Heres an update since I haven’t done one in awhile. I’m still working on it. I need to put it on a canvas and what not but I’ve been working on the actual image itself for a long time. All done in illustrator.

Ah yea, well anyways. I’ve been pretty busy this semester with design projects and all that jazz. I’ve been pretty busy with my graphic design class and have learned alot. What fonts to use, and what not to use. I’ve also learned how many people will get much much to extravagant with a logo design that ends up only working in one or two ways instead of many. I’ve learned what fonts to use and what ones to stay away from and how to create a simple logo, yet create something unique enough to solidify its presence. Anyways, heres a logo and the stationary designs I’ve been working throughout the semester. If your company happens to be EarthWeaves and your looking for a new design. Contact me. We’ll work something out.

Ok, so browsing Digg today I found a link to 25 reasons you might be a hardcore graphic/web designer. And here they are instead of linking you to the add and pop up filled site its from. But just so no one complains, heres the the website cg-files.com

1. You’ve almost rear-ended the car in front of you because you were analyzing a font on a billboard.
2. You get pissed when a free photoshop brush you download is less than 1000px in size.
3. You’d rather study the paisley pattern on your boyfriend/girlfriend’s shirt than listen to what he/she has to say.
4. You can use keyboard shortcuts at light speed, blindfolded, but you can’t type a paragraph of text without staring at the keyboard.
5. You’ve had “Software Nightmares,” when you’ve been working way too much.
6. You consider meals interruptions.
7. You’ve learned your lesson and stopped using the word “final” in any file name when saving.
8. You clean your keyboard more often than you wash your car.
9. You’ve intentionally given up trying to explain your projects to non-designers.
10. You see CMYK and RGB like Neo sees the Matrix.
11. You’d rather organize your desktop than your sock drawer.
12. When you heard that Adobe was acquiring Macromedia, you had a Design Orgasm.
13. When you look at Album art all you see are grunge Photoshop Brushes. (Then you see the album art a couple minutes later)
14. You’ve Photoshopped out a watermark for a comp or mock-up.
15. You’ve actually $paid for a font.
16. You’ve totally slaughtered a great design concept because the client thinks he/she knows best. (everyone thinks they are a designer)
17. The amount of words you’ve written with a sharpie labeling burned discs total more than the amount of words you’ve read in novels.
18. You’ve had to explain to a client that a layered file wasn’t part of the deal.
19. You’ve kept a ragged concert ticket just so you could scan it.
20. You’ve nicknamed the OSX spinning wheel. (and not affectionately)
21. You bookmark a resource more often than you have a fun night out on the town.
22. You’ve intentionally overbid a project because you can sniff out a bad client from a mile away.
23. You can’t go to a restaurant without secretly critiquing the menu design.
24. You have an amazingly huge font collection, and an amazingly short temper.
25. If you had a penny for every mouse click, you would have been a trillionaire 3 years ago.

Ah yep, I’m changing colors, as you can probably tell. I’m still doing small things here and there to tidy up a bit. I need to do some stuff to the footer and I am working on a new header image. I’m not sure If I am going to go out and shoot a new photo or design something. Time will tell. I’ll have some new artwork up soon as well and Will also be doing some work to the Menu. Thats the plan for now.

Peace.

Ok, so tonights post is going to have a lot of mixed ramblings in it. I have a couple updates to do and then I’ll get to the interesting stuff and jot down whatever is on my mind. H’ok, so to start off. I have an image update that I had to do for school.

I had to make a photo montage of some political issue that I feel strongly about, which, in my opinion is one of the most absurd things to ask someone to do because its such a broad topic and usually leads to no good and most people don’t fully understand the issue it is that they feel is *important* and can’t clearly express their thoughts. I did mine on the war going on Iraq. If someone asked me what side I was on, I couldn’t honestly tell you because I don’t know enough to make an educated decision. I can’t blame the Bush Administration (awesome, the governments stalking system just flagged my website) and I can’t blame the Iraqi’s. But I do know that things are so messed up that we can’t just pull out and leave because of the complete and utter mayhem that will result and I do think that is one of the things people can’t get a grasp of and we can’t just Bomb the damn thing because that would most probably cause all out world wide nuclear chaos. As long as someone doesn’t try to tell me what I was feeling when I made the image or what I think of things I’ll be alright. But then again, the only reason I made the image is to see what kind of rise I can get out of the people in my class. I’m curios as to who is going to get extremely irate over it or who is going to love it.

