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.
Dan Wadlinger, a friend and co-worker at Rider University suggested this sketch:
Ok John, in honor of the many graduations, I want to request a graduation sketch. A graduated graduated cylinder. Basically a graduated cylinder with a mortar-board. And a smile.
Thanks for the suggestion, Dan. Here you go!
My very good friend Kelly Lake and her husband Ed were recently blessed with twins, and I can’t think of anyone more deserving of a shot at motherhood. I love the fact that she’s got a double shot, and I’m cheering them on. She is part of the 365 project over at http://www.facebook.com/365sketches and she knows I’m always looking for sketch ideas for this project. She said “So… Ed has this t-shirt idea that I think if anyone can make it possible YOU can… he said, ‘you should get a t-shirt with a window on it and two little baby faces pressed up against the glass’ I guess in a ‘window on the womb with twins’ what do you think?” I said I loved it and that as soon as my current queue ran out, I’d get on it. Here it is, and I hope she loves it! Hugs and kisses, Kelly!
Creative Commons Attribution for images used in this piece:
So this is my entry for Mozilla’s 2010 t-shirt contest. Mozilla is Firefox‘s parent company. You can see the entry in context at , and vote for it, if you like. They asked for a design that promoted key elements of Mozilla’s vision, which is openness, innovation, and community, all things you may know I hold very dear myself.
In Inkscape, I took these four words and put them in via the text tool, then converted them all to paths. Then, I used the Bezier tool and the pencil tool to connect the letterforms and create tendrils which I saw as life forms seeking out connection. I saw the design as airy, connected, and creative, things I love and respect about Mozilla. If you like this design, I’d love it if you could vote it up at
“Mammon slept. And the beast reborn spread over the earth and its numbers grew legion. And they proclaimed the times and sacrificed crops unto the fire, with the cunning of foxes. And they built a new world in their own image as promised by the sacred words, and spoke of the beast with their children. Mammon awoke, and lo! it was naught but a follower.”
– The Book of Mozilla, https://goo.gl/dt6mJT
This was a very special request from my good friend Janie Hermann who was recently advertising a program at Princeton Public Library, a part of which involved a shredder truck, which would come to shred bulk paper and sensitive materials in order to prevent them from being seen by unintended eyes, but I imagine also as a way of recycling paper. At any rate, when I read “Shredder Truck” all I could think of was a huge black rig running though the streets at midnight with heavy metal guitarists all riffing at each other in a wild cacophony, all with their Marshall Amps turned up to 11. So I replied to the post with the idea, and the next thing we knew, it was an idea for a sketch.
Because of the shape required to properly render a tractor trailer, this is the first drawing in this image to break the square format for these sketches. I won’t do it often, but I’d rather break the format on a special sketch than keep the format and break the image. Also, because of the detail in this sketch, please consider taking a look at it full size.
In Inkscape, I got the 4 shredders and the tractor itself separately from MorgueFile and bitmap traced them. I created the trailer using the rectangle tool, converted it to a path, and roughed up the shape a bit with the node tool. I worked to overlap the 4 shredders and have their color and tone fade gracefully into one another. I created the moon with the ellipse tool and blur effects. The rear wheels of the trailer are a copied and modified set of the back wheels of the tractor.
I hope you like the image. I love the nighttime feel, the dangerous color scheme, and the visual volume of the shredders. Thanks to Janie for the spark and the request!
In this sketch. I worked briefly with Mary Kay Podlecki to see how well Inkscape could work to help quilters to develop color schemes, textures, and other quilt planning. Mary Kay is working on an amazing iPhone app that allows you to choose from hundreds of square types, layouts, and color schemes, and she was looking to see if Inkscape could help her to illustrate the various square options. I worked with her one day to explain how you can use grids, apply textures, dotted paths, color schemes, and make templates that you can use over and over again to develop squares. With her expertise in quilting and my knowledge of Inkscape, I think we covered a lot of ground fairly quickly, and I hope she’s on her way to using Inkscape to help her in her quilt design. She sent me a sample image which I was able to recreate fairly quickly in Inkscape, which is what you see here. Thanks for the opportunity to work together, Mary Kay!
The iBod is a new kind of computing device, one that takes you off the couch and allows you to truly interact. All of your iPad apps will still work with the iBod, but you will notice that they are just a little fuzzy because they’re just magnified, but apps made natively for the iBod will reach new heights of usefulness and a full body computing experience. Now, with the iBod, you can have a boxing match with a full sized partner, play chess as a king, dance your way to stardom, and have full body length videoconferencing. Preorders now available!
The iBod was inspired by Dan Wadlinger who suggested that I should focus on the next iteration of the iPad, and this is what I came up with. In Inkscape, I got a picture of a jumping person, a picture of the iPad, and bitmap traced both, in this case using the color tracing function of the bitmap trace dialog for the iPad. I added the tether and the background, and called it done.
Thanks, Dan for the inspiration!
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