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.
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?
In order to make this image, I started with a public domain silhouette of an octopus. Using the Bezier tool (ctrl-b), I traced each part of the octopus, the head and its 8 arms, making sure to separate the tracing into two lines for each part, a top and a bottom, which allows the next technique to work. I took each top and bottom and combined them (ctrl-k) into a single path of two subpaths each. Finally, I took each of those paths and applied the stitch sub paths (live path effects or LPE) and set the number of lines to 25 for each part. Before applying the stitch sub paths LPE, I duplicated my original tracing, and placed it on top of the LPE applications, to create an outer edge to the parts, which disappear when you apply the LPE. I also painted a body color using the calligraphy tool, and applied a slight blur to it. Finally, I applied a sea like gradient to a rectagle in the background. Hope you like it.
Okay, so those of you who know me on Facebook know I like Foursquare, the geolocation microblogging app. I also like Android, the phone OS from Google, which has a cool barcode scanning capability. I’m fond of QR codes, which are square barcodes that you can encode URLs, paragraphs, and other strings of text. Bring it all together, and you have a way to scan a barcode to check in to Foursquare. I use an app for scanning to Foursquare called PhiSq available in the Android Market for free. I also use a free site to generate QRCodes from the Foursquare Venue URLs at http://qrcode.kaywa.com/ — copy and paste the Venue URL into the form, and voila: a QRcode that you can import into Inkscape. However, Inkscape has its own barcode generators in the extensions, and I’m sure they would work with the scanner as well.
I imported them into Inkscape, placed them in a grid, with explanatory text, and printed them out. I’m thinking about taping these to the back of my laptop, though you could get the scan right from the screen where you’re reading this. Although, unless you’re also on Rider’s campus, you’ll have a heck of a time getting any points or badges for the checkin.
This is a note of thanks to my new friends that I met and worked with in the Inkscape sessions at Princeton Public Library over the last five weeks. Special thanks to Janie Hermann and Janice Painter for helping to make it happen and keep it going. This was the subject of our last exercise, and we had a lot of fun with it. Thanks again, all!
So here is another monogram study for a very good friend and regular contributor to this project, Shannon. Shannon is bright, kind, inventive, cool, smart, technologically proficient, creative, and a lot of fun to be around. In short, she’s amazing. I wanted to capture some of her qualities in these monograms. Hope you liked it, and thanks to Shannon for asking for it!