This past weekend was my birthday, I got a Wacom Table. Its amazing. I’ve been doing a lot of doodling in photoshop and alot of work in illustrator and am currently working on a couple images in illustrator and a piece in photoshop. Its just hard to really work on things with school work. According to my roommate I “never” have homework. But hes an also an engineering major and actually has to open a book to study. Being a Digital Art major I get to play on my computer the whole time and no one knows that I’m actually doing work. Its pretty sweet I guess. I just can’t wait to get through my basic classes. Even my 270 digital art class is really boring. All we’ve done so far is photo retouching and photo montages. Those are things I learned way back when and aren’t really amused with anymore unless it has a real purpose. But hey, whatever, its easy work for me. Ok, back on topic. Tablets are real fun to sketch with.

I did this in about 10-ish minutes for one of my friends. She new I was up to some design work and asked me to draw her something so this is what I came up with. I found the table has opened up a whole new level of design for me because I can just sit down and sketch like I would in a class taking “notes” and things just seem to come more naturally instead of, kind of awkward with a mouse. You get a more lifelike feel on the computer, where everything is usually expected to look perfect and usually lacks that sort of hands on touch. I’ve also found coloring to be more fun because it feels like your actually doing something.

Oh, and another thing I want to talk about that I have noticed in college classes. There is always that one ass who masses up the god damn seating in the lecture hall. Usually by the third class or so everyone usually has their usual seat even though seating isn’t designated by the teacher, it just kind of happens and people know that they have a specific seat. But, then you always get that one person who has to be a real jerk and eff things up for everyone else, displacing about 8 people just because the thought they would “switch it up” that day. And yes, I’m only complaining because this happened the other day in my philosophy class. I walk in, right before the teacher did only to find my seat is taken by someone else, because there usual seat is taken by someone else because the person who took their seat was taken by the asshat who fucked up the seating. Oh, and I just thought I would mention how the Umaine campus smelt like marijuana tonight.

Family Guy Article

Read that article. Its the most RIDICULOUS things I have read in a long time. I mean honestly, does Ned Washington really have nothing better to do? Just in case you don’t feel like reading the article I will recap. Family Guy made a parody of the song “When You Wish Upon a Star” in which the main character, Peter sings a song called “I need a Jew”. Basically he needs help managing has finances and is in search of a person of good money management. Though the song is vaguely similar, it isn’t really that close to the original. The notes are off, the key is off, just the overall pattern of the lyrics gives it that feel of the song. Basically, I think Ned Washington and the other originator of the song is, well, a jew. There are numerous parodies of the song floating around and none of them have ever been challenged so why challenge this one? Heres the clip from family guy in question.

Well, its 3:13 am. Yep, thats right. But hey, I have no classes today so whatever. I’ll be on my way home sometime after I wake up and what not. This weekend should be pretty damn sweet. I’m going to snowmobile grass drags and freestyle demos this weekend in New Hampshire. I’m sure I’ll have tons of pictures to post when I get back from my short fall break this weekend. Hopefully I can get the jeep muddy this weekend. My friends and I want to turn up the old mud pit we made one summer and get it nice and dirty again. It should be a good time. It will be nice to have the extended weekend. A nice short break from school. Then in another month I’ll be skiing so thats where I’ll be on the weekends. A nice escape from school work which is somewhat over whelming at times. Oh well, it will pay off I think. Maybe not so much the actual piece of paper but I think the networking is whats going to be worth it.

Oh and I almost forgot to mention that I’m starting to dable with desktop widgets. Right now I am working on a widget which I think people are going to like as long as it will be ok to distribute it. I don’t thin it will be to much of an issue, I’ll just have to ask the right people before I do. I’m not going to tell anyone what it is yet so you will have to wait and see. Also, I’ll be changing the feel of Bagels Inc soon to a more winter-ish theme. It should be pretty sweet. I think people will enjoy it. Well I’m done typing for now.

I just made it to match my current windows theme. Enjoy it.

This is a sweet commercial. Its given me some ideas for some future artwork, alot of stuff I still haven’t even uploaded here yet.

Something I came across on the internet and I thought it made a lot of valid points. Never let your talents go for free.

