the crunchy pencil

Animation for Nail Creek Brewery

2012-01-24T15:43:00.002-05:00

New comic

2011-12-18T10:43:00.002-05:00

Just published a new web comic, Shitty Ideaa 25¢... I've been collecting my cartoons and doodles recently and it's sort of a stray sandpit for my itinerant ideas; I publish it 3 times a week and the only base rule is I can't spend too much time on them--enjoy!

Photos on the front page of the Observer-Dispatch Mohawk Valley section

2011-11-23T10:35:00.001-05:00

photo by Kathleen Duncan / Observer-Dispatch

Beer posters - not just for people who subscribe to Beer Advocate magazine

2011-11-22T13:49:00.002-05:00

The first two posters for Nail Creek Brewery will be available on acid free artisanal paper 13x19, signed. Check them out:

Inspired by the 'My Goodness My Guinness' posters, they're a series and we're hoping to do one for each beer Nail Creek releases.

Nail Creek will be having an official Brewery Beer Release where they will be tapping the first kegs of the Belgian Double and Breakfast Stout this Friday November 25th.

Whole bunch of stuff for Nail Creek

2011-11-16T16:08:00.004-05:00

Some coasters just came in from the printer...

And some posters and stuff promoting Nail Creek Brewery's first couple of beers in production; a Belgian Double and a Breakfast Stout. They should be on tap for Thanksgiving. More beers and more stuff on the way - you can find me at the bar...

Nail Creek Brewery

2011-11-13T18:42:00.007-05:00

I'm just finishing up new artwork for the guys at Nail Creek Brewery who are busily cranking out beer for their first professional-scale brewing venture; two brews to be released around Thanksgiving. More beer-specific illustrations to come soon.

Should I work for free?

2011-09-07T09:24:00.001-04:00

I normally don't mindlessly repost stuff but this is something I have to deal with every day and every artist (and every cheapass business owner within the sound of my voice) should read this. Artist Jessica Hische has done the work for me. Thank you Jessica!

Cartoons at a drag show

2011-06-12T19:57:00.005-04:00

Went to a drag show here in Utica last night and I brought my sketchbook (I never go anywhere without a sketchbook...). I came away with some amusing drawings and scribblings:

Teaching and cartooning (and gardening)

2011-06-07T11:47:00.005-04:00

I've been neglecting my blog but have been preparing new stuff in the process; I'll be teaching Foundations this summer as well as a MWP Community Education class I've been developing titled Classical Portrait Painting & Drawing, basically an "Old Masters" approach to portrait painting.

I'm also working on a graphic novel - sort of a personal project I've been sitting on for some time. Here are some face studies from my sketchbook for one of the main characters... I'll have more information on that and some more drawings to come. For now I gotta get out there and garden today as those veggies need water and weeding.
More later

Come sit on the couch!

2011-04-17T17:58:00.003-04:00

Article in yesterday's UticaOD: Sit on the couch and tell why you love Utica. We recorded interviews at the Indie Garage Sale, Utica Train Station and at 14 Cottage. Interviewees were asked what they loved about Utica.

On WKTV News Channel 2: What do you love about Utica? You can follow TheCouch on Facebook or Twitter.

The Most Dangerous Game

2011-04-02T16:25:00.003-04:00

Images from a recent Illustration figure drawing session...

Alternately dressed as a mafia hit man, cowboy or ninja, today Steve
is General Zaroff from Richard Connell's The Most Dangerous Game

Today on Altpick.com...

2011-02-01T14:22:00.004-05:00

I hate meetings (must be something in the water...)

FLAME WAR!

2011-01-21T15:25:00.005-05:00

some new digital work for an article on email etiquette.

I didn't know there was a name for this... Aahsome!

2011-01-08T13:07:00.037-05:00

I've been doing some dickin' around on the interweb today and I found some information on something I've wondered about much of my life... What I always called the Upstate New York Accent, that particular accent that occurs in Utica, Syracuse, Buffalo and Rochester. It includes rather inventive pronunciation of certain words that people from the coast and New York City often find nasal and annoying.

Well I was happy to find out that it's got a real name. We are part of a dialect called Inland North American English and since the 1960s, linguists have called the local lingual abberation the Northern Cities Vowel Shift. To those badly afflicted, the /æ/ vowel in "cat" and "that" tends to come out like "keeat" and "theeat". I heard a girl in line for a movie order tickets to Black Swan, pronounced something like "bleaack sweaahn". Among other abused vowels is the confusion of the vowels /ɑ/, /ʌ/ and /ɔ/ or the "short o", "short u" and "aw". This can be heard in the words "cot" (/ɑ/) or "cut" (/ʌ/) sounding more like "caught" (/ɔ/). Other subtleties abound from region to region.

According to linguists, the vowel shift basically follows the Erie Canal West from about Utica, past Buffalo, and then provides the Great Lakes region with much of it's pronunciation. The thick of it in the Eastern region is between Syracuse and Buffalo, but you'll hear it throughout Michigan and Wisconsin; you can hear it in their pronunciation of "Wiscaahnsin". Apparently what we take for granted as the Chicago accent is also an extension of the INAE/NCVS. The theory is that the canal provided much of the momentum for this accent and it's actively spreading today. To those of us who do a lot of travel West in and around upstate New York, on into Northern Ohio and Michigan, this makes perfect sense.

