Thanks to Paul Debraski for the inspiration on his Daily Doodle, where he recently did a piece using this old but fun technique for creating an optical illusion in which you can switch back and forth between seeing two faces, or a vessel. I decided to use Steve Jobs, and imagined that the vessel was for the Mac faithful to drink in the Steve juice. I type this on a MacBook Pro, so I’m guilty too. However, I do not agree with Steve that ‘open’ makes one think of Microsoft. 🙂
tags: apple, mac, Macintosh, iPad, cult of Mac, cult of Steve, design, Inkscape, open source, open, creative commons, 365
There have been many times in my life when I’ve been tempted to build from scratch. Especially in web based projects, I’m often told that no preexisting solution or framework will be able to help me to solve a given problem. I stopped taking that advice and learned a very long time ago that we have several beautiful and continuously improved interfaces for searching the depths of recorded history, that every problem I’ve encountered has likely been long solved by someone else, and that they more often than not have written about their experience, sometimes going as far as to document the solutions with illustrated steps. Building from scratch may do something for your ego, but does very little for your productivity. And I’ve yet to find someone who cares significantly about the extra work you did to get up to speed with a better solution that was already out there.
This is the result of a short collaboration between Sam Pinola and I during a recent visit to his house. We sat together and brought in images and discussed techniques and revised and played, and this is what we came up with. Thanks for the help, Sam!
The saddest part about this, really, is that I have more than one friend/liker/pal who wants this sketch done. I’m not mentioning any names, but I’ll just say that if you are a renter making your landlord miserable, a relative who is taking advantage of an open door, or someone staying past the third cup of tea, you’re not vain — this sketch is about you.
Clients often contact me asking for a logo, and my immediate response is to ask how they (plan to) define their brand. If I get a blank stare or silence back, I know we’re going to have a lot of work to do. If they respond with a few key phrases or words that help me to define what they are and why they exist in the world, I know we’re going to have fun. If they say that they never thought of it before, I know that we’re going to do some important but necessary work. This is the beginning of the end of our branding planning for a new blog venture called Central Jersey Good Eats, which strives to make people aware of good food and related topics in the central part of New Jersey, be it gardening, cooking, eating out & visiting restaurants, food photography, farmer’s markets, and anything else you can think of. We feel like we have a plethora of things to talk about related to food in New Jersey, and through interviews, techniques, tips, reviews, and other journalism, we plan to share it all. Before we even began thinking about visual representation, we developed a Strategic Plan, vision and mission, ( http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0Ad-YsRMv5bPqZGNrZm05ZndfNTY1ZnFmcnh6ZnM&hl=en ) which we are able to use to help us to make decisions about visual representation and other decisions, because answers are either brand centric or brand divergent according to the plan. The plan answers why we still will exist in the samw world with Yelp! If you live in Central Jersey, keep an eye out for new articles and stories about good food where you live.
This is the kind of thing that makes me scream at the television. When someone is describing a URL verbally, I have found that more often than not they will call the slash used in URLs a backslash, when it is in fact a forward slash, or just a slash. I’m not sure why it makes me so crazy, but more than anything I think it’s the number of times I’ve seen it done incorrectly lately. So, to try to do what I can in my communities to campaign against it, you’re getting this sketch today. Thanks for the platform!
The image uses a lot of my regular go-to effects. I use blurred dupes for shadows and glows, pencil based triangles for attention, and in this particular piece, I used the bend Live Path Effect to create the curvature on the word forwardslash. The background rectangle has a center gradient to create the shadowy corners effect.
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WWW creator: Sorry about the // (seattlepi.com)
Sir Tim Berners-Lee: Sorry About the Slashes (sitepoint.com)
Sir Tim BernersLee admits forward slashes on World Wide Web ‘were a mistake’ (telegraph.co.uk)
