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!
I’ve received a strong response of interest (maybe jealousy?) in the “friend monograms” sketches, and I’m saying right here that if you ask for one, I’ll make every effort to make you one, or in this case, 12. I think letterforms and their relationship are art. I got a lot of help from fontographers on these, but the kerning, custom nodes, placement and relationship, etc., is mine. Thanks for asking, Dan! That’s what this project is all about.
So this was inspired by the recent sketch of my longtime monogram as well as a conversation with Sarah Badawy about how some combinations of letters work better than others. In order to do each of these, I went through the same workflow in Inkscape each time:
You can do it. You can also extend this methodology to any string of text to make logos, wordmarks, and text based art and design.
Yes, Inkscape is primarily a vector based editor, but I use bitmap or raster based images in it all the time. Inkscape gives you the ability to work in a light way with bitmaps but makes it more difficult to paint into, alter, erase, etc. with bitmaps, unless you do a bitmap trace. In this case, I imported my image, and set it in layer one. Then I imported another image of some rust into layer 2, and set that layer to mode: darken, and brought the opacity down a bit. Finally, I imported the third image, a kind of tech looking checkerboard, and applied the same mode, darken, and lowered the opacity. This is one example of how the layers menu can be really useful in Inkscape, where it is essential inside photo manipulation apps like the GIMP.
This is a lyric from a short Pomplamoose song. A jingle, really. It seemed perfect for a little 30 second commercial for an airline. Really fun, cute stuff from Nataly Dawn’s collaboration with Jack Conte. Check out the YouTube video below to see why I think they’re so great. The jingle is at the end of the video after the song “Another Day”