You might find it annoying, you might find it embarrassing or comforting... you might not know you even have it depending upon where you're from. Growing up in a college town in upstate New York, I was constantly surrounded by college students from Long Island and New Jersey and their own bizarre versions of what words were supposed to sound like, so personally I've always found hearing the accent a comfort and even find myself slinking back into it among certain company... For example: put a can of Genesee Cream Ale or Utica Club in my hand at a party and you'll notice a personality shift from over-educated urbane intellectual snob to backwoods hick with just a sip!

Happy Holidays

2011-01-01T13:04:00.000-05:00

I'm so afraid of this...

2010-11-28T21:41:00.013-05:00

Have you ever wanted to stop someone about to shoot themselves in the foot? That's how I feel about the upcoming Tron movie that's being pumped everywhere; it's like you're about to see something you love being pooped-on.

I just can't get myself excited about this movie because everything Hollywood gets their hands on for nostalgic purposes seems to get destroyed. The Star Wars saga is probably the best example of this; a fun trio of space adventure movies, 20 years later turned into a baroque, emotionless overuse of computers (because today computers are cheaper than creativity).

As a kid I never liked Disney. They've basically made 2 movies I've ever liked; Tron and The Black Hole. Both of these films were exceptional because they didn't fit easily into the sappy-and-cute children's garbage they regularly publish. The moral: make something that's exceptional and it sticks out.

As stunning as they could make it graphically, this movie will never live up to the effect of the original Tron, because at the time it was visually stunning in a way that no other movie was or could be. Today we are constantly bombarded by stunning and always expect stunning.

Help needed: does anyone read greek?

2010-11-16T13:33:00.004-05:00

I'm almost finished with a new hand-drawn typeface I'm preparing for use, Mister Licky Chops. MLC includes a lot of eastern european and Greek glyphs and symbols. I don't know Greek so anyone who uses or reads it would be helpful to me to even out spacing, characters, etc.

You get what you pay for

2010-10-16T11:50:00.021-04:00

By now you may have heard about the hubub created by The Gap's redesigned logo. Companies redesign from time to time and it's generally a good idea to update branding, but what's not a good idea is how they went about it, by crowdsourcing and spec work - The Gap farmed the job out to anybody to do work for free in a competition, and the best work was selected and that person was (presumably) paid (I could only imagine what the worst of the submissions looked like!).

As a design professor at an art school, my colleagues and I get these requests frequently from freeloading local companies and businesses who want us to create some kind of graphic design competition among our students or to have them do it for them for free.

These businesses almost always can afford to get their work done the right way and pay a designer (or a student!) to do it, but they opt for the cheap. Maybe it's the economy - maybe it produces an opportunity to flex their lack of an ethical backbone because everybody's suffering financially? These people might be doing this in a good economy as well, but the episode with The Gap just headlines this type of frugality, but it is so often done by small businesses without the kind of ethical pressure and leadership as is had by a Fortune 500 company.

As a graphic artist the practice of spec work and crowdsourcing isn't good for me and my industry, but this particular example of crap design as a direct result of professional cheapness shows very clearly how it isn't good for the business as well. You really do get what you pay for.

Well, you may have heard that days ago they swapped it back for their old one. Good idea.

You suck at multitasking

2010-09-26T18:42:00.014-04:00

I know people who multitask a lot... I even know some people who feel that they feed off of multitasking. They relish the act of doing several things at once. In my opinion, most of these people are actually terrible at it, but I think they get a high from doing a lot of things at the same time. It's like tricking yourself into thinking that your busier than you are.

Think of it like packet switching. Packet switching is the technology that basically runs the internet. It allows information to be cut into little bits. That's why the web pages you browse form themselves in little jumps or, often in lagging stretches of time (...or sometimes create errors or they might not show up at all). Packet switching allows big things to be transmitted electronically in small bundles. Now when you browse information directly of off your hard drive it reads much faster than off of the internet. This is because it's not packet switching, it's getting one thing done at a time.

Well the news is out that multitasking is really a lie. Studies show that multitaskers lose 40% of productivity due to the time spent switching tasks. It really makes sense when you think about it; task switching is the time your brain takes, for example, to disengage from Task A, change gears, and engage into Task B. There's time lost there due to reorientation because each task uses different parts of your brain. A Stanford University study even goes so far as to show a 10 point drop in IQ due to distraction alone! Multitasking, you are 40% slower and 10 points dumber! Quit dickin' around on Facebook.

The Sure Sign of a Good Time

2010-09-20T16:51:00.009-04:00

Art Director: All this copy says is "here we go" what does that mean?
Creative Director: It means what is says, it's the sign of a good time.
Art Director: So... What kind of imagery do we want to convey? People... um, leaving? Things, like... going?
Creative Director: Gotta jet--meeting in five!
(Creative Director exits)
Art Director: Great. See what you can do with this, kid...
Graphic Artist: Awesome! Hey, what the fuck does Here We Go mean?
Art Director: Dunno. Make something and run it.
(Art Director leaves)
Graphic Artist: I'm gonna be famous!!!

In my kingdom this is awesome!

2010-07-30T11:34:00.008-04:00

Been so busy making graphic art lately that I haven't had any time to draw. I finally got around to photographing this pair of watercolors I recently finished, In my kingdom this is forbidden/In my kingdom this is awesome!

In my kingdom this is forbidden

In my kingdom this is awesome!

