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25 of 365: There’s a little Carlton Banks in all of us.

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
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.

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21 of 365: Consistency #design principle

21 of 365 - Consistency design principle by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
21 of 365 - Consistency design principle by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
21 of 365 - Consistency design principle by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
21 of 365 – Consistency design principle by John LeMasney via lemasney.com

Consistency is important in design because it allows you to create the same quality of experience across pages (such as the use of grids in magazines), spaces (the common layout of department stores of a chain), objects (the dashboard of a car), buttons (standardized web browser dialogs), or other design elements. It allows for recognizance in the sense that very particular colors (Facebook blue), fonts (Marlboro font), layouts (Target stores), or uniforms (Best Buy blue and khaki) will breed familiarity and comfort despite a difference in place, space, or format.

In this illustration I used the Burger King logo as a basis for a genre called ad-busting, where the highly recognized brand becomes a vehicle for a countermeasure to the brand, in this case, Coronary King, associating the mostly high fat foods sold at Burger King with coronary disease.

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15 of 365: Closure #design #principle

15 of 365 - Closure design principle by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
15 of 365 - Closure design principle by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
15 of 365 - Closure design principle by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
15 of 365 – Closure design principle by John LeMasney via lemasney.com

Closure is part of a set of design principles called the Gestalt principles of perception. Closure says that when we see a set of individual elements, we tend to put them together as a set in our mind. Humans fill in missing information to try to solve each shape as part of a set with collective meaning.

In this illustration, I took the image of a rabbit, and broke it down into a series of lines. By using the viewer’s innate ability to resolve missing parts, it makes the image of the rabbit simpler, design wise, and more interesting aesthetically.

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Double exposure with newspaper by John LeMasney via lemasney.com

Double exposure with newspaper by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
Double exposure with newspaper by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
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.

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Advanced rotation in Inkscape.

Advanced rotation in Inkscape by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
Advanced rotation in Inkscape by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
Advanced rotation in Inkscape by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
Advanced rotation in Inkscape by John LeMasney via lemasney.com

Let’s say you want to create a visual effect in which you have objects floating with regularity around another object, such as creating tick marks around the center of a clock. In this post, I’ll explain how you can do this easily in Inkscape. The key is in moving your center-point for the outer objects.

See the video below for a clearer explanation of these instructions. Open Inkscape. Using the text tool, create an ‘o’. Create a line with the bezier tool as your first tick mark. Put it in the perfect topmost position, aligned with the ‘o’ vertically. Click the tick mark with the selector tool until it is in rotation mode. Take the plus mark for the selected tick mark, and move it to the center of the o. This centers rotation at the center of the o. then, select the tick mark in rotation mode, and while dragging the rotation handle, hit your space bar at each place you want a tick mark. In 12 clicks of the space bar, you will be done.

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I used to believe by John LeMasney via lemasney.com

I used to believe by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
I used to believe by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
I used to believe by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
I used to believe by John LeMasney via lemasney.com

I decided to illustrate a meditative thought I’ve had recently. There is a change emerging in my point of view, and I thought that I would express it in Inkscape. I added the text in two pieces, one for each line. I used Bebas Neue, one of my favorite title fonts. I tightened the kerning on an already very tightly kerned font, by breaking the text into individual letters and moving them horizontally towards each other until they had a certain flow. I spaced them on the non-repro grid on Inkscape that is set to 100 pixel squares. I added a texture in the background from an acid stained, coffee drenched sheet of ledger paper. I then re-aligned the lines of text to the blue ledger lines, and reduced the opacity of the letters to let the texture show through, as though they were printed as a ghost print in red ink. I think the text speaks to the treatment and the treatment speaks to the text.

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