Riveting

If only puns were as funny to other people as they are to the person who puns them.

I was handed an illustration gig on wednesday by my undergrad design professor, which is certainly both the best paying and highest profile job I’ve had to date. I’m happy about those things. The job was for a Kansas City architecture firm, and it involved doing some concept art for trophies that will incorporate old rivets from the Golden Gate bridge. The firm had done some retrofitting on the bridge a few years back, and they ended up keeping the rivets they removed as…souvenirs? I guess its best not to waste old steel, especially if it has some historical significance to it.

I was given one of the rivets as reference material while I worked on the project, and have been treating it with the utmost of reverence. Sure, it’s just a chunk of steel, but it has an artifact quality to it since it’s both part of one of our most well-known bridges, and because the people who gave it to me really seemed anxious about getting it back in good condition.

This is a thought that has been building from my frustration of working with logos, and my professor’s opinion that our graduating class, in general, is not very good at logo design. Thanks to doing some reading on David Airey’s Blog last night I think I’ve started to piece together my particular problem. And when it comes down to it, it doesn’t seem to be a problem at all so much as a result of academic misdirection that I can at this point consider resolved. 

My professor would strongly encourage us to not lock ourselves into a single idea, which is what a lot of people in my class would do almost instantly when developing logos. This is a good thing. I liked to do lots of thumbnails, and a lot of times I’d have many that would look the same as I was trying to work out an idea visually through multiple sketches with small variations between each. I had noticed no fewer than one occasion where my professor had told me to stop that because I was just doing the same thing over and over. I think over time I had complied with this idea and as a result began to sell myself short conceptually.

My professor also tended to pick the logos he thought we should work on from our sketches, not knowing if they were ideas that we liked or thought about. Sometimes things end up on paper, and then I stop thinking about them because it was just an experiment and I didn’t care how it turned out and had dedicated no thought to it. And then that idea would end up being my final product, and I wouldn’t know why other than “the professor said so.”

The entire point of the thumbnail process is to explore all your options, and if that means trying to fully work out a problem roughly BEFORE going to the computer, I’m all for it. Once I jump into Illustrator I tend to be restricted by the ideas that I’ve put to paper. Working from a half-developed idea would land me with a half-developed finished logo. 

I don’t think I fully realized what was happening until I ran across ideas that paralleled my own in David Airey’s process. First, I absolutely agree that you shouldn’t show sketches to a client, as they might end up falling in love with something that you hate. In a classroom setting, while an assignment might be for a specific company, the professor is still the client in the end. Showing the sketches to him would often derail ideas that I favored for those that he thought looked better. While he encouraged us not to become locked into ideas, he would basically lock us into them. He would also derail my thought processes by telling me to stop sketching things that looked similar, which is the lateral thinking part of the process. 

So most of the time I would move forward with an idea that I didn’t really like, that I didn’t do any further thinking about. Now I can’t blame him for my failure to keep thinking about these things independently, but I also was taking his advice more as rule, thinking that he was being guided by a higher design wisdom that I would be rewarded for following, and that I would gain understanding in the end. Instead what we all got was the judgement of being bad logo designers. 

And that is why now, after I’ve turned in my final project and am waiting to graduate in a few days, I am working on a new personal logo so that I can competently market myself. Lesson learned.

As I was asked about this recently I figured I’d relink it here. It leads to the Infamous Tax Law Comic that maybe nobody paid attention to except for its ingenious creators. Speaking of the ingenious creators, I was able to easily locate it on my site by searching for “tax comic” and “law comic” using that handy search bar on the side. It strikes me that the other creator wasn’t trying very hard to find it. In any case, it gives me a great excuse to put up that fine looking devil head shot. Hellfire looks good on him.

A more general desire to update the old web log brought me here tonite, after I had spent a good portion of the day languishing in pain on my sofa from overdoing a workout Thursday morning. After downing some Ibuprofen and snorting a few lines of Potassium I was in condition enough to hobble to the store and buy some other restoratives to cure what ails me. Not my ideal plan for a Saturday but it was a damn good excuse to be lazy and play a little more Phantom Hourglass on my recently purchased Crimson and Black DS Lite.  I could rant about my love hate relationship with video games. It would involve talking about how I really like playing them, but then inevitably when I do I look back at it as wasted time and sort of resent doing so. Then I’d probably go in the direction of what I’d do with that time instead, like maybe re-establishing contact with my angsty inner artist who probably wouldn’t be so pissed off if I spent time drawing on a regular basis. And this all comes after a week of heightened productivity, during which I managed to post a new french freye based Pulp Heroes comic and put together a bizarre little holiday greeting card for which I need to find some means of printing. Prior to that I came up with a nice solution to a shirt design that Danny wanted, only I need to find some way to get that printed while making it worth my while financially. And it’s less about my desire to earn money for the art that I make as it is my desire to not be hundreds of dollars in the hole just so I can fulfill a promise I made.

I think all of the above can be summed up with a simple statement of “Holidays are fucking stressful”.  Winter break is a bit of a joke, tumbling from finals right into having to find the right gifts for everybody, while at the same time trying to do all those things you couldn’t make room in your schedule for with your newly found free time. It’s all a bit much.

There were some other things I had been thinking about lately which were more investigative thoughts which I won’t allow to be tainted by the negative spin this post has taken. Other than that I hope to get a few more comics done before school starts back up again, so I’ll at least update here when those go up.