Graffiti

2010-06-20T18:21:00.011-04:00

On the way back from Tennessee, we stopped at Natural Bridge, in Virginia off I81.

A little history, Natural Bridge was once owned by Thomas Jefferson, and visited once by George Washington who apparently carved his initials into the rock face. Apparently this set a precedent so every next joker had to do it but I was impressed with the clarity and quality of the carvings we saw, you can see the date on some of them:

And here's a more contemporary attempt at immortality:

Back from vacation

2010-06-19T17:31:00.000-04:00

Been on vacation where we packed the dog up in the car and took a long road trip. Went to a friend's wedding in Waverly, NY, visited some artist friends in the area, hit Jamestown to visit family, then visited some artist friends in West Virginia, my sister in North Carolina and family in Tennessee.

I am proud to now say that the above plate is now mine, a piece by Eric Pardue, an old friend from Alfred University. It's titled The King Solves a Multiple Homicide. I covet it.

In Virginia we ended up staying in a Yogi Bear's Jellystone Park Campground for more money than I cared to shell out but it was late and we wanted to camp. The camp rangers yelled at us. It is my guess that they were crabby because it was company policy, closely adhering to the crabbiness of Ranger Smith from the cartoon.

Anyway we were happy to leave that place. More about what we did and what we saw later.

Nature's Herbal Therapies store

2010-05-26T13:54:00.005-04:00

The Nature's Herbal Therapies online store is up and running. They sell a fabulous selection of herbal supplements for health and dietary purposes and now they're available over the internet. I've used several of them and I can tell you that they work great and make you feel great too.

Caelum Gallery

2010-05-07T08:34:00.000-04:00

Opening at Caelum Gallery, NYC

Branch Creek

2010-04-18T16:14:00.006-04:00

Welcome to the beginning of a website for Branch Creek Construction, a green builder in Asheville, NC.

Branch Creek is Ben Martin, a licensed North Carolina General Contractor who has been building environmentally friendly, energy efficient, innovative quality projects in the Asheville, NC area since 2003.

My personal favorite part is the photograph of Ben, digging in his family's foundation at 6 years old.

The Tooth Watchers

2010-03-25T14:42:00.004-04:00

I've finally found a home for this painting - it's now up at Nail Creek Pub & Brewery.

It's called The Tooth Watchers (for those who can't see from this crappy photo that's a molar on the plate next to the fish).

Noodler's Ink

2010-03-14T15:02:00.004-04:00

Sketch for a larger drawing:

I just got a bottle of Noodler's Ink. Great stuff. This color's called "Beaver" (I say in my best Butthead voice)

Demonstration drawings for class

2010-03-14T13:57:00.010-04:00

Ink wash and watercolor instructional demos I created for Illustration and Methods & Media classes:

This is Steve, our model who alternately poses as a cowboy, a hunter on safari, a mafioso, and now this guy. You can't see it but his left hand is resting on a skull. Nudes are so boring...

Kim Rosen is coming

2010-03-10T09:56:00.006-05:00

Thursday March 11, illustrator Kim Rosen, artist lecture at 2:45, PrattMWP Auditorium

Internet Explorer and why can't we all just get along

2010-03-06T09:45:00.011-05:00

So Google no longer "supports" IE6 (Internet Explorer 6)... I no longer "support" bleached denim, but I forgot to put out a press release.

The fact of the matter remains that a lot of people still use it. Although designers love browsers like Firefox and Chrome, the rest of the world is still out there and they use IE. According to global statistics, IE6 is currently 9.79% of the browsing population, and a crushing 48.7% of the total uses IE (of any version).

Designers hate Microsoft because they own the majority of the customer base and they never play nice. Having one single way to browse the internet just isn't realistic. Disposable products that create a headache for designers and software developers is a fact of life for designing for the internet.

If you were to take a trip to, say, Mexico or Viet Nam, or almost anyplace that isn't as hip as the US or Europe--technologically speaking--you would find yourself in an internet cafe on a PC that runs Windows XP, browsing the internet using IE6. If you want to say "to hell with" the rest of the world, it's okay to have this attitute, but for designers that want to build for everyone, IE needs to be covered.

The internet is something that everybody needs to use. A monk using a 14.4 kbps modem in Tibet needs to research farming techniques, and that guy in front of you on the freeway driving erratically in the Escalade browsing on his Blackberry needs to dick around on Facebook.

Any book that doesn't fit on our bookshelf doesn't belong in the library

2010-02-03T16:34:00.022-05:00

This little guy is somebody I used to draw years ago. I decided to resurrect him for the sake of this stupid Apple/Adobe "format war". I used to call him the e-Jerk but maybe we can change his name to iJerk... He was a cartoon I made to represent the kind of tech geek who can be seen in line waiting for a pre-ordered Kindle or the latest iPhone. Don't get me wrong--I'm a geek myself but I don't drop my pants and buy anything just because it's new and shiny.

So to follow up on the format war post, Adobe's CTO is understandably pissed about Apple not supporting Flash...

We are ready to enable Flash in the browser on these devices if and when Apple chooses to allow that for its users, but to date we have not had the required cooperation from Apple to make this happen.

What gets my goat as a designer isn't that Flash is the king of all media and Apple should bow down to the king--it's not and honestly Flash is used in creating some really heinous stuff...

