Leaf illustration by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
Leaf illustration by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
I saw a beautiful illustration on Pinterest that made use of clipping, and decided to play with the idea for myself. In Inkscape, if you import an image, like the palette in the illustration above, and make or import a shape, such as the leaf here, you can place the leaf shape on top of the palette image and apply object/clipping/set clip which results in the clipped image above. I added a rectangle in white, set transparency to 50%, and added the word leaf in one of my favorite fonts, Bebas Neue, and applied a skew.
It’s an interesting way to visually share two ideas in a single image. Both the palette and the leaf have their own visual message, and together they send an interesting combination of the two. I could have used a photograph instead to possibly make a statement about love or business or nature, or all three. Open up Inkscape and try this technique for yourself.
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In this session, local graphic designer and technology consultant John LeMasney will demonstrate how to get started with digital graphic design using free (open source) software, and will introduce the concepts of color choice, font choice, visual inspiration, best practices, and resources. If you ever find yourself tasked with putting words and images on a page in an interesting way, but have never had any training in how to do that effectively, this class is for you!
I was very happy to be asked for the fourth time by Janie Hermann to create what has become a tradition: the visual branding for ALA Battledecks, a fun contest in which presenters present interesting, funny, and sometimes shocking slides that they’ve never seen until they present. This year, in Chicago, Janie asked me to design something that called up the ideas of gangsters, flappers, the 1920’s and the glitz of Chicago, and so I focused on a fedora, Art deco, and marquee lights for the design. Thanks for the opportunity!
ALA Battledecks Chicago Showdown by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
It is becoming more important to know how to create original images, videos, and other visual content. You need transliteracy skills.
20060410 (2) (Photo credit: nikontino)
In the same way that it has traditionally been important to know how to read, write and perform arithmetic as a basic skill set of  communication, it has become increasingly important for people to create their own images, video, and other graphics to communicate their particular message effectively. It’s almost as though people only recently realized their visual preferences, maybe as a reaction to the emergence of visually motivated social networks like Pinterest, a place for people to curate, share, and collect images with verbal content becoming secondary.
A more visual web of content requires new skills.
A screenshot of the GIMP 2.2.8 raster graphic software. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
As we move towards more digital interactions, and enjoy more visual web content from producers as a first introduction to their messages, we can see that they are creating a digital trail for themselves. Other people then find and interpret what they are about through quick visual assessments. If you look at my Pinterest boards, you will quickly get a sense of what I am about, because the cursory glance at a series of images does not carry the threshold of understanding that reading text does. We must slow down and engage our verbal brain to interpret the letterforms, then the words, then the combination of words to make meaning. With images, we need only recognize the items in the image to begin interpretation. We want to be able to leave our own visual trail, one with interesting, insightful, and communicative images, videos, and graphics that tell our story. If you do not know how to edit a photograph, make cuts, titles, and transitions in video and audio, or create a reasonable graphic, you will become more reliant on others to produce, edit, or change content for you. In the same way that you would not have to rely on someone else to create your word processed documents for you, you do not want to rely on someone else for mediating your visual content.
You can learn how to make great images and videos.
There are fantastic free tools and resources to begin to learn how to use these toolkits in the same way that you learned how to use browsers, word processors, spreadsheets, and operating systems. If you learned by spending time in the applications, the same will likely be true for visual applications. If you learned by reading a book, you may want to try the same for these applications. In order to learn Inkscape, an open source illustration application like Corel Draw and Adobe Illustrator, by book, I strongly suggest The Book of Inkscape, by Dimitry Kosonov. You likely learned word processing and other  applications because a need arose for you to become familiar with them to do schoolwork, business, or to communicate with others. A new need has emerged in digital transliteracy: for people to communicate in person, on paper, on-screen, in images, in video, in voice, and in graphics.
You can be your own graphic designer, video producer, or photographer with the skills to support you.
English: An infographic illustrating and comparing the popularity of different geosocial networking services (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
With newly acquired video editing, image manipulation, and other visual media skills, you can begin to tell new stories that move people differently than a page or a voice can, take part in the remixed web, leave your creations waiting to be found and enjoyed, and have a kind of digital presence that engages, sticks with visual learners, and promotes you differently than text can because of the very nature of the media.
I’d like to help you to gain these skills!
Contact me at lemasney@gmail.com or 609-553-9498 to talk about how we can begin to acquire these skills for your organization, service, or product. Let’s do something great together!
I woke up one day recently with this idea in my head for an illustration of the origins of Comic Sans, Microsoft’s often inappropriately misused, popularly hated, comic font. Free to reuse as you wish with attribution. (Origin of Comic Sans by John LeMasney via lemasney.com)
‘Comic Sans MS is a sans-serif casual script typeface designed by Vincent Connare and released in 1994 by Microsoft Corporation. It is a non-connecting script inspired by comic book lettering, intended for use in informal documents and children’s materials.[1] The typeface has been supplied with Microsoft Windows since the introduction of Windows 95, initially as a supplemental font in the Windows Plus Pack and later in Microsoft Comic Chat. Describing it, Microsoft has explained that “this casual but legible face has proved very popular with a wide variety of people.”[2] The typeface’s widespread use, often in situations for which it was not intended, has been the subject of criticism and mockery.[3]’
from “Comic Sans – Wikipedia” at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comic_Sans curated by lemasney creative. Feel free to share.
I will be talking about http://365sketches.org, a daily design project using free software to the Arts, Tech, Community and Culture group at Artworks Trenton on Wednesday, February 27th, 2013. It ran between 2010 and 2013 with a break in the middle for two years worth of daily posts.
In this project, I made a design or image with free (libre) software, most often the open source illustration application called Inkscape. I started it as a personal venture in mastering Inkscape. But through social media, shows, requests, and demonstrations, the project became a community of practice, learning, and communication. In all of the various projects, collaborations, and work that I’ve done, I can clearly say that this one, costing only time and effort and returning my investment a hundred times over, has been the most rewarding by far.
Please come and learn how and why you should get started in developing a 365 project.
The Graphic Design Experience Every Student Needs to Succeed
The Essential Cheat Sheet for Social Media Cover Photo Dimensions [+ Pre-Sized Templates]
A Crash Course in Inkscape
