Grid Paper

I’m working on overcoming creative ennui (read: terror) by trying out different grids. Adobe Illustrator is all fine and good, but nothing compares to paper and a pen in my hand. I still love my squares, but it’s time to make room for hexagons, circles, and polar coordinates! My cursory research hasn’t offered many possibilities, but Lay Flat Sketchbooks look promising (that off-center polar, ooh la la!) and I’ve been tormenting my printer running off “experiments” from the fabulous free graph paper generator from Incompetech (what a name!).

Enjoy!

Decide

I’m still working on this one. I recently read a blog post about creativity and jumping at new ideas and how that may be a refusal to decide, to act on the scary current ideas, so I decided to make a poster for my work area to remind me to decide rather than flinch away. I’m leery of gradients and, especially, drop shadows and glow effects, but they’re oh-so-temping =)

Jump In!

I keep thinking of starting my series of book cover reviews and then the little ‘voice of reason despair’ jumps in and tells me that I know nothing. The little voice is a frequent visitor, so I made this one to remind myself to…

Numb & Numb-er

The word placement is not quite right in this one, but my brain is taking a break for tonight

Judging a Book

I’ve gotten more specific when answering “What do you want to do [for work at some point]?” lately. For now, I want to learn to create ebooks, including book covers and inner layout.
The layout is more of a challenge than it may seem, but that is a post for another day. For today, I want to talk about covers.
In this age of self-pub, e-pub, etc, are covers still relevant? The answer is an unequivocal “Yes”. I may not be looking at a shiny book cover on a crowded bookstore shelf, but the cover still says a lot, especially when it comes to self-published books, because now there is no publisher to decide what goes on a cover and whether it will even remotely reflect the story inside. I can usually predict the quality of the novel (and figure out that it’s self-published) even before reading the excerpt. Fact is, covers matter, even on a tiny screen. They may evolve and become decoupled from their paper counterparts, but they will continue to serve a purpose – to distill graphically what lies ‘inside’.
Since most of my graphic design education is destined to be self-directed, I decided to start a series where I attempt to analyze book covers to help me see more than just the surface, as I’m prone to doing. I will start by looking at books I own and have read and move on to books that somehow caught my attention.
Here’s to judging the book by its cover!

The Very Long Internship

At the VisCom department of Austin Community College, where I am fitfully studying for a Graphic Design certificate, posters abound touting the wonders of internships (no mention of added superpowers, sadly). I’ve only ever had one internship, well, technically, co-op, and it was while I was an engineering student. The job paid, and much better than my previous stint at my then-university’s computer lab.

Internships today, with the possible exception of engineering, are almost universally unpaid. The rare few that pay anything trumpet that fact loudly. Hardly any unpaid internships meet the Department of Labor criteria, ancient though they may be:

1. The training, even though it includes actual operation of the facilities of the employer, is similar to what would be given in a vocational school or academic educational instruction
2. The training is for the benefit of the trainees
3. The trainees do not displace regular employees, but work under their close observation
4.  The employer that provides the training derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the trainees, and on occasion the employer’s operations may actually be impeded
5. The trainees are not necessarily entitled to a job at the conclusion of the training period
6. The employer and the trainees understand that the trainees are not entitled to wages for the time spent in training.

So if internships are really a way for businesses to get free labor, why don’t they simply, and honestly, ask for volunteers? Why bother whitewashing it? Do they feel like they’re doing some poor student a good deed, opening doors, etc? Very few people can afford to work for free. Food and shelter are not luxuries for anyone, students included. This is not a good deed. This is taking advantage of people desperate to do something, anything, to get a job in this economy.

Please, folks, just be honest. Ask for volunteers. You may get some. Your honesty may well widen the pool of applicants: in my 30s, I’d feel silly applying for an internship, though I am a student. But you may inspire me into a volunteer stint. Just not for 30 hours a week.

Daily: Balance

For the curious, the fulcrum A is a “scissor truss”, which has become popular and is used for cathedral ceilings. Occasionally, my wild engineering nature breaks out in my artwork

References:

Roof truss types

Trusses on Wikipedia

Untidy

No, I don’t think that nudity is necessarily untidy but it was a fun play on words =)

I’m going to play with the gradients a little more to improve readability for the final version.

Daily: Scarce

Scarcity is a concept that not everyone understands intimately. But it leaves scars and is scary indeed.

Daily #16: Spot

Wow, I can’t believe it’s been almost a month. That’s a lot of wallowing in one’s misery =)

Today’s word is pretty simple, originally I was going to use “sport” or “spout” and obscure the R or U to make it into “spot”, but in the end I just replaced the O because neither word seemed particularly expressive.

Technical issue: for some reason, Illustrator kept trying to make the final exported JPEG taller than I specified by adding white space at the bottom. No matter how much I resized the artboard and the yellow rectangle and twiddled with the outer glow effect, it wouldn’t cooperate. In the end, I gave up and cropped the image in another program.