The real problem is that out there is a sea of Flash apps and games and websites. Some of them good and some of them bad, and not all of them--in fact very few of them are going to be updated just to make it convenient for iPhone and iPad users. This basically makes a whole sea of information inaccessible to these tools.

Apple seems to think it is redesigning the internet. In fact it is just censoring it. Organiziations like the W3C actually are redesigning it, and a new version of HTML code is on the way but could take years to finish. In the mean time we've got all this stuff we've made and to simply say that some of it is garbage because they didn't forsee the format war isn't responsible engineering; it's like saying that any book that doesn't fit on our bookshelf doesn't belong in the library.

I think The Onion quotes it best in this video: "I'll Buy Almost Anything If It's Shiny and Made By Apple" (warning this is video served up using Flash).

So why does this thing not work again?

2010-02-01T09:33:00.019-05:00

Apple's new iPad and of course the iPhone don't read Flash. Outside of the obvious loss to the consumer, this creates an incredible problem for web developers because developing something for both web and these is akin to designing a different website for each different browser. It's what we had to do back in the dark ages of the internet. Apple has always marketed themselves as the good guys, opposed to the great dark lords of Microsoft, etc. Now we find that they are the designer's bottleneck.

Apple has their apologists who basically say that Flash doesn't perform well on OSX so it shouldn't be there (and it doesn't perform well--my browser crashes frequently, and my MacBook heats up like crazy when I use Safari). Another lame argument is that Flash is proprietary software (Adobe owns Flash) and the web should be open, but Apple has never been about open to anything, and everything they do is proprietary. What the hell?

Personally as a designer I have always felt Flash was unnecessary. And it is; it can be a designer's crutch, but it can also be a wonderful tool that makes incredible things happen. To limit content because it doesn't work well on your little jerk box gyps the consumer.

Whether you like Flash or not, it's part of the neighborhood.

Everybody else uses it and to say that Apple doesn't support it because it doesn't work well with OSX or Safari, you need to improve your software, not make apologies for your substandard products. To say that Apple doesn't support it because it's proprietary is just laughable considering Apple's own closed door to open source (sure there's the iPhone Apps but these are only after Apple's approval). Until then iPod and iPad (and mac OSX users everywhere) will basically be second-class citizens of the internet.

So let's recap:

Flash doesn't work well on macs (this is bad and Apple doesn't seem to want to fix this and I doubt Adobe will either - so this ends in a stalemate)
Flash is proprietary software but everything Apple does is proprietary (argument is null)
Flash is a designer's crutch (true) but there are thousands of pages of Flash content already out there on the internet which are unreadable by iPhone, iPad, and it causes frequent crashes on macs (not good)

PS: this article on Webmonkey just in: Why Flash Isn’t Going Anywhere, iPad Be Damned explains the entire "format war" going on in detail.

Antisocial Behavior opening tonight 5pm

2010-01-22T12:58:00.009-05:00

Exhibit at PrattMWP School of Art Gallery with Alicia Boswell
January 22 - February 19
lecture and reception Friday January 22
lecture 4-5pm upstairs, reception 5-6pm in the gallery
(PrattMWP Studio Building on State Street between William and Henry Streets)

And stay off the damn internet in the car while you're at it

2010-01-11T17:24:00.009-05:00

Regarding the previous curmudgeonly complaint, I'm glad somebody's at least talking about this; internet in cars and user distraction while driving: Experts Debate Merits, Dangers Of Wi-Fi In Cars.

Heard it on NPR today. I know there's a huge financial incentive to put the internet into and onto every single thing there is but in cars is just dumb - and dangerous. It's bad enough that we get road rage but I have friends that get this cute little thing called email rage.

Wanted: dumbphone - must make calls and sometimes text - no apps necessary

2010-01-10T11:07:00.016-05:00

I remember the good old days of my Nokia 5160. I called it the "homeless basher" because I once used it to fight off a homeless person attacking me in Astoria, NY. My cell phones are always at least 2 years behind the times, but that's just because all I ever need is something to make calls and sometimes text message. Dropping it from a height of over 6 feet and being able to be certain that it will survive is more important to me than Twitter.

This is why I find the Google/iPhone battle for the hearts and minds of Americans amusing. As a web designer I also realize that I should probably keep my mouth shut or be seen as a hopeless misanthrope, but I'm one of those users who don't need to be online all day long, don't want to let people know my GPS and don't want to give away information to the network about who I'm talking to or what I'm doing.

The dirty little secret about 3G network phones is the amount of seemingly private information you give away just by owning one. Just like in Facebook, all of your information becomes public for the benefit of the network and cloud databases of who you are and your identification details. Despite all of the nifty apps and games and tools I would get with an iPhone or Google's Droid, I guess I just still value human interaction and real life over the internet and the idea of being attached at the hip to your army of devices...

And this is why I was so interested in this new website, the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine, a website that serves to detach you from Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites. They've already been served a Cease And Desist order from Facebook so they can't be all that bad. Your privacy is what you make it; just owning a cell phone and using social networking sets you up for identity theft. Being pissed about it afterward is just silly.

Dr. Keith Keenan, Holistic Natural Healing

2009-12-21T21:53:00.009-05:00

Finished the new website for Dr. Keith Keenan, a Central New York chiropractor and herbalist. I have been seeing Keith for about 6 months now. He's extremely gifted and his talent at healing is a rarity; one of my favorite clients, the kind that I myself would recommend regardless.

