Tortured Artist Incident #1 Zillion-and-4

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12 October 2004
2 min read
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In Design
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I’m working on some artwork for our company’s christmas party invite. The theme is winter wonder land, we’ve hired some large fluffy polar bear cut outs (growly bears) for decoration and I though the invite should therefore feature a polar bear.

I opted for a very deceptively classy smooth Arctic background with stars, two scripty fonts, some cartoony penguins (think Japanese character stationery), dangling from and icy curly glacier with a polar bear trying to reach them so he can eat them. The polar bear is also thinking about a roast chicken as he is trying to eat the penguins.

I have received the following criticisms from my party organising colleagues before sending it out to the company.

1. The polar bear is too fierce/aggressive. Can you at least take off his claws?

How many friendly, cuddly polar bears without claws have you met?

2. I don’t get why the polar bear is thinking about chicken.

Have you been watching cartoons over the past 50 years? Man it’s a classic toon cliché!

3. But the fierce polar bear doesn’t go with the style and isn’t what the theme is about.

Obviously very new to the use of contradiction as humour.

Nothing has been said about my Santa’s sweatshop sign depicting a swoosh logo in candy stripes. I guess that one hasn’t hit the radar yet.

Maybe I’m being over protective, or these subtle things are too subtle.

GRRRRRR!!

Before:

After:

Dude Where’s my CPU?

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1 September 2004
1 min read
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New iMac G5 unveiled

But where’s the cpu? Dude it’s in the screen.

Wow.

Not too keen on the slot loading optical drive, but wow, that’s one hell of a design. Don’t know how effective the cooling will be, some Apple rumour sites have been speculating about cooling probs being a reason for it’s delayed release. But that’s probably me being too picky or paranoid.

Love that crisp turquoisey-ceraulean-blue Apple are using in their graphics these days. Apple’s visual identity evolves as their products evolve, but that’s another soapboxy design entry for later.

New G5: Week 1

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27 August 2004
6 min read
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In Technology
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Work replaced my cruddy windows box for a G5 with a 20 inch cinema display. Now this is a design machine! It’s whisper quite, very stable going between Photoshop and Illustrator and just the usual mac gorgeousness encased in aluminium. This machine makes other things possible that my old one had either extreme difficulty or impossibility doing. For instance, right now, I am working on a 14 MB file (not huge), in Photoshop, going between my text editor, (BBedit), FTP client (Rbrowser Lite), Mail, iCal, Safari, IE 5.2 and drumroll… listening to a CD in iTunes! Yep, I couldn’t have the equivalent apps open at once while listening to a CD on my old machine, Photoshop would slow up, screen might not render terribly fast. But not now, I can listen to Red Hot Chili Peppers — Live in Hyde Park (highly reccomended) and go about my usual work stuff no probs!

My other annoyance was the colour, screen, graphics card and their interaction or lack thereof, with graphics apps. Sometimes 1px wide vertical lines would appear as two even though I new this was not so. I couldn’t get the geometry totally right either. Colour calibration was not fun on previous set up, despite having Illustrator and Photoshop set up to use the Adobe 1998 RGB profile. If I had to take screen shots, I had to do this weird song and dance, converting everything from my monitor colour space to what I wanted, to back again! Go figure! Quite often saving for web produced weird results, but resaving it fixed it. Go figure! Didn’t quite help when two geeks from work gave it a shot either. They thought they new a little about colour management. Go figure!

Such a grand screen demands a grand desktop. I haven chosen the puprle spookiness of Ravenswood Manor from pixelhuset.

The screen is gorgeous! It even comes with it’s own aluminium grey coloured cleaning cloth! How cool is that! The clarity and colour is in-fucking-credible! And the wide screen format is equally useful, I can have my psd file with my code window side by side, or a browser window. Or whatever. It’s fan-bloody-tastic! Of course Expose also makes light work of finding the appropriate document.

As I have a snazzy graphics tablet, this means I can use Inkwell to draw or write anywhere on the screen and use it in other apps as I see fit. Nice. I need to play around with it a bit more, but still nice. I haven’t played around with Fontbook as much as I’d like to, but I love what I see so far. A useless but human detail I like is in the login screen, if you enter your details incorrectly it shakes the login panel left to right like it’s saying, uh-uh! Nope!. Go on all you Panther (10.3.5) users, try it. I’ve been logging in wrong on purpose almost every morning just to see it!

Okay not so crash hot stuff: white mouse and keyboard. I am a grot. It’s already dirty. The tower is heavy I can’t lift it. Alright that’s to be expected.

