Second Submission...

Voting rewards the cute. And do you get cuter than Love bugs??? I think not.

New Derby

This weeks derby entry. The theme is bugs. So I decided to illustrate a nice jaunty tea time. They're casual right now, but imagince that right after tea they're going to play cricket, and wear monacles and say "Right-O chap." And all that. Vote for it here.

Submission part 2

So I made a second submission for this weeks derby. The theme is 'Home.' So this one is a fishy. A fish that lives in a bowl is boring, a fish that lives in a bowl while terrorizing the seven seas is awesome. The little image on the flag is kinda hard to see - it's the outline of an octopus. Yaaarrrr and such.

New Derby Shirt

This weeks theme was 'Home.' So my design is a homeless guy warming himself in front of his box house, which opens up to a cave of wonders! He's living the dream. With his fancy chair and his stylish chandeliers....

Last weeks entry got rejected for some reason -which incited an online riot. (okay. 6 people were upset but still) Before being banished to rejection land, my design got up to 15th place. Which out of 250+ designs is pretty good. And then the Woot gods released their wraith upon my anthropomorphic bike riders. Oh well, maybe I'll have a chance to re-sub it for a different derby.

New Derby shirt.

New derby shirt up at Woot.com. The theme this week was 'green'. The color or the idea. So my theory is that if endangered species rode their bikes, then we could drive our cars more. Inconsiderate animals..

Anyway. This design didn't take me nearly as long as last weeks, and I like the simplicity of this one a lot more. Not to mention it was fun to try and contort a zebra into a biking position.

Woot Shirts!!!!

So I finally submitted something to the Shirt.Woot weekly derby. The theme was to create a symbol for an imaginary nation. So my nation is the land of overcompensation. Where everything is more extravagent and there's a lot more of it. Their motto: The Amalgamated Territories of the Organization of the United Brotherhood of the Fraternal Order of the Society of Really Important Places.

It's been steady at about 84th place. As long as I stay in the top 100 I think it'll be a solid first showing in my first derby. In order for it to move up in rank people need to vote for it.

Click on the image to see it much larger and with more detail.

InDesign Seminar

Last Friday I went to a Kelby Training seminar on Adobe InDesign. It was held in the convention center in Sacramento, which is good because that's before the crazy Sacramento freeway interchange where 3 freeways called I-80 intersect with a bunch of other freeway's and I always take the wrong one. =)

The seminar was taught by Taz Tally who was exceptionally good. Not only did he make a software training class interesting, he had a lot of tips that were relevant to my job, not to mention a comparison/contrast with Quark. I learned a lot. I spent most of the seminar mentally banging my head into a wall wishing I had known this stuff a year ago when preparing my portfolio at Davis. I learned tons of time savers and shortcuts that I had no idea even existed. Plus there was a section on Adobe Bridge which is a feature that I just started using a few months ago - but I'm planing on using a lot more now since it has some excellent features (most notably the batch rename and info template).

The best thing is that the seminar came with a booklet that followed along with the seminar and had room in the margins for notes, so I could pay more attention to the demonstrations instead of furiously jotting notes like I was back in college. I also joined the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP), which gives me access to tips and tricks for all the adobe products and discounts at a bunch of places. So here's to starting my new life as an InDesign pro.

Open Office

For once I paid attention to some pop up advertising. Java was doing it's update thing and it had a little ad for a program called Open Office. So I went to the site and downloaded it. It's great! I use Works for all my word processing/spreadsheet needs. But it doesn't open .doc files. So when someone sends me a word file I can't open it. But Open Office is solving that for me in a big way - it even has a program to open Power Point files, and you can edit and save in the same format. This thing is awesome.

InDesign Seminar

So next friday I'll be up in Sacramento all day with a bunch of other designers and artsy people for an InDesign Seminar. I'm hoping this will bring back all the InDesign stuff I learned up at Davis. I haven't used the program since I graduated so this will be a nice refresher course and I'm hoping to pick up some advanced skills. It's from 10 to 5 so I'll be inundated with tons of info. But that's good. After that I'm planning on doing some mock-ups so I don't lose the skills.

Additionally I ordered Quark a few days ago and it should be on its way. Quark was one of those programs that we didn't learn in school. All of my teachers always insisted that it was an outdated program that no one used - come to find out nearly all the places I apply for work require it. So I'm going to do some online classes so I can at least be familiar with the program. Hopefully it'll be similar to InDesign so I'll be able to pick it up quickly.

Ryan can skate!!

Jubilant throngs fill streets as the national deficit is refunded due to the beauty of Ryan's skating ability. Soldiers are expected to return from Iraq within the week as Homeland Security has reduced the national threat level to an 'all clear' green due to a world wide peace-movement brought on by the skating ability of this young man. We can expect many prominent companies to be contacting him shortly about product deals.

OMG First post!!!

So today I dreamt about waffles. And then unicorns ate them. I was very sad. This is a blog. My text is pretty. Read it.