For this entry into my Design Something Every Day project I created a digital doodle for one of the greatest books of the 20th Century, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. The book pulls back the curtain of civilized society and explores the darker superstitious and bestial side of human nature. It is truly a must read.
Lord of the Flies has had a very deep influence on the culture, with references and allusions in works as diverse as LOST, Survivor, the Simpson’s. Two major film versions of the book have been produced, the fair Harry Hook 1990 version and the far superior 1963 Peter Brook classic. You can watch the Brook’s film on YouTube, if you haven’t seen this disturbing film, please do, it is well worth it.
I am a big fan of filmmaker Stanley Kubrick (1928–1999), so you can imagine my excitement when I saw this post of great promotional pictures from 2001: A Space Odyssey on the blog Stanley Kubrick — Deserving of Worship. A nice sentiment for one of the greatest film makers we’ve ever seen.
Kubrick was great filmmaker and a real artist. His films have been completely digested by the culture and have become a sort of visual short hand.. the monolith, Dr. Strangelove, Alex & his droogs… These archetypal images have burned them selves in or collective consciousness like ghosted images on an old CRT monitor. The great Margaret Cho is aware of Kubrick’s iconic power (see here). His lasting influence is the true mark of a genius and consummate craftsman.
In that vein I designed this desktop wall paper for my computer as apart of my Design Something Every Day Project.
This book includes the amazing interview with Eric Nordern originally published in Playboy (September 1968). It has one of my all time favorite quotes, something of a mantra for me:
The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death — however mutable man may be able to make them — our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.” — Stanley Kubrick
Some good Kubrick resources:
The Kubrick Site — an Amazing collection for all things Kubrick
It’s amazing how long you can use a program, feel like you know it, then suddenly discover a simple little shortcut or technique that will save you a massive amount of time. It’s a mixture of “ah-ha, that’s awesome!” and a little dash of “man, why didn’t I know that, I’m such an idiot.”
This just happened to me, I was listening to Episode 73 of the Martini Hour with Deke McClelland and Colleen Wheeler and they became embroiled in a discussion about how to get out of the text-editing mode inside PhotoShop via a keyboard shortcut. When you are typing or editing text and you want to access other tools you can’t make them active through the traditional keyboard short cuts, because if you hit the letter for the keyboard shortcut you’ll only add that letter or if you try to hit return/enter on the main keyboard it will just create a new line like in a word processor. There is, however, a keyboard short cut for it in PhotoShop: either the enter key on the number pad or hit CTRL + Enter (PC) / CMD + Return (Mac). Colleen thought it was the ESC key at first, Deke said her confusion was because she was so used to using that shortcut in InDesign to do the same thing and she just expected it to work in the same way in PhotoShop.
That was a light bulb moment for me. I never knew that shortcut in InDesign! That is a huge time saver and I wanted to pass it along. When you are typing or editing text within a text box in InDesign and you want to switch to a different tool via a keyboard short cut, all you have to do is hit the ESC key, then you are switched to the direct selection tool with the text box you were typing in selected. It’s pretty handy tip I learned when I least expected it. By the way if you hit ESC in PhotoShop you’ll lose all of your text edits, so don’t get confused.
Here’s the shortcuts sans my ah-ha moment:
Escape text editing within InDesign:
ESC
Escape text editing within PhotoShop:
CMD + Return (Mac) CRTL + Enter (PC)
Enter on the Number keypad
A little design based off the excellent tutorial “How to Create a Mosaic Portrait from a Photograph” from the ever talented Cheryl Graham, who writes great tutorials for one of my favorite sites, Vectortuts, as well as her own blog freetransform.net. I used a picture of some goofball hamming it up for the camera (okay it was me) and used the mosaic technique and then played a bit with duplicating the layers, changing the stroke and fill colors to give it a little dimension.
For this entry into my Design Something Every Day project I created a digital doodle for one of the greatest books of the 20th Century, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. The book pulls back the curtain of civilized society and explores the darker superstitious and bestial side of human nature. It is truly a must read.