The Little Chimp Society

2009-12-17T14:48:00.000-05:00

Many thanks to the Little Chimp Society for posting my stuff!

Pharmaceutical woes

2009-12-17T14:05:00.009-05:00

This drawing is titled The battle of the generic versus the brand name, and it's sort of a personal narrative of some pharmaceutical woes I'm currently experiencing with my medication for epilepsy.

I hate the pharmaceutical industry. Years ago I did a brief stint as a freelance ad designer for an agency that did exclusively pharma, giving me a creepy window into their twisted world. Today I tell my students to work with a conscience, because it was my conscience that really bothered me when I took that job...

thanks to BOOOOOOOM!

2009-12-17T07:39:00.002-05:00

Jeff Hamada on his weblog BOOOOOOOM has created a huge group of like-minded artists. Kudos to you and thanks for looking.

A Skull A Day

2009-11-22T12:39:00.001-05:00

Many thanks to Skull-A-Day blog, for mentioning me. A great website I've been reading since I started drawing skulls.

sketchbook entry

2009-11-21T10:59:00.005-05:00

I've been using this horizontal watercolor paper sketchbook lately and drawing exclusively with a fountain pen.

if I could reach you I would slap you, part II

2009-11-15T11:24:00.009-05:00

Attention span memento mori

designing for the wave of eco-hype

2009-11-13T16:10:00.006-05:00

This only fuels my pursuit of dumb logos. ECOFONT: the green font with holes in it is some European graphic designer's dumb idea to try and ride the environmental wave of hype.

I wish that at the heart of this was a very clever joke, but somehow I don't think the designer was that smart.

SURLYCORP

2009-10-26T19:44:00.004-04:00

did this one as a demo on using layers with type.

5 minute magazine masthead

2009-10-19T18:11:00.005-04:00

did this one as a demo on using the blob brush in Illustrator.

2009-10-09T23:43:00.004-04:00

whenever the video game world is ready to listen to me...

another 5 minute logo

2009-10-01T17:08:00.005-04:00

It's not just a product, it's a lifestyle.

The Generation Gap?

2009-10-01T13:45:00.000-04:00

There are times I don't think there is a generation gap. Today teaching my Illustration class, one of my students commented on another student's sketch for a project: "Oh my god that looks like Bomberman!" What I found funny about it was that I thought exactly the same thing even before she said it.

These are only a few from my treasure trove of old video games that I keep next to my desk in my design studio (Laticia calls it the Graphic Design Cave). They're a distraction for me between projects or just if I need to get my face out of web design for a few.

Sure you may think you young punks these days are good at Halo? But how about some Golden Axe whoopass? Thought not...

the 5 minute logo design

2009-10-01T12:39:00.011-04:00

I've done a few of these now; here's my logo for the product Dog Barf. I do these in under 5 minutes and just knock it out, however stupid and the stupider the better. Stupid is Business and Business is Fine. If you just happen to have a product called Dog Barf, we should talk...

make yourself useful...

2009-09-09T13:36:00.028-04:00

9-9-9. I totally forgot about this until my friends from my previous employment at Sega contacted me about a party in SF I will sadly have to miss; the 10 year anniversary of the Sega Dreamcast, launched on 9-9-99. (here's a link to one of their commercials at the time). It was the height of the tech bubble and Sega was riding a mega wave of hype. Money was being thrown around like I had never seen it. Massive parties with cocktails, laser light shows, strippers dressed in kinky boots and miniskirts with Sonic the Hedgehog and the whole crew dancing to awful thumping club music...

But the hype of the launch didn't last. The console battle against the Playstation 2 eventually lost and despite a kickass list of great games nobody every played (Jet Grind Radio, Crazy Taxi, Rez, Chu Chu Rocket, Shenmue, really, the list is huge...). Eventually the Dreamcast ended up in the Vault of Deceased Video Game Consoles along with the Atari 2600, Colecovision, Sega Genesis and Nintendo Entertainment Systems.

After the crash we suffered wave upon wave of layoffs. Sega stopped making consoles and focused on games (which was smart), but every 6 months there was the paranoia of losing your job hanging over our heads due to downsizing. Jobs were deleted and shifted so much it's amazing anything got published. Although I loved working at Sega this made it extremely difficult to work there and maintain sanity. It was a blast--I was fired twice and hired back the next week both times. It was an excellent learning experience but I finally left of my own accord because I decided to go to grad school. Most of the very talented people I worked with eventually moved on as well; Sega wasn't exactly a sinking ship, but an eternally leaky one with a tendency to hire CEOs who would shoot holes in the hull. Honestly I don't know how I survived there as long as I did, but a word of wisdom at any job:

make yourself useful.

donation to CHAIRity 2009

2009-09-09T13:21:00.005-04:00

I pulled this painting out of a backlog of old canvases from grad school. I forgot how much I liked it.

I created it after being blown away by looking at a book of California painter John Register's incredible work. Laticia and I both like it because it has this vacant, almost sad presence of people, but the most beautiful parts are the restaurant and the items on the table.

I'm donating it to Sculpture Space's CHAIRity Auction, this Saturday September 12th.

If I could reach you I would slap you

2009-08-23T15:48:00.007-04:00

finally finished...

I'm working on a process document to display the painting after every coat. I took photos after each session so I'll be able to show it in some sort of animation.

