I’m always excited when I can get my inbox down to 100 messages or less. I don;t do it often, but when I do, I dance a little inside my head. It should not be nearly so exciting.
Tag: Portfolio
This is a series of wordmarks I’m working on to help brand a new venture called Act for School Libraries (Act4SL). I love the idea: advocacy for media expertise in school libraries so that transliteracy can be fostered in one of the most important places possible: school libraries. This is a work in progress, essentially just begun, and therefore has some roughness to it. That said, I love the directions that it is going in!
So my libland friend Julie asked me to sketch her a giraffe, and I do just about anything Julie asks. In this case, I did the following to fulfill her request:
- I found a silhouette of a giraffe and imported it into Inkscape.
- I lowered the opacity on the giraffe so that I could see text as I placed it on top.
- I added the letters in the word giraffe one at a time with the text tool
- I selected (s) each of the letters and made them into paths (shift-ctrl-c)
- Using the node tool (n) I stretched each of the letters into the shape of the silhouette until the letters were representative of the silhouette of the giraffe.
- The silhouette was set aside, and I then created a background for the scene.
Try it out with your favorite animal, and let me know how it turns out! Hope you liked it Julie!
Related articles
- 20121122: Sliced by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org #cc #design #typography (365sketches.org)
- 20121120: A study in hexagonal geometry by John LeMasney via 365sketches.org #design #cc (365sketches.org)
- 20121111: an explanation of SVG vs. PNG (365sketches.org)
- 20121108: A waveform of the word “open” #tattoo (365sketches.org)
So I had a phone call today, then a bit later I had today’s sketch. I think less of her now.
When it comes to information, I like it to come in firehose form, because I have excellent filters. Here’s a note that you might find is true for yourself too. Meanwhile, information addiction is a real thing, and you may find the following useful:
‘Contemporary theories of reinforcement learning are rooted in the dopaminergic reward system. Dopamine neurons in parts of the midbrain, such as the ventral tegmental area and substantia nigra pars compacta, play a vital role in the expectation of reward. Most of what is known about these neurons comes from electrode recording experiments with rhesus monkeys. Not surprisingly, these neurons respond to primitive rewards, such as food and water. They signal a monkey’s expectation of rewards, but what was not known until now is whether these same neurons might also signal expectation of information. To test for this preference for information, which is a cognitive reward, a new paradigm needed to be put in place. Ethan Bromberg-Martin and Okihide Hikosaka, both at the National Eye Institute, developed a brilliant behavioral task that opened the door.’
from “The Chemistry of Information Addiction – Scientific American” at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-we-addicted-to-inform/ curated by lemasney creative. Feel free to share.
Disclaimer: this is yesterday’s (Thursday’s) post, and tonight’s (Friday’s) may be a few minutes into tomorrow (Saturday), so please forgive me. So one of my favorite Inkscape converts, Beth Nolastname, posted on my wall yesterday, suggesting a really cool background generation site for use with Inkscape. She said:
John, this looks like a neat link to use with Inkscape. Tiled backgrounds designer Web based tiled backgrounds designer, create any pattern your site needs just for few minutes. Adjustable size, pictures, colors, texture and transparency
I didn;t use it to make my pattern though I did try it and like it. Aside from thinking that it’s a cool site, my only reaction is that Inkscape already has some amazing tools for developing these kinds of background patterns, with a lot more flexibility, such as the one I made for today’s sketch. I made mine with the tiled clones tool (edit/clone/create tiled clones) , which starts with a single (not two) selected object/shape/path/group/etc. of any type, and allows you to create repeated patterns with amazingly rich flexibility. You can affect transparency per clone, rotation per clone, distance apart, angle of repeat, and even color variation per clone. I kept mine pretty simple, adding variation of horizontal and vertical movement by a few pixels, blur variation with a degree of randomness, and so on. In short, while it may have a larger learning curve than Beth’s suggested site, it also is far more powerful and flexible. Thanks for the inspiration, Beth!