my first computer in my second term of art school. The year was 1994. I wasn't yet 21 and Photoshop 2.5.1 had no layers. I hadn't even heard of the Internet. I sent my first Eudora e-mail in December of 1996.
Just about ten years later, my whole life runs through my computer. Most of the time I don't even think about it anymore. But a week like this one makes me stop and take note.
In the last few days I've designed a movie poster that's printing at a service bureau in South Pasadena right now. I designed some movie titles that I e-mailed to Paris to be added to the final reel of Tarsem's new movie that's premiering in Toronto on Saturday. On Monday I whipped out a set of business cards for the man, posted it to my printer's server on the other end of Pasadena. Those cards are off to Toronto in the morning, too. When I left my chair and went outside my house it was only by choice.
All the while, I've been comping up more and more merchandising items for my book that would put any ad agency pitch to shame. Those are coming off my little Epson printer at photo quality.
Let's not forget that I went online to book a flight to New York, so I can pitch the book to publishers, who I contacted by e-mail, sending them an active link to a little mini site with PDFs of the whole 112-page project, compressed to a svelte 7MB of fun.
I bought a bunch of obscure music on iTunes, downloaded a few clips from YouTube and formatted them for my iPod, helped a friend by doing some web searches for her, got photos of a building in Tucson, AZ that I'll be muralizing as part of an AIGA presentation in October...
If you're just a little bit younger than me, you may be thinking "Well... gee whiz. What about it?" It's hard to remember what life was like before computers. Sometimes I think back to high school and have to really remind myself that I didn't google for anything. I wrote my papers based on library research and lecture notes. I wrote letters in longhand. Sometimes two or three a day. How quaint. Over the past 24 hours I've written 57 e-mails.
I'm part of the last generation of Westerners that grew up without immediate and pervasive access to personal computing. I started with a horse drawn buggy and now I've got myself a nice new Studebaker. No nostalgia here, either. I've never, ever longed for the days when I had to do a lot of things by hand. I had a mechanical typewriter once. And an electric one. And lots of glue sticks. Screw that. More progress, please! Sign me up for Mac OS XIV.
The bottom line is that I couldn't have my own studio without my Mac. I'd rely on all kinds of real world infrastructure to do what I do, I'd need to invest some serious cash to make that happen. Odds are, I'd be working for the Man instead. But thanks to my little Machine I get to be as free as you can be without having rich parents or winning the lottery. And that's pretty good.
The big question is, as always: What's next?
I'm excited to get my very own desktop rapid prototyping machine.
Something like this, but smaller and cheaper. Cheap enough to have fun and goof around. Imagine the fun we could have.
And where's my Google implant, anyway?
And when will Photoshop understand context?
Select this tree. Remove the background behind this poodle.
RFIDs combined with cheap, pervasive GPS, everywhere-always-on wireless internet access and electronic payment through my cell phone.
Oh, and could I please have a SIM card for my computer?
Why can't every computer be my computer?
I think futurists that bill themselves as such are snake oil salesmen. But PRINT magazine recently ran an excerpt of a speech Gordon Lippincott gave at the 1956 Aspen Design Conference. He basically anticipated e-commerce in detail 50 years ago. Gordon was a designer and account planner. My friend Russell is a musician, writer, and account planner. He's also a blogger. I'm going to be much better about reading his posts carefully and frequently from now on. Take a look. He has interesting things to say and links to all kinds of excellent content.
I'll post more new work for you soon, and I hope to have more things to reveal about the new book very shortly.
For now I hope that you're headed for a mellow weekend. Do please remember that 344 LOVES YOU
Originally posted on September 1st, 2006
Phew! After an unhealthy, but unavoidable all-nighter, the 6th Ink & Circumstance column is finished. It's titled TIME TO MOVE and will appear in the Nov/Dec issue of STEP Inside Design magazine. This installment deals with the emotional range of graphic design, or rather the lack thereof. A little teaser strip follows below. On top of that, work on the Tarsem end credits continues. Both the Writers and Directors Guilds have signed off, so we're in business. In the nick of time, too. They need to get the print to Toronto for its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.
I got two hours of sleep yesterday. Not a schedule I react well to anymore. Luckily, today was a fairly mellow day, at long last. Not to overshare on the minutiae, but I had enough time to get a haircut and to clean my closet. This last one is a big deal for me. Lugging bag after bag of old papers, obsolete manuals, and just general pack rat stuff took over three hours, but I finally found the floor.
Cleaning the house always marks the end of a big work push and helps me order my mind a bit along the way---tending the inner Zen garden by reordering the shelves. What can I tell you? I'm deep. I hope that you'll have a wonderful Labor Day weekend. Throw a bratwurst on the barbecue for me. And remember: 344 LOVES YOU
Originally posted on August 27th, 2006
The first 200 inches of credits, on their side
I will never look at the end credits of a movie the same way again. I just spent 10 hours typesetting the end credits for Tarsem's new film The Fall. It took an army of people to make this movie. And muscular passports. Tarsem shot this movie in Britain, South AFrica, India, Bali, Romenia, the Czech Republic, Fiji, Italy, Bali, Spain, China, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Turkey, Egypt, and Cambodia. Sheesh!