Now I need some accessories: some speakers, headphones, keyboard cover might be an option. A proper graphics tablet cover would also be nice come to think of it.

How to Get a Mac When You’re Surrounded by Windows

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27 August 2004
3 min read
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In Design, Technology
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1. Rob bank
2. Buy mac

Or you can just rob a mac store up to you.

Or you can read on to see what I did.

I prefer macs. I’m a designer/illustrator, who can code without Dreamweaver. I’m an odd breed (job hunting and high school taught me that). I rarely use office apps, I spend my working days in Photoshop and/or Illustrator and/or Flash with a text editor, some browsers and an FTP app. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not gonna throw a tanty and demand a Mac, I’ve worked at companies with Windows machines, but I prefer the company of macs.

As a web-based software-ish travel company, the office is of course mainly Windows boxes except for the developers and some of our production team with Linux, I think there’s some Sun servers etc. The office is very anti-mac, so getting me a mac was looking impossible. We’ve got an OLD iMac for testing, but it’s hardly a design machine.

One of the previous designers, (now a project manager), used to use a mac at work, but was replaced with a windows machine for cost reasons I think. This too was indeed a strike against me getting a mac. It was looking pretty bleak, until we employed a technical documentation guy, Vergil. He and his 12 inch Powerbook G4 have been a here about 8 months and this seems to have added more credibility to the mac in the eyes of the office.

I casually said that I would like a mac at an office challenges day, (meetings where we got to make suggestions to improve working conditions and processes). This seemed to have sown the seed in our finance guy’s head.

Design for Chunks

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17 August 2004
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Design for chunks competition, in partnership with Virgin Atlantic.

What a fantastic comp! You design a sick bag, you are one of the lucky 20 winners, Virgin Atlantic print them and passsengers throw up in it! Fan-bloody-tastic!

Needless to say the site is full of double entendres of the vomity kind. I love this sentence in the copyright info:

Isn’t the blatant commercial exploitation of real talent enough to make any true aesthete sick?

Now for something truely sick, the Disney Dream Desk.

Colorcell

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10 August 2004
1 min read
2 Comments
In Art
880 views

Check it out I’ve just created my own living colour cell over at Colorcell.
It’s an interesting site where you can create colour palettes called cells containing 4 colours. People vote for their favourite cells and you can view stats like the most popular cell for the day etc. Cells are ranked and are either alive and well in the living space, or dead in the cemetery. Of course there are only 100 spaces in the living space so it’s a fight for survival.
That’s the basic jist of the site. There’s more to it and it’s not unlike one of those digital pet things but not annoying.
Let’s see how long it takes for my cell to die. With any luck it’ll live on in the hall of fame.

Friday Apple Stuff

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6 August 2004
2 min read
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In Art, Entertainment, Technology
672 views

Ahh. It’s Friday.

Bono Moves to Preempt Thieves

Yep, U2’s new album Vertigo, due out in November, was stolen at a photo shoot. The guys are gonna release it to the iTunes music stores if it turns up online elsewhere, like on file-sharing networks. And I’m guessing if they can find it online too. Hmm…

Apple has taken the G4 powermacs off the web store. Yeah you can still check out their specs and whathave you, but click on the buy now graphic. I defy you to purchase one on this site, you just can’t. This means that work will now be purchasing me a G5 instead! (insert numerous sarcastic damnings of all sorts).

Next week will go down in history as the only one where I actually want to go to work. This one was the one I least wanted to go back to work as I spent the previous week doing life drawing and painting classes at The Rocks.

And finally, checkout how mac fans are showing their love ‘n’ support for Steve Jobs.

How many other CEOs of other huge techy companies spark such a public response?

Telstra Art Competition

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5 August 2004
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Telstra ‘Paint a Payphone’ Art Competition
Telstra are running a competition, the winner will get their artwork displayed on selected Telstra payphones across Australia, and at the Museum of Contemporary Art.
Prizes are very encouraging, with an iBook pack for 17s and under, and 10,000 bucks for 18s and older.
I wonder if this is one of those things that crap graffiti taggers* shun because it’s legitimate? I can see it now, the sensitive graffiti artist in the crap tagger posse enters comp with a gorgeous design, wins and gets thrown out of said posse for doing something other than write a bad alias illegibly.
* I am aware that graffiti art is not all people essentially lifting their leg and marking their territory. This stuff, I think, is crap. There is plenty of fantastic graffiti out there, including tags that are meticulously executed, with more attention to typography than a lot of designed stuff.