Chimp Fingers 2.0

2009-08-20T18:56:00.000-04:00

I've only recently become aware that the cheesy buttons I complained about had become such an icon that they're even called "Web 2.0 Buttons". Ridiculous for me to assume that as the web gets better, design gets better. Outside of using them for browsing from phones, "Web 2.0 Buttons" only makes designs look like something a 6-year old should be using.

I made these for free at a website with free online glass button generator and these are far from the best out there. There are plenty of others; pay for a software tool or Paypal download a button and you'll get the cool reflective pool effects you'll see in Apple products. Da Button Factory sounds promising... Have a blast!

Marketing The Man vs. Reality, Part 2

2009-08-03T19:11:00.011-04:00

Regarding my previous post of the same name, I don't think it's fair to simply be cynical about bad advertising photography of people, but what does good advertising photography of people look like without all the cheesy idealization?

In times of great wealth, the advertising tends to use idealized images of people. The 1950s were perhaps the pinnacle of this, using illustrations rather than photographs of people in ads. But how do you illustrate the hard times? I can think of no better example than the photography of the New Deal. What really comes out of that period isn't the manufactured glitz of escapist Hollywood movies, but the grit and originality of individuals featured by journalistic photographers like Dorothea Lange, Peter Percupu and Lewis Hine.

The government, through various channels and departments like the Farm Security Administration and the Works Progress Administration, hired these photographers as journalists to go into towns and villages across the country documenting the people they met. It was a sort of "man on the street" view of the era after the Great Depression.

These programs were mostly a publicity project in support of relief programs like welfare, unemployment, encouraging laws on child labor and ending rural poverty. Many of these programs worked, considering how many more laws and civil services we have today, and I'm sure a part of it is due to Washington visually coming to grips with the public as it looked; gritty and real but full of character.

Considering our current economic situation, I often wonder why we are always forced to look at models instead of real people in advertising photography.

photo credits:

Peter Percupu, "Children of Miners, March 19, 1937", National Archives
Dorothea Lange, "Mrs. Hull, in one-room basement dugout home. Dead Ox Flat, Malheur County, Oregon", National Archives
Peter Percupu, "Roumanian miner, unemployed, known in Scott's Run as 'Ground Hog'. March 19, 1937", National Archives
Lewis Hine, "Waiting for a job on a park bench in New York City, 1920", National Archives

New painting in progress

2009-07-29T17:51:00.003-04:00

It's titled If I could reach you I would slap you. In process--layers upon layers of glazing yet to go.

As life is metaphorically, you can always see Skeletor in the background...

Marketing The Man vs Reality

2009-07-22T15:40:00.011-04:00

Personally I can think of few ways to fuck up a design worse than using stock photography of people. Nothing wrong with stock--there's plenty of great photographers out there doing that sort of stuff, and doing it well, but the most pedestrian use of stock photography has a tendency to psychologically suggest turning your brain off and blindly trusting the business being represented.

The end effect of that is that It's something everyone else sees; something everyone gets--like the flu. Everyone gets the same shitty customer service on the end of that phone, and you're no different. Everyone else is happy so you should be too. Real individuals don't work here, only visually perfect models with whitened teeth. Bottom line: what you see isn't original, so the business is unoriginal.

That bathing suit model wouldn't talk to you anyway... Ladies: that man with the perfect abs is gay... That cute elderly couple are too busy traveling, tracking down bargains on pharmaceuticals across the border to stop and talk to you... Those rosy-cheeked children are inaccessible due to their creepy overprotective parents who keep them on a steady schedule of photo shoots and diets, hoping for a chance at the big-time...

On the other hand, an inspired viewer feels special, like they are experiencing something original and making an informed decision based on the real world, not on a generic photo of physically perfect people provided to you by The Man--the last thing people trust is The Man. You remember The Man, right? If you're old enough you do.

That confident viewer is the one who feels like they're getting The Real Deal. By providing original imagery, you provide an original experience. Humans are not these perfect creatures--they have personalities. If you want to instill confidence, show a piece of something real.

The bottom line: original art is the way to provide that original experience. You'll get that by using artwork of real people, real customers, real employees who work at your business, not the genetically perfect people happy in their plastic bubble of advertising.

Twisted Spurs

2009-07-13T16:52:00.010-04:00

I've got a couple of pieces up at K Space Contemporary in Corpus Christi, TX. It's a cowboy-themed exhibit called Twisted Spurs. I started these cowboy army figure drawings and paintings a few years back realizing they were a great way to simplify a narrative without using the figure.

We got fucked-up and bent our ploughshares back into swords.

Circle the wagons (and by wagons I mean pills, yo)

You can see those and many more in the gallery section of my website.

the Nail Creek sign is up

2009-07-08T10:45:00.011-04:00

After expanding their deck outside the Nail Creek Pub and Brewery, they've installed my sign.

They've done a brilliant job with the bar. Nothing wrong with Utica Club but they've got great beer and I'm thrilled that they've recently added an open Irish music jam on Tuesday nights. Here's Chris, the bar's owner.

And Tracy, co-owner and chef.

The sign looks great! Plan is to add a light which should be nice at night. I'll post photos when they get that finished.