I had to assemble this thing in two separate files. Why two separate files? Because InDesign CS2 tops out at 216 inches file height. Which I actually thought was oddly impressive. Now, the way to get an InDesign file into Photoshop is via Acrobat, which won't go higher than 200 inches. OK. Fine. Unfortunately, Photoshop seems to draw the line somewhere below 200 and squeezes the resulting file, making my condensed font into an extended font. It's as if the design fell victim to a Looney Tunes steamroller. I'll have to split the thing into more parts to get what I need.
Well, this is all getting very technical and I don't want to bore you. Suffice it to say that some days it's about art and other days it's about bending the machine to do one's bidding. But it's worth it. I like learning new tricks. Plus. badly typeset end credits are a pet peeve of mine, so I'm happy to do it right on this film. These credits will be very, very simple---just a white on black scroll---but dammit, they'll be well set. It's the little things...
I hope that you're having a lovely, mellow weekend. While you're lounging, please remember that 344 LOVES YOU
Originally posted on August 25th, 2006
The new book is done! It's official. I picked up two bound copies today. Alice did a fantastic job making beautiful books out of two stacks of printouts. Her attention to detail is just wonderful. The headband alone made my day. It's one of those lovely, lovely minutiae that make an object start hovering two inches off the ground.
As a finishing touch Alice helped me apply the shiny, oversized, two-sided dustjackets, printed out as a kind favor by my friends at Typecraft right here in Pasadena just last night. (My thanks to David, Andrew and J.J.)
So now the book is done and it looks very, very cool! It's funny how you can stare at a set of artwork for four months, make every printout, plan every detail, and still be completely surprised by the final assembled piece. It's one of the great pleasures of this job. In other words: I love it when a plan comes together.
Add to that the euphoria of relief: I actually finished a big personal project without an external deadline and it came out as well as I had hoped. I didn't leave the thing half finished and put it on the shelf (as I have shamefully done with other projects in the past). NO! I got it done and it's a good piece and that's a huge load of my mind. I did my job!
Now comes the fun part: I get to start showing the book around to publishers. And then... then I get to show it to you.
When I walked out of Alice's workshop with my two perfect little books today I felt a huge wave of bouncy, nervous energy: I wanted to show this project off right now! After four months of patient work it suddenly felt incredibly, physically urgent to present the thing. But that's not how it works. I won't count my chickens before they hatch. Must. Get. Book. Deal. First. Then I'll show you the book in all its shiny glory. (And all the merchandising goodies I comped up, too.) For now: more teasers. Yes, it's true: I'm a book tease, but please do remember: 344 LOVES YOU
Originally posted on August 23rd, 2006
Wednesday morning, 3 a.m. After a few days of hardcore client work I'm back to working on the monster project. The books are drying at the bindery and will be ready for pickup in a few hours. It's like Christmas Eve!
Unfortunately, I miscalculated the final size of the binding, so I'm busy adjusting the dust jacket file. It's not a big deal per se, but hell, everything takes forever when you're working on a 27x17" file with a hundred layers at 600dpi. But the dust jacket is the last thing that stands between me and meeting publishers, so I'm eager to send off the files. Reason goes out the window and I'm working late nights again. For those of you who've heard me talk about maintaining a healthy balance between working and taking care of your body... DO AS I SAY, NOT AS I DO.
Earlier tonight, I spent a few quality hours mocking up more merchandising items for the project to show how far beyond a book this could go. As I said before, my advertising background compels me. Once you have your ad, you photoshop it into any and all situations to wow the client. "Yes, it's your new Metamucil ad and here it is on the side of the Empire State Building. And on a blimp. And as a tattoo on Angelina Jolie's thigh." You'd be surprised how jazzed people get about this sort of thing. Besides... a couple of Photoshop hours building things that don't exist are always time well spent. It's very zen and gives me a chance to appreciate some great pop music. Today's playlist includes Feist's cover of the Bee Gees' "Inside And Out," the fabulous Pointer Sisters, and ABC's forever brilliant "Lexicon of Love." I make absolutely no excuses.
Until next time, remember 344 LOVES YOU
Originally posted August 15th, 2006
The book is at the bindery as of 1pm today. I'm days away from having a working prototype. And speaking of prototypes, I'm mocking up some merchandising items to accompany the book. (My advertising roots are showing.) Among other things, I ordered an alarm clock in the mail---a WACKY WAKER, don't you know---and went right to work on it when it arrived today. I took it apart, redesigned the face, reassembled the clock, shot it, spent an hour massaging the shot... and then I noticed a little detail... Looks like I'll be doing this again tomorrow. Sigh! Right now, it's obviously later than I thought. But remember, even with bags under my eyes: 344 LOVES YOU
