25 of 365 - there's a little Carlton Banks in all of us by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
25 of 365 – there’s a little Carlton Banks in all of us by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
So, I decided to break with the design principles and do something kind of fun today. My friend Justin Hoenke, a fabulous librarian and one of my favorite humans ever, posted the selfie you see in the first quadrant. I recently saw a meme using Carlton Banks (of Fresh Prince fame), and decided to use Justin’s fun pic to do my own Carlton meme. I missed my post yesterday, so another will be coming soon today.
In the GIMP, I opened Justin’s picture, and sized it down to a quarter of the original image size. I brought it in again as a layer, sized it down less, moved it into place, and added a layer mask by selection for the second quadrant so that the rest of the picture was not overlapping any of the other quadrants. The same for the third and fourth, except that I started to munge his iris together to prepare you for the appearance of Carlton in the last quadrant. For Carlton, I added an elliptical selection the size of Justin’s iris, and made it into a layer mask, then played with layer styles and transparency until it looked like Carlton was inside Justin’s eye. Without the stamp tool to munge the iris, Justin’s pupil would have obfuscated parts of Carlton’s face.
22 of 365 - Constancy design principle by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
22 of 365 – Constancy design principle by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
Constancy is the idea that we see a particular object in the size, color, shape, feel, and other senses that we expect. We always see humans, for instance, in the same way. We expect that they will be 6 foot tall or less, and see multiple humans in that context. If we introduce comparative objects that we recognize the size of, it will alter our perception of scale.
In this illustration, I decided to alter the relative size of human silhouettes to expand the depth of the piece.
9 of 365 - attractiveness bias design principle by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
9 of 365 – attractiveness bias design principle by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
Attractiveness bias is a design principle that allows designers to act upon noted preferences in humans for (typically) other humans who seem to be whole, symmetrical, appear genetically and otherwise healthy, and nutritionally sound. A commonly cited example for attractiveness bias is the televised debate between Nixon and Kennedy, where people who saw the debate said overwhelmingly that Kennedy won the debate, and those who only listened to the debate felt generally that Nixon won the debate. The difference can be explained in the differences in their appearances, where Kennedy is said to have looked younger, stronger, more healthy, more attractive, and more steady than Nixon in the debate.
In my illustration here, I decided to take an attractive image of a female and alter her feature symmetry and skin tone to make her less attractive, and thus less preferred.
I was diagnosed a couple of years back with Adult ADHD. This was a surprise to me, but not especially for those who knew me and the sometimes chaotic way in which I respond to visual stimuli.
I did not remember ever having been hyperactive as a child, and attention did not seem to be an issue for me, though later in life, I found myself having trouble focusing on one task at one time, which sometimes made it hard to carry out tasks. Often, ADHD is lifelong, and does not typically just show up without an external source.
When researching possible causes for a late appearance of Adult ADHD, there is some evidence to support concussions and head injuries as a culprit. This made me think of the sometimes funny, often scary stories I have told of the many times I’ve been hit in the head. I’m going to tell those stories here, finishing with the most recent head injury, which happened just the other day.
1. Little league baseball.
I was not very good at baseball, and as a result, I ended up in the outfield. During practice one year, the coach was hitting out a practice pop fly, I did not have my glove in the right place, and the next thing I remember is waking up with everyone around me in the outfield.
2. Little league baseball, year 2.
That’s right, the same thing happened two years in a row, and I’m pretty sure I dropped out of little league after that.
3. Parks and Recreation.
The first time I ever got stitches was when I worked for my township’s Parks and Recreation department. Mostly, the work was emptying 50 gallon drums of empty beer bottles and cans in parks, with grass cutting in the summer, but we also maintained the playground equipment. One day, I was replacing a chain net on a basketball hoop by myself on a saturday. In order to get the hooks open to hold the net, you sometimes have to use pliers to open them a bit. I misjudged my grip and the pliers went into my head with all my might. Blood started coming down my head, and I went to the hospital. The diagnosis was a concussion.
4. Moving day.
When I moved from Levittown, PA to Ewing, NJ, we got a moving truck from the storage place we were using to hold our house’s contents between the residences. I was standing on the ground behind the truck when a wooden Ikea shelf fell over and hit me in the back of the head. We rescheduled the move, went to the hospital, and the diagnosis was a concussion.
5. First week at Princeton.
I was excited to be working at Princeton University, and was going to lunch with a friend. It was raining, and I was suffering from cataracts (I’ll explain in another post) and I misjudged the last step of a set of steps down into Woodrow Wilson Hall. I went headfirst into the glass and metal door at the entrance, and a girl who saw it shrieked. The blood flowed. I decided to forego a visit to the nurse, but I probably should have. The hit was at least as damaging as my previous injuries, and likely a concussion.
6. The occasional chandelier.
Most recently, I stood up too quickly into a chandelier and blood started to flow. I do these kinds of injuries from time to time, but this one made me think of the others.
I guess more than anything, I just wanted to note the history of these injuries, but I do wonder if they have anything to do with my recent discovery of ADHD.
Double exposure with newspaper by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
Double exposure with newspaper by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
This is an example of my love for double exposures. Back in 1994, I was in a photography class, and perhaps my best image was one of my friend Geoff Kremer double exposed with a scene in an abandoned warehouse that I was exploring with my friend Roch Pisarek. They were interesting images on their own, but together, there was a kind of spark. In the GIMP, I achieved this by importing both images, resizing them to be the same size, then placing the selfie layer on top of the newspaper layer, then setting the layer mode to Darken Only which gave the effect I was looking for. I also duplicated the selfie layer and lowered the opacity of the newspaper layer to enhance the effect.
I really love design play that takes the expected and twists it. This is a prime example. By starting with a photo of an original game cartridge for the atari 2600, and replacing and repainting the firefox logo into it, then adding the title in the Atari 2600 font (Mumbai.ttf) it’s fairly easy to pull off this kind of substitution. In retrospect, I should have used ALL CAPS for the title, as they did for their cartridges, but still, a fun project.
