These are design or consulting jobs that rose out of a request from the audience. I am always looking for prompts for new content, so if you have a need, please reach out.
So just a few nights ago, I was giving a talk about 365 sketches and it’s origins to the Princeton PC Users Group, and a friend of mine from Linux Users Group in Princeton, Kim, was in the audience. There’s a sequence in my talk where I show a whale deep underwater, preceded by a sheet of web 2.0 logos collected as a way of showing the style of web 2.0 logos. At any rate, when Kim saw this progression, he said that he thought at first that I was going to show a Nascar whale, a whale covered in logos. Yhis struck me as funny, and it was exactly the sort of thing I might do. I decided to do it with a cheetah, in order to stay in the analogic idea of advertising and fast vehicles. So, here it is, and thanks very much to Kim for the spark!
253 of 365 is a giraffe made out of text by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org #typography #design #inkscape #tutorial #cc
253 of 365 is a giraffe made out of text by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org #typography #design #inkscape #tutorial #cc
So my libland friend Julie asked me to sketch her a giraffe, and I do just about anything Julie asks. In this case, I did the following to fulfill her request:
I found a silhouette of a giraffe and imported it into Inkscape.
I lowered the opacity on the giraffe so that I could see text as I placed it on top.
I added the letters in the word giraffe one at a time with the text tool
I selected (s) each of the letters and made them into paths (shift-ctrl-c)
Using the node tool (n) I stretched each of the letters into the shape of the silhouette until the letters were representative of the silhouette of the giraffe.
The silhouette was set aside, and I then created a background for the scene.
Try it out with your favorite animal, and let me know how it turns out! Hope you liked it Julie!
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.
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!
So Dennis is a tweep (twitter-peep) who mentioned that his initials were pretty interesting, wink! While I don’t know him as well as most of my other monogram subjects, he’s a nice enough guy from the interactions we’ve had on Twitter, and I agree: His initials are pretty interesting. 🙂 Hope you enjoyed the set, Dennis!
Ana Devecka showed an interest when I started making monograms for friends, so here is my set for her. Ana is a sweetheart, creative and funny. She’s a mom and a wife, and very proud and dedicated to her family. She likes to help people, and always wants to find new ways to do it. I used this set to try to use font combinations to represent those qualities of hers. Are you interested in what Inkscape could do with your initials? Let me know!