The Bad Client & The Bad Designer

2009-06-30T10:07:00.014-04:00

In creative work we all encounter the client who wants to shoot themselves in the foot. I can think of many botched projects in my past happening because the client wants to maintain the status of the designer or sees themselves as the creative expert (despite the fact that they are hiring you to be this...). This always ends up to awkward effects, where the product ends up being a shadow of what it could be due to the push and pull of what they think is best; it ultimately undermines the effectiveness of the product. Whether this person is just a micro-manager or is afraid or is overprotective of the project, this attitude is your problem to solve. This is The Bad Client.

Now don't get me wrong; every client has taste and creative needs and they need to have them realized. Their ideas might not parallel yours but they are as valid and more important than your ideas. The client deserves the best of any chance at improving their business because they came to you. The designer that ignores this is doing the opposite of the above, creating a product without the input of the client's specific needs. This is the designer who is shooting their own self in the foot and they will one day (rightly) find themselves without clients because word passes along that they are a creative Diva. This person might be better off as a fine artist who creates insular work about their own lives; instead of hiring an expert the client is hiring a problem. This is The Bad Designer.

As far as clients go I realize that I have been blessed by those of the smartest sort; clients who make the decision to hire the professional to be the expert. This is done through good communication, diplomacy, understanding, and on the designer's part, convincing the client that you are the creative expert and they would be better-off going to you than to some generic spec work source.

Well, thank you.

Madness

2009-06-17T14:45:00.012-04:00

It's a beautiful day out but I'm at home working. It's fun though--today it's a promotional illustration for a theater production. Using the concept of a pulp smut novel--I love pulp illustration.

I used myself as a model. Ink on watercolor paper. Laticia asks me: "so it's just a floating head?".

Hells yeah its a floating head! And when did floating heads stop being cool?

Egyptian keg party of the dead

2009-06-08T10:53:00.016-04:00

Following the Assyrian posting last week I figured I'd post about the Egyptian Book of the Dead. It's one of my favorite historical subjects regarding both illustration and graphic design and I've got a great full color oversized book of the Papyrus of Ani that I've had for years.

Produced during the era of the New Kingdom (1570–1070 BC), The EBOTD is a document that was buried with its owner giving them instructions on how to live in the afterlife. The actual title is translated as The Book of Going Forth By Day. I wish the instructional manual to my camera was this cool (and this clear). It starts under the assumption that the user knows nothing, giving directions on not to eat your own feces and not to turn yourself upside down among other odd things. Instructions vary from practical instructions on how to make beer, to how to confront the various deities and monsters you will meet in your journey to the other side of the river (I'm sure drinking beer helps).

As a kid I loved the book because parts of it looked like some kind of crazy party. The papyrus is owned by the British Museum along with an extensive collection of Egyptian history. I'd like to see it in person some day.

The Papyrus of Ani is one of the most well-illustrated and well-preserved versions of the Book of Going Forth By Day. The majority of these books were created in workshops where artists and scribes would patch together the pieces and the name of the owner would be added in later. It is an extraordinary historical justice to the designers, that in retrospect the books are individually named after the artist and not the owner or client.

Hittite Hot-Shots

2009-06-03T17:52:00.014-04:00

Lately I've been reading and researching the history of text and writing. The other day I took some photos from the Brooklyn Museum's small but incredible Assyrian collection seen below:

These huge stone tablets date from about 800-900 BC. They illustrate winged genies plucking fruit of some sort.

They are inscribed using cuneiform, characters created using a triangular chisel tool on stone or clay. Cuneiform is a character developed after pictograms (like Egyptian heiroglyphs). It was used to write the Hittite language.

Due to their age, however they are in the latest era of cuneiform characters, created well after languages like Aramaic, Phoenician, Hebrew and Greek were worked into more modern alphabets. This makes them somewhat of a late historical throwback to an earlier age (its actually called Neo-Assyrian: cuneiform was first used about 3500 BC, about the same time as the development of heiroglyphs).

They look much older than they actually are, but the graphic designers creating them used some wonderful layering techniques, writing on top of the images, blending text with sculpture.

I love this exhibit and they are freekin' sweet.

New camera, photos for a client

2009-05-20T20:30:00.011-04:00

It's been a couple years I've been promising myself I'd buy a digital SLR and I finally indulged myself. I've been needing it more and more lately; here are some photos from an on-site photo shoot for a client.

Delicious, delicious client...

...and I got to eat the food!

I'm not sure that I would thrust my fist in the air, devil horns and all yelling "woohoo being a graphic designer rocks!" but there is the occasion that it pays off in ways I didn't initially perceive.

Social Networking and Marketing

2009-05-11T11:38:00.014-04:00

I'm in the particular situation of being a web designer and hating the internet (well sort of...). Despite the wonderful technological advancements of social networking, I also enjoy my privacy. I also happen to use applications like Facebook for the sole purpose of connecting to friends, but without any of the bells and whistles. Unfortunately this is a contradiction.

Those bells and whistles? The games, the applications asking you for your top 5 anything, lists of favorite things and you can elect to like, linking you to places, objects, things, products or people. They all ask you to "Allow Access" when you sign into them. LivingSocial is one of those apps that collects this data on you.

When you input data into any of these apps, your user ID in the database is edited to include new information. Your ID can then be tagged as liking Mountain Dew or can include a list of your top 5 celebrities and this information is used to market specific information to you. A company called Colligent is among a group of companies that use this information, and link what you like or associate yourself with to companies that want to profit off of this.