Jasper aka Grasshopper

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3 August 2004
1 min read
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In Wildlife
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My cat has the power of Mr Miyagi or some other karate dude who can break thick planks of wood with their head. On sunday evening Jasper was running about in super-hyper-kitty-mode. Mum was opening a cupboard door made of 1/2 inch thick tasmanian oak or something, and Jasper just ran straight through it splitting the wood in twain!

I could totally understand if he broke it off its hinges, but no, he actually split the wood. Jasper is a little over a year old so he’s still a littlish cat, but clearly there is martial artistry in his blood.

I might change his name to Grasshopper.

Get Well Steve

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2 August 2004
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Apple’s Jobs has cancer surgery

Poor Steve. At least they found the tumour in time by the looks of things, and he’ll be back in time to see the new iMac G5 line rolled out. All black turtle neck sweaters are to be rolled down at half mast.

On a brighter note, new iPods. Yep new click wheel, bigger capacities, longer battery life and cheaper.

On a selfish note, work has given the go ahead to buy me a mac, W00T! It aint a G5 like my first preference, but hey a dual 1.25Ghz G4 with 20″ Apple Cinema Display is not to be snezzed at, especially the monitor, very happy about the monitor (insert happy dance with a couple’o cart wheels*).

*cart wheels and dancing may not actually take place.

ComiXpress

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22 July 2004
1 min read
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In Art
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Taking a leaf outta the Cafe Press book, ComiXpress steps it up with offering to print and sell your indie comics online. You’ve even got an option to have a ComiXpress ad printed in your book, meaning you get a discount and your soon to be numerous fans remember where to buy your masterfully sick creations. But you’ll also need mini-posters and flyers to ram down prospective fans’ throats, and yes, the ComiXpress guys can and will do it.
I would like to introduce these guys to the transparent gif, their logo is really quite nice ‘n sexy, but the opaque ghosting rectangle thing is letting ’em down.

No ‘Puters Please, We’re Artists

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20 July 2004
2 min read
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In Art
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Work has been trying to get everyone to get their holidays down by the end of June. Hey, I’m down with forced time off, no prob. Well no prob for me any way.
So far every set of dates I put through, (I need to take a week), gets knocked back, Sorry, Redtape Corp work is suppose to start any day now, and so is Super Confused’s work. Redtape Corp’s work is yet to manifest in my inbox, and Super Confused work is just starting up, albiet VERY slowly.
So I’ve locked in next week.
I’m looking forward to my activites next week, I’ll be floating around the art rooms at the Julian Ashton Art School in The Rocks, brushing up on my drawing and painting. I rang up to enroll this morning and got a delightfully airy receptionist. After giving her my credit card details, I asked her if she could email me a list of the art supplies. She laughed and replied, Oh, we don’t even have a computer, just bring what you feel comfortable with. We’ll see you next week.
How cool is that? Being a web/graphic designer, THIS is exactly what I needed.
Needless to say, my geekier work colleagues found the idea of a week without computers quite scary.

G5 iMac Coming

By
15 July 2004
56 second read
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In Technology
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G5 to power new iMac

Apple’s 3rd quarter conference call has confirmed that the new iMac line due out in September will have G5 processors.

As for any cosmetic make overs, checkout the pizza box description, and just a plain box. I guess we’ll just have to wait ‘n see. If your lucky I might even do a crude sketch of what I think the new iMac should look like…

New iPod rumors are around too. Yeah NOW they release a purple one!

The Office Kitchen Vortex

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14 July 2004
2 min read
3 Comments
In Design
796 views

It has come to my attention that our office kitchen has a hidden vortex. I first noticed this a couple of months ago with my mug mysteriously disappearing, my coffee and green tea levels diminishing quickly and honey also suffering a similar fate.

I have managed to keep these at bay with some ingenious skull and cross bones stickers, or at least they slowed it down. In fact some people confessed to frequently taking some of my supplies and promised to stop.

Okay, I don’t mind if someone uses my stuff occassionally, but it really fucking shits me when I turn up to work in the morning and all my coffee is gone, or there’s only one tea bag to see me through the day.

Today, however, was the last straw. My ingenious tea strainer has vanished. I spent 20 minutes turning up our small office vortex / kitchen, but to no avail. I have sent ’round and office e-mail, and with the aid of my trusty graphics tablet, quickly composed a sketch of my awol tea strainer to accompany said e-mail.

No one has seen my tea strainer, but everyone finds the sketch amusing.

GRRR!!!

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