I just received a quartet of blank android figurines from DeadZebra and upon sitting down to figure out what I wanted to do with them design-wise I realized that a template would come in pretty handy. Instead of redrawing the same little guy over and over in sketch form I decided to ease the process by making an easily printable 8.5″x11″ pdf. Download, print, design away.

Earlier this week I found time to slap together a button for PAX Prime 2010. Playing on my JonnyBrokenBones gamer ID, it features a lettermark, bloody splatters, and imperceptibly small background patterning of the Blue Bomber himself. Weighing in at 1.25″ and in a limited edition run of 100, this will be THE pin to get at this year’s PAX West.

See you in Seattle.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/2010/4/26/processor-auction-childs-play/

Jerry explains it better than I can. My only part in this was to have partcipated in the Card Sharks event at PAXEast, meeting up with people, trading some cards with people at the show, and adding my card to the binder that was eventually presented to the PA guys.

Dave (@DaveSchrader on Twitter), the man who spearheaded the entire trading card idea, deserves the bulk of the credit since he spent the time and made the effort to present our cards during one of the PAX panels, and when gifted with a really expensive piece of hardware acknowledged that the Card Sharks was a community effort, and unselfishly gave it back to PA to be auctioned off for the Child’s Play charity.

And now I present for your viewing pleasure, JonnyBrokenBones:

This image makes the most sense to those who are familiar with the lesser known brother of H.P. Lovecraft…

So I’ve slapped on my blogging training wheels and am trying to a bit more update focused. Since I’ve been away from the drawing tablet for quite some time and am attempting to get my sketching skills back up to snuff, I’m going to make an earnest effort to post my successes and failures here.

Today’s offering: Funny looking babyish t-rexafunkasaurus.

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.

A simple update to display the logo for coffee czar, a Pulp Heroes related design project. I don’t know how much actual use this guy will see in or out of comic, but I do know that it’s only 2 colors (3 if you count white) and doesn’t look half bad. Although I am considering making the hand look more like a spiked gauntlet. Coffee Czar, ruling over caffeinated beverages with an iron fist.

I’ve also noticed that my lightbox plugin is no longer working. After downloading the newest version, and making edits to the script as noted in the WordPress codex, it’s still not working. I love that I’m away from my blog for so long each time that I need to spend an extra hour trying to troubleshoot the things that have broken while I’ve been away. I’m not sure if that’s incentive to blog more, or to just not bother.

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.

That being said, I just wanted to pimp my homegirl Brandi’s Etsy site, See Monkey Bead. She makes the jewelry, I made the banner. 

Head hurts, mouth yawns, design awaits.