Every day, there are more and more Craigs List posts seeking “artists” for everything from auto graphics to comic books to corporate logo designs. More people are finding themselves in need of some form of illustrative service.

But what they’re NOT doing, unfortunately, is realizing how rare someone with these particular talents can be.

To those who are “seeking artists”, let me ask you; How many people do you know, personally, with the talent and skill to perform the services you need? A dozen? Five? One? …none?

More than likely, you don’t know any. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be posting on craigslist to find them.

And this is not really a surprise.

In this country, there are almost twice as many neurosurgeons as there are professional illustrators. There are eleven times as many certified mechanics. There are SEVENTY times as many people in the IT field.

So, given that they are less rare, and therefore less in demand, would it make sense to ask your mechanic to work on your car for free? Would you look him in the eye, with a straight face, and tell him that his compensation would be the ability to have his work shown to others as you drive down the street?

Would you offer a neurosurgeon the “opportunity” to add your name to his resume as payment for removing that pesky tumor? (Maybe you could offer him “a few bucks” for “materials”. What a deal!)

Would you be able to seriously even CONSIDER offering your web hosting service the chance to have people see their work, by viewing your website, as their payment for hosting you?

If you answered “yes” to ANY of the above, you’re obviously insane. If you answered “no”, then kudos to you for living in the real world.

But then tell me… why would you think it is okay to live out the same, delusional, ridiculous fantasy when seeking someone whose abilities are even less in supply than these folks?

Graphic artists, illustrators, painters, etc., are skilled tradesmen. As such, to consider them as, or deal with them as, anything less than professionals fully deserving of your respect is both insulting and a bad reflection on you as a sane, reasonable person. In short, it makes you look like a twit.

A few things you need to know;

1. It is not a “great opportunity” for an artist to have his work seen on your car/’zine/website/bedroom wall, etc. It IS a “great opportunity” for YOU to have their work there.

2. It is not clever to seek a “student” or “beginner” in an attempt to get work for free. It’s ignorant and insulting. They may be “students”, but that does not mean they don’t deserve to be paid for their hard work. You were a “student” once, too. Would you have taken that job at McDonalds with no pay, because you were learning essential job skills for the real world? Yes, your proposition it JUST as stupid.

3. The chance to have their name on something that is going to be seen by other people, whether it’s one or one million, is NOT a valid enticement. Neither is the right to add that work to their “portfolio”. They get to do those things ANYWAY, after being paid as they should. It’s not compensation. It’s their right, and it’s a given.

4. Stop thinking that you’re giving them some great chance to work. Once they skip over your silly ad, as they should, the next ad is usually for someone who lives in the real world, and as such, will pay them. There are far more jobs needing these skills than there are people who possess these skills.

5. Students DO need “experience”. But they do NOT need to get it by giving their work away. In fact, this does not even offer them the experience they need. Anyone who will not/can not pay them is obviously the type of person or business they should be ashamed to have on their resume anyway. Do you think professional contractors list the “experience” they got while nailing down a loose step at their grandmother’s house when they were seventeen?

If you your company or gig was worth listing as desired experience, it would be able to pay for the services it received. The only experience they will get doing free work for you is a lesson learned in what kinds of scrubs they should not lower themselves to deal with.

6. (This one is FOR the artists out there, please pay attention.) Some will ask you to “submit work for consideration”. They may even be posing as some sort of “contest”. These are almost always scams. They will take the work submitted by many artists seeking to win the “contest”, or be “chosen” for the gig, and find what they like most. They will then usually have someone who works for them, or someone who works incredibly cheap because they have no originality or talent of their own, reproduce that same work, or even just make slight modifications to it, and claim it as their own. You will NOT be paid, you will NOT win the contest. The only people who win, here, are the underhanded folks who run these ads. This is speculative, or “spec”, work. It’s risky at best, and a complete scam at worst. I urge you to avoid it, completely. For more information on this subject, please visit www.no-spec.com.

So to artists/designers/illustrators looking for work, do everyone a favor, ESPECIALLY yourselves, and avoid people who do not intend to pay you. Whether they are “spec” gigs, or just some guy who wants a free mural on his living room walls. They need you. You do NOT need them.

And for those who are looking for someone to do work for free… please wake up and join the real world. The only thing you’re accomplishing is to insult those with the skills you need. Get a clue.