New Word Illustrations Project

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So here are some new Illustrations I did for a personal project. I made the image of Charles Bukowski using the text from one of his best poems, "The Genius if the Crowd".

The other is the one and only Bob Dylan made out of lyrics form "Like Rolling Stone" and if you don't know the lyrics well, you have bigger problems.

Shaping all the text and sizing it to fit crashed Photoshop and Illustrator about 10 millions times. Printed out at 24x17 these look amazing I must add.

Hope you like.

The Genius Of The Crowd Charles Bukowski

there is enough treachery, hatred violence absurdity in the average
human being to supply any given army on any given day

and the best at murder are those who preach against it
and the best at hate are those who preach love
and the best at war finally are those who preach peace

those who preach god, need god
those who preach peace do not have peace
those who preach peace do not have love

beware the preachers
beware the knowers
beware those who are always reading books
beware those who either detest poverty
or are proud of it
beware those quick to praise
for they need praise in return
beware those who are quick to censor
they are afraid of what they do not know
beware those who seek constant crowds for
they are nothing alone
beware the average man the average woman
beware their love, their love is average
seeks average

but there is genius in their hatred
there is enough genius in their hatred to kill you
to kill anybody
not wanting solitude
not understanding solitude
they will attempt to destroy anything
that differs from their own
not being able to create art
they will not understand art
they will consider their failure as creators
only as a failure of the world
not being able to love fully
they will believe your love incomplete
and then they will hate you
and their hatred will be perfect

like a shining diamond
like a knife
like a mountain
like a tiger
like hemlock

their finest art

Dave Eggers on Print

On The Media: Transcript of "Panoramic View" (April 16, 2010)

DAVE EGGERS: For me, I don't know what I would do if I didn't have two, three daily papers a day to read. I don't want to read online. I don't want to wake up and look at a screen. I feel like, you know, as a society, we try to put everything on that same goddamn screen. And pretty soon we're going to be eating on the screen or like -

[AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]

- making love through the screen. It’s just sort of like why does everything have to be on a screen?

You know, there’s been some study that was quoted in one of our panels that said that even how we read our blood pressure is different when we read on print than when we read online. I think that it’s too exciting and distracting online. There’s always some button that wants you to click to cat porn, you know, online.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]

It’s just like you’re trying to read some article and it’s flashing and it’s telling you to go somewhere else.

[LAUGHS] I like the curatorial, the calmness, the authority of a daily paper. But I do think that it’s a time to make the paper form more robust and more surprising and beautiful and expansive. People still want to read long form literary journals and nonfiction, etc., and so why can't the print medium do that and be that home and leave the Internet to do the more quick thinking and quick reacting things?

I tend to agree. The internet is not for deep content. It's a shallow quick fix in comparison.

Music to drive you mad.

The centuries-old struggle to play in tune. - By Jan Swafford - Slate Magazine

The gods are laughing at their little joke on musicians. When it comes to the tuning of instruments, especially keyboards and fretted instruments, nature drops a giant hairball in our path. Here's a short course on the arcana of tuning. It will take us to the meaning of a celebrated collection of keyboard pieces: J. S. Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier, humankind's greatest musical riposte to the laughter of the gods.

In dealing with tuning, there are two main terms to know. One is interval. It means the distance between notes. The basic science of intervals was laid out in ancient Greece, perhaps first by the mathematician Pythagoras. The first notes of the C major scale are C, D, E, F, and G. The note E is the third note up from C, so the interval C-E is a third. The note G is five notes up, so C-G is a fifth. So musical intervals run second, third, fourth, fifth, and so on. (Some intervals can be major, like F to A, or minor, like F to A flat.)

Beacon Rock Hike

[gallery link="file" columns="2"] Went for a hike at Beacon Rock this weekend. Nice easy hike with some amazing views. You would have to work hard to take a bad photo so there are a few more here.

Copy Paste copy paste copy copy

Similarities - a set on Flickr

Albert Einstein once said, “The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The pairs of images in this "Similarities" set are similar visually in one way or another. They are presented without judgement as to the motives of their creators. The viewers of the pieces can form their own opinion(s) about what they see.

Recent Design work

[gallery link="file" columns="2"] So here are some recent Design projects I have been working on. Can't post a lot of the Photo Illustration work due to legal stuffs but this I can post.

Very happy with the retro feel of the Barrio Tiger artwork. It is going to be nice to see that as actual real deal album art work. Not a CD, not download, but a real record. The Ditchweed sticker was fun because it's such a strong bright typographic image that still feel a bit country.

Fun stuff.

Why the office is anti work.

Why you can't work at work.

With its constant commotion, unnecessary meetings, and infuriating wastes of time, the modern workplace makes us all work longer, less focused hours. Jason Fried explains how we can change all of this.

After more then a few years in offices I can back this up 100%. Now that everything we do is over the internet we get so much more done it's silly.

Good lord, what a thought...

I'm quitting the Internet. Will I be liberated or left behind? (1) - By James Sturm - Slate Magazine

Over the last several years, the Internet has evolved from being a distraction to something that feels more sinister. Even when I am away from the computer I am aware that I AM AWAY FROM MY COMPUTER and am scheming about how to GET BACK ON THE COMPUTER. I've tried various strategies to limit my time online: leaving my laptop at my studio when I go home, leaving it at home when I go to my studio, a Saturday moratorium on usage. But nothing has worked for long. More and more hours of my life evaporate in front of YouTube. Supposedly addiction isn't a moral failing, but it feels as if it is.

I would last two days before my life crashed around me.

The rise of The Poison Picture

Fair Trade Photographer: Microstock: why would a reputable company do this to themselves?

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, this one has a lot to say. It says microstock. It says perfect-people perfect-world lowest-common-denominator cookie-cutter pile-them-high sell-them-cheap image.

Why would a reputable company want to be associated with those words?

And from the comments:

This is another technology game-changer... it is always impossible to know what will come along and how it may turn an industry on it's head. This is something that I believe will turn microstock on its head and put it in its place - which is on the websites of micro-companies and fly-by-nighters, and not on the website of any company which values its image.

Picture buyers (and designers) who think they can get away with using microstock images have now got to contend with the fact that with one click of their mouse, anyone can find many many examples of the same image being used across the web. And that just makes it far too easy for a company's reputation to be ridiculed.

Major corporations are already aware of this and that is why you will no longer find microstock images on their websites.

Say hello to the era of the Poisonous Picture....

Good write up if you ever have to sell a better image to a client.

Thanks Charlie!

Puppet warp in CS5

Interesting to see how this works with high resolution files. Content Aware Scale introduces way to much artifacting so I have no faith in Content Aware Fill. This might be useful though.

On a side note, how long till we have a icon which denotes a picture as a Illustration versus and real Optical Photograph?

Print is dead, long live Print.

Popular Science+ – Blog – BERG

Working with the Popular Science team and their editorial has been wonderful, and we’ve been working together to re-imagine the form of magazines. Art direction for print is so much about composition. There are a 1,000 tiny tweaks to tune a page to get it to really sing. But what does layout mean when readers can make the text disappear, when the images move across one another, and the page itself changes shape as the iPad rotates?

We discovered safe areas. We found little games to play with the reader, having them assemble infographics in the act of scrolling, and making pages that span multiple panes, only revealing themselves when the reader does a double-finger swipe to zoom across them.

Bad content will not work in this context. I think we may be able to merge what was great about old media, great art, design and well written content with the instant always on internet culture.Very interesting to see how this plays out.