Just like the way that 3G phones can be used to find the user's physical location on the street, now you can be located in a marketing database; now your name, address, email and god-knows-what-else can be identified with Mountain Dew, so that puts you in an entire range of users who would be best suited for ads, magazines, phone calls, credit cards, and whatever the users of these databases need from you. Wired recently published an article duly titled Your Facebook Profile Makes Marketers Dreams Come True.

How can you design a website that can be used and can be useful but doesn't use the user? It's easy. Web 1.0 did this quite well but didn't manage to profit off of it; the old model of clickthroughs or pageviews off web banners didn't pay the bills. Users went to the websites and got what they needed and it was easy to ignore the ads.

Web 2.0 works because it found a way to survive with the advertisers; keep the users there, collect data on them and advertise to them while they are busy dicking around on the internet.

Lilacs

2009-05-11T10:24:00.006-04:00

The lilac blossoms are back. They smell great and our house is surrounded by them. We've been pruning and thinning them so they don't turn into a nightmare. Once a year they're genuinely wonderful to live with.

This year I'm really into gardening. Last year we had a victory garden in the back yard, and this year I'm challenging myself to have even better yield than last year. I'm tired of paying for expensive greens at the supermarket and we've got the space for it. Laticia's finishing up school, I'm tilling and planting. I'll be sure to keep you posted on what's growing.

Time is Hella Tight

2009-05-10T10:11:00.001-04:00

I dislike the end of the semester when everyone in academia freaks out--they're either anxious about their vacations or grades, or worse their contracts.

Right around now I just try and focus on breathing and what's in front of me.

Anyway, here's some NYC scrawl for you to enjoy...

Global light sources

2009-05-04T09:56:00.005-04:00

Super busy this week but here's some more random photos taken recently...

Final coat of varnish on the Nail Creek Pub sign

2009-04-29T16:35:00.005-04:00

I've been working on this traditional English pub sign for months now. It's an oil painting on thick plywood. I spent about a month painting it and a couple drying (in retrospect I wouldn't do something like this in oils again). It's down to the last coat of marine varnish before this gets put into action.

The stuff has a slight yellowing effect due to the UV blocker, but it makes for a slick surface. I'm hoping that a thick coat of this stuff will endure the Utica winter and enough of it on there so the inevitable tagging can be removed without damage to the painting.

Chris, the bar's owner doesn't seem to think such a dreadful thing as vandalism would happen and I'm surprised considering he's from Utica... Check out the Nail Creek Pub at nailcreekpub.com

Ill Logic

2009-04-27T17:21:00.007-04:00

When I program a web page or an application I feel a connection to the logic and the math, which can only be appreciated by computer nerds (such as myself). I have been thinking about programming and typography lately so I created a set of these Ill Logic pieces which are dual and triple narratives formed from web programming logic (PHP).

It's geeky I know but considering this stuff runs everything we look at on the internet, I can't help but think programming languages are an overlooked form of language in the broader sense. Anyway, here's a link to 4 of them on my website.

What I saw last time I was in Brooklyn

2009-04-26T15:22:00.001-04:00

Tim O'Reilly interview

2009-04-21T22:25:00.005-04:00

I watched this interview twice and took notes. It really makes sense and puts Web 2.0 into perspective, and in addition it made me not hate Twitter and that's a miracle by itself...

Control Freak

2009-04-20T21:09:00.002-04:00

I started a series of drawings a few years ago in California (while working for Sega) called Control Freak, obsessing over video game controls and people's hands. I have been continuing these lately in the format of giant 4 foot tall charcoal drawings:

You can see more here

Awesomeness at the Natural History Museum

2009-04-14T21:03:00.007-04:00

Got some cool and mysterious photos

"Sup? Mammoth for dinner? Cool."

Chimp Fingers and the Internet

2009-04-02T13:05:00.010-04:00

I'm a Luddite and I don't think that the web design industry has enough of us among its ranks. And why should it? Designers need to be reactive to technology. But I don't own an iPhone and I don't want the internet to look like one.

The early accessibility of images on the internet of the 1990s inevitably created a desperate need for the 3D button to show us the way to go in the 2D world of a computer monitor. Very photoshoppy, but we knew they worked because they looked like real world buttons. These eventually went away with the onset of CSS and an increasing ability to utilize text links in a button-like fashion.

Apple went a step further enforced this by standardizing the 3D button in OSX. This basically made all browsers on Macs visualize form buttons as crystalline kitchy dewdrops with a drop shadow. I've always hated them but they're a fact of life for Apple users so I got over it.

With the iPhone, they're back. Of course with the iPhone they have a purpose; iPhone users' fingers are the tools used to find things and fingers are clumsy so the design fits the form. That's fine but I hate it when designers assume everything needs to look and act like their favorite gadget.

It would be a mistake to say that the Pepsi website is a good design—its Flash garbage, and of course it is; it's Pepsi! Designing in Flash so users can experience the same design and reactivity of an iPhone is a step back in time, like when Flash was used to create 'intro pages' to websites featuring video and flying type. Here's a link to a great one. Similarly the Pepsi website is audio abuse to anyone who visits the site (assuming they get over the massive download time. It goes back to the idea of doing something because you can do it, not because it's good design.

But I digress... when I discuss the difference between using the internet and dickin' around on the internet, websites like Pepsi's can help to illustrate this. But computer-based users don't have chimp fingers and shouldn't be treated like chimps.