I’m a Player.

I have officially joined the ranks of Dribbble (big ups to my boy, Ed Nacional), a community for designers to show and tell what they are working on with small screenshots. I was a bit hesitant at first, but the more I use Dribbble the more I like it, and I plan on utilizing it from here out. There is a strong sense of community (dominated by web designers it seems) and it has already proven itself a valuable venue for feedback on in progress work. Bottom line, if you are interested in seeing all the nitty gritty stuff that I am working on day in and day out, you can follow me on Dribbble if you have an account, or subscribe to the RSS feed of my shots if you don’t.

Added bonus: Dribbble seems to be a breeding ground for the trendiest of the trendy trends in web and graphic design, so I also use it as a system of checks & balances for myself in my never ending sisyphusian battle to speak with a unique voice through my work.

It has also been valuable for me to thoroughly examine and use a web based service that serves the creative crowd, as I am also currently designing one.

One last thought: it seems that successful services have been very intentionally limiting the size or magnitude of their submitted content and using it as a marketing point, Dribbble and Twitter are the two best examples. This seems to me to be related to the idea that limiting oneself in art or design is one of the best ways to get inspired. “Make something beautiful” is much harder than “make a beautiful black and white flyer for a local punk show using only a photocopier”.

Announcing Crowdstorms

Senior year is in full swing and I have a lot of pots on the stove. The time has finally come to start publicizing one of the most exciting projects I have in the works, which is a comprehensive and (hopefully) unique web service that I will be building with my good friend, Josh.

The name of the project is Crowdstorms, and it will be a tool that helps designers, illustrators, writers, and other creatives form and develop ideas. It will use the power of words and people’s unique associations with them to fuel the creative process and encourage unconventional solutions to visual problems. Details are still fuzzy, but the site will allow users to create “topics” and then ask the community to populate them. It will carefully track all of the relationships different people form between words and ideas, building an associative reference tool unlike anything currently available.

I will keep this blog updated with the major news concerning Crowdstorms, but for all the behind the scenes action, check out the development blog Josh and I are maintaining. If you are interested in the private beta, sign up to be notified when it is available.

Harry Caul, Jazz Performer Sketches

Some posters for my boy Harry Caul. These will help him further deceive his booty call.
This is one part of a pretty extensive branding system that is currently in progress, but I thought I would share these.

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Afflicted Little Men

Some teaser/progress work for a freelance project. I tend to draw a lot of afflicted little people.

Drunken Surveillance Master

Messing around with some themes and characters from my favorite films tonight. Hoping to start posting more sketches and in progress stuff on here.

Specialists vs. Extremists

Some thoughts on extremists vs. specialists, with a few little diagrams.

I will now make up a person for the purposes of illustrating what has been bouncing around my head for the past couple of days.

There is this guy I know named Jerry. Jerry is a very passionate person, especially about one subject in particular: lighting fixtures. Jerry’s job is to sell and install lighting fixtures, in his spare time he reads his favorite lamp blogs, and he surrounds himself with other lighting enthusiasts. By all quantifiable measures, it would seem that Jerry is an expert in lighting: the guy you would want to have around when making lighting decisions in your own home. However, for the sake of this story at least, Jerry is an extremist. Though he may know all there is to know about these fixtures themselves, he has no interest in your family, your home, or your specific lighting needs. When you ask him a question about lamps, his answer is so full of jargon and the snobbery that all to often comes with expertise that he is no help to you. Despite all of his knowledge, he is useless and irrelevant to you and your lighting woes.

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A Word is Worth 1000 Pictures: The Importance of Words in Brainstorming

A few thoughts on ideas and brainstorming to close out the year:

It seems to me pictures have become a much bigger part of the way we communicate these days, largely due to the internet, methinks. Of the 95 RSS feeds I am subscribed to, only two or three ever have the backbone to post content free of pictures, and a solid five or six only post images. While I may agree with the ol’ adage “A picture is worth 1000 words,” I hope people aren’t forgetting how valuable and powerful a word can be.

With this time between semesters comes not a break, but rather a frenzied attempt from me to finish, or at least start, all of the self initiated or otherwise school-unrelated projects I have piled up for myself over the last six months. This means I have been doing a lot of brainstorming recently, and with some reflection I have come to realize that my methods for working through ideas are almost completely based on words. While I think most people sit down and start sketching to hash out ideas, I tend to start writing. (Probably largely due to this exercise from earlier in my education at MICA).

Words hold such power because they are a hot medium, as McLuhan would say. An image is flat and tells the whole story; if it is crisp and in focus, it leaves little to no room for interpretation (of the image itself at least, the “concept” that produced the image is a whole different matter). A word however, is completely unique, not just to other words, but to every individual person. In reality, there are no true synonyms: big, huge, gigantic and massive may be more or less interchangeable, but each evokes a slightly different feeling. I have found these nuanced differences between words to be the best way for me to represent, sort and generate my ideas. Once I have found a set of words, maybe two or three, maybe twenty or thirty, that I think represents the idea I have, the sketching process becomes an investigation into what these words look like, both in and out of context of the words surrounding them. You’d be amazed at the scope and scale of visuals that can spring from something as simple as “What does authenticity look like?”

May your 2010 be even better than your 2009! I have a lot of stuff coming down the pipes, including a lot more activity on this ol’ blog. Stay tuned!

Modular Type Skeleton

I am in the midst of creating a modular letter set; our first assignment with House Industies‘ Ben Kiel. This is simply a skeleton I have created to construct the alphabet with as few pieces as possible. Now, I am actually planning on putting this into Flash, creating a symbol in the library for each module, and then editing the individual modules one at a time and watching how they affect the entire alphabet. Hopefully with this process I can create a unique, balanced, and dynamic letter set.

Perhaps I will look into an interesting way to publish the dynamic Flash file, allowing other folks to create their own modules and plug them into the skeleton I have made. Let me know which of the multiple/alternative letter forms are most successful? Let me know in the comments.

Poster for MICA’s Screening of Objectified (in progress)

I am creating a poster for MICA‘s screening of Gary Hustwit’s latest documentary, Objectified. In order to do this, I tracked pretty much every object I touched throughout the course of a day and then proceeded to illustrate each one. I wanted to allude to Build‘s poster for the film, but take the basic idea a bit further and put a concept behind it. I will post the final and printed version in my portfolio.

P.S. That image above is massive, just re-sized on this page. Download it or view it in it’s own window to see some more detail.

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Every Single Object I Touched Today

I will be making a poster for MICA‘s screening of Gary Hustwitt’s new film, “Objectified“, and I was inspired by this quote from Mr. Hustwitt…

On an average day, each of us uses hundreds of objects. (Don’t believe it? Start counting: alarm clock, light switch, faucet, shampoo bottle, toothbrush, razor…) Who makes all these things, and why do they look and feel the way they do? All of these objects are “designed,” but how can good design make them, and our lives, better?

… so I decided that for my poster I would track all of the objects I use in a single day. This is pretty much everything I touch or use, excluding food, architecture, and mother earth. I know the evening is young, but here is the list I have compiled:

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