Category: portfolio

This is a portfolio of my work in many forms. It should give you some insight as to the products I might help you to create.

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portfolio

Bokeh by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org #Inkscape #vector #tutorial #cc

Bokeh by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org #Inkscape #vector #tutorial #cc
Bokeh by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org #Inkscape #vector #tutorial #cc
Bokeh by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org #Inkscape #vector #tutorial #cc
Bokeh by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org #Inkscape #vector #tutorial #cc

Given my recent reminder from Beth about the very cool, powerful, flexible tiled clones tool in Inkscape, I decided to make a little tutorial about how to create this bokeh effect.There are a lot of settings here, but along the way, try playing with my numbers to see what happens.

  1. Make a black background created with the rectangle tool, the same size as your page.
  2. Make a single circle, and “unset the fill” by right clicking on the fill color indicator in the lower left and choosing ‘unset’.
  3. Make the circle about 1/50th of the black rectangle, sort of the proportion of a star on the American flag’s blue field.
  4. The first circle should go to the upper left corner of the black field.
  5. Select the circle and open the tiled clones dialog by going to edit/clones/tiled clones, and use the following settings to replicate the design.
  6. The tiling scale is set to 8 columns by 6 rows (48 clones)
  7. In Symmetry tab: Choose P4M Symmetry, Shift X and Shift Y in both row and column are set to 15% with 6% randomization in both X and Y
  8. In Scale Tab: Scale X and Y in both row and column are set to 5% with 10% randomization in both X and Y.
  9. The Rotation tab is ignored.
  10. In Blur and Opacity tab: Blur is set to 1% per row and 2% per column with 5% randomization. Fade out is set to 10% in both row and column with 25% randomization, and alternate is checked for both row and column.
  11. In Color Tab: An initial color of a slightly yellow off white is chosen. This is why the fill must be unset in the original circle. Each of the settings for Hue, Saturation and Luminance are set to 2% per row and column with 5% randomization, except that Luminance is set to 30% randomization.
  12. The Tracing tab is ignored.
  13. Click on the Create button at any time to see how your settings affect your clones. When you’re satisfied, close the dialog. As long as you have the original selected, you can go back into the dialog and continue experimenting.
  14. Also, any changes you make to the original immediately affect your clones, as you might imagine. My imperfect circle shape for the bokeh was created by finding and selecting the original (shift-d), making it into a path (shift-ctrl-c), and altering its shape with the node tool (n)

Obviously, there are a lot of options with this flexible, powerful tool. However, once you begin to play with the options, as I did here, your experimentation will pay off. You start to see what the shift settings do, how the rotation setting works, how to bring about symmetry or randomization, and so on. First, have fun, then worry about getting the precise effect you want. You may find that your experiments lead to more interesting outcomes than your original idea.

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brand consulting curriculum vitae design principles Illustration Inkscape instructional technology portfolio professional activities professional experience

It’s not so much that I’m connected as addicted.

It's not so much that I'm connected as addicted.
It's not so much that I'm connected as addicted.
It's not so much that I'm connected as addicted.
It’s not so much that I’m connected as addicted.

When it comes to information, I like it to come in firehose form, because I have excellent filters. Here’s a note that you might find is true for yourself too. Meanwhile, information addiction is a real thing, and you may find the following useful:

‘Contemporary theories of reinforcement learning are rooted in the dopaminergic reward system.  Dopamine neurons in parts of the midbrain, such as the ventral tegmental area and substantia nigra pars compacta, play a vital role in the expectation of reward. Most of what is known about these neurons comes from electrode recording experiments with rhesus monkeys. Not surprisingly, these neurons respond to primitive rewards, such as food and water. They signal a monkey’s expectation of rewards, but what was not known until now is whether these same neurons might also signal expectation of information. To test for this preference for information, which is a cognitive reward, a new paradigm needed to be put in place. Ethan Bromberg-Martin and Okihide Hikosaka, both at the National Eye Institute, developed a brilliant behavioral task that opened the door.’

from “The Chemistry of Information Addiction – Scientific American” at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-we-addicted-to-inform/ curated by lemasney creative. Feel free to share.
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portfolio requests

249 of 365 is a birth announcement for a first cousin once removed [infographic] #inkscape

Chloe Emeline LeMasney
Chloe Emeline LeMasney

This is Friday’s post, so please excuse that today is now Saturday. 🙂 So this is for my cousin Mike, who has an amazing family with his wife Michele. Their latest addition was Chloe, and she looks like a healthy happy sweetheart. Congrats, cousins! Here’s her stats, and I hope you enjoy them even a fraction of the amount that we do.

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portfolio requests

248 of 365 is a star pattern [image] #Inkscape

Star Pattern
Star Pattern

Disclaimer: this is yesterday’s (Thursday’s) post, and tonight’s (Friday’s) may be a few minutes into tomorrow (Saturday), so please forgive me. So one of my favorite Inkscape converts, Beth Nolastname, posted on my wall yesterday, suggesting a really cool background generation site for use with Inkscape. She said:

John, this looks like a neat link to use with Inkscape.

Tiled backgrounds designer


Web based tiled backgrounds designer, create any pattern your site
needs just for few minutes. Adjustable size, pictures, colors, texture
and transparency

I didn;t use it to make my pattern though I did try it and like it. Aside from thinking that it’s a cool site, my only reaction is that Inkscape already has some amazing tools for developing these kinds of background patterns, with a lot more flexibility, such as the one I made for today’s sketch. I made mine with the tiled clones tool (edit/clone/create tiled clones) , which starts with a single (not two) selected object/shape/path/group/etc. of any type, and allows you to create repeated patterns with amazingly rich flexibility. You can affect transparency per clone, rotation per clone, distance apart, angle of repeat, and even color variation per clone. I kept mine pretty simple, adding variation of horizontal and vertical movement by a few pixels, blur variation with a degree of randomness, and so on. In short, while it may have a larger learning curve than Beth’s suggested site, it also is far more powerful and flexible. Thanks for the inspiration, Beth!

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portfolio

About life and truth (potatoes gonna potate) by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org #typography #Inkscape #design #cc

About life and truth (potatoes gonna potate) by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org #typography #Inkscape #design #cc
About life and truth (potatoes gonna potate) by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org #typography #Inkscape #design #cc

About life and truth (potatoes gonna potate) by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org #typography #Inkscape #design #cc
About life and truth (potatoes gonna potate) by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org #typography #Inkscape #design #cc

We are who we are. It’s hard to break with what we know. I saw this idea somewhere, and wanted to pay a little Inkscape homage to the idea. Cause we’re all potatoes in one way or another, and potatoes gonna potate. Tomatoes gonna tomate. Haters gonna hate.

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portfolio

246 of 365 is lemasney’s social media workflow [infographic] #Inkscape

My social media workflow
My social media workflow

Inkscape makes for a great visual organizer. By creating circular icons from all of my most active social media services via clipping with circles, then using the connector tool to connect them in specific ways, you can see that I use my Android based phone to generate a lot of content that is dispersed in lots of ways, and that most of my content gets directed to FriendFeed, a social media aggregator, which then funnels into Twitter, then Facebook. I wonder, how do you do social media, and how would you show me?