The New Yorker cover created on an iPhone

The New Yorker Magazine has a tradition of excellent, challenging and often times controversial covers for its weekly magazine. This was evident during the previous American election, with two covers illustrating the stereotypes of both candidates (see here and here). The propriety and tastefulness of the covers created something of a political firestorm, or at least in media circles. It gave the media a chance to feign indignation, point fingers, and flog one if their own, something that seems to be great sport amongst the fifth estate. Of course, the Daily Show had the most rational and hilarious take on the controversy see here.

Politically the New Yorker takes risks not only in content, but also in style and technique.  I admire the way their editors and art directors take chances and have cover illustrations not only by a wide assortment of artists using a staggering assortment of medium; from oils or watercolors,  pen and ink, even the amazing illustrations of Bob Staake created using the 3.0 version of Photoshop (the latest version of the program is 11).  Now we can add the Apple iPhone to such august company.

The current issue features a cover created by illustrator and designer Jorge Colombo. It’s pretty amazing, he drew the cover using Brushes, an application for his iPhone. According to the New Yorker he drew it while standing for an hour outside Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in Times Square. Which I find a delightfully quirky and surreal factoid for some reason.  Watch him creating his cover below:

Seeing Colombo’s fantastic work being created on a simple iPhone app and the work that Staake can do using only Photoshop 3.0 is pretty amazing. It should reinforce the point that computers and software mere are tools, powerful and great tools to be sure, but they exist only in service of some other purpose. In this case we should not  be blinded by the technology and forget the meaning of the art. Photoshop, iPhones and their ilk are wildly different that the primitive brushes of the Lascaux caves, but are singular in that they are means to an end, the creation of art. I need to remind myself of this when I obsessively pour over the latest tutorials on PSD Tuts or slobber over the newest bells and whistles in the next Adobe release. Photoshop is a wicked tool, but still just a tool.

via Gabriel Campanario / Urban Sketchers

If your interested check out these related links:

• The New Yorker article on the cover read it here…
• iPhone Brushes Flickr Group, it is pretty amazing. here…
• Jorge Colombo’s Website here…
• ABC News interviews Jorge Colombo here…
• Bob Staake’s Website here…
• More Bob Staake illustration techniques on YouTube here…
• Peruse the Covers of The New Yorker Magazine for inspiration. Search the archives here…

Andy Warhol draws Debbie Harry on an Amiga

This is pretty interesting. Andy Warhol digitally painting a picture of Debbie Harry with a Commodore Amiga at a product launch press conference in 1985!

Add one part Andy Warhol of soup can fame, a dash of Debbie Harry of Blondie and toss in the Amiga and you get an amazing stew of early 80′s pop culture in one bit sized morsel.

It is pretty funny watching Andy Warhol and the Commodore host interact; it is worst on-screen chemistry I’ve seen since Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman in Attack of the Clones. However, I do love the term “leaky flood filter,” (at1:17). I think I’ll start using that when I have a poorly made layer mask or when losing to the “The Flood” in Halo. It is interesting that the host sees the leaky flood filter as a mistake and Warhol thinks it is pretty and wants to keep it. That shows the vast gulf that sometimes exists between the creator of something and the end user. It’s something that authors, designers, illustrators, film makers and developers should keep in mind when their creations are released in the world. That is, no matter what your intentions are or how good your plan is, when your creation is released it will take on a life of its own.

via John Knack

Twitter Background Templates for Illustator & Photoshop

Twitter is all the rage, but how can you make a great looking twitter page? Twitter gives the user limited, yet flexible design options. As social networking sites go, this gives you the ability to create a unique look unlike say, Facebook. But it keeps things much cleaner than the design nightmare that is MySpace.

Creating a cool background is the key to differentiating yourself on Twitter. After reading Jennifer Farley, of Laughing Lion Design‘s excellent  tutorial on Sitepoint (click here to read it) about creating your own backgrounds for Twitter. I was inspired, and created some generic templates based on her tutorial. Download the my templates and use Jennifer’s tutorial and these templates and before you know it, you’ll have a background that will make everyone a twitter about. Oh, man, I can’t believe I actually used a lame twitter pun. Twitter puns are the lowest form of humor, it makes one sound like, dare I say it… a twit. I did it again!

Download these free templates for your own use, pass along the link if you like them. The templates for Photoshop and Illustrator with guides and are in the three most common browser sizes (800×600, 1024×768 & 1280×1024), though the 800×600 might be a bit useless, but you might as well have the complete set. These were created in the CS3, if anyone is interested I can save down the Illustrator version to an earlier version.

Also you can follow me on Twitter.

A few secrets from the Deke Lounge, you ‘betcha!

Photoshop? You 'betcha!

When you visit the Deke Lounge to experience some liquid learning make sure you take off your shoes. The incomparable Deke McClelland and Colleen Wheeler do another bang up job in the Lounge this week. Joining them again are Russell Brown, the Bill Nye of Photoshop (okay it’s just the white lab coats that make me think this) and John Nack Adobe wizard and wordsmith.

This week the patrons of the Lounge discuss Layers and Filters in Photoshop. While imbibing at the Lounge,  John Nack let slip some interesting factoids about my beloved Photoshop. It must have been the strong filtered and layered Martini that freed his already verbose tongue.

First cat that escaped the bag was that in CS4 the maximum number of layers that you could have in an individual file is somewhere on the order of 8,000. Though one of the commenter’s on deke.com say this isn’t true, but it only matters on the amount of RAM you have. The commenter labeled his comment as AFAIK,  which I had no idea what that meant. After consulting with Dr. Google, I discovered it means ” As Far As I Know.” Considering that I can’t see why you would want even 1,000 layers let alone 8,000, I don’t think I’ll spending any time testing this. So I’ll just trust John Nack on this one .

The second secret of Photoshop John slipped was that although the maximum size of a PSD is 200,000px x 200,000px it wasn’t always this way. At one point they were testing letting a PSD have a max image size of 2 million pixels by 2 million pixels, you know in case you wanted to literally Photoshop the moon. However Adobe couldn’t find a powerful enough machine that wasn’t previously engaged trying to beat Gary Kasparov  to work on a file that large. So were stuck with only 200,000 measly pixels, who can do anything with that?

Finally and most awesome was the revelation that the super secret  Adobe code name for the Photoshop component code is,  Fargo. As in Fargo the movie… you ‘betcha! The component code is apparently the engine that runs the software and with the head of the code cut off adobe uses this code in its other suite of programs (Flash, Illustrator, etc…) so they can use PSD’s and keep the structure of the file.  Keeping the hierarchical structure of image files, in a way turns Photoshop into a sort of database program when you jump from program to program, which is very cool.

This is pretty interesting internal info, and it even was so cool it got Colleen to temporarily speak in the 3rd person! Listen to the Martini Hour and you’ll see. In addition to this version, all the previous versions of the code were also named after other Coen Brother’s films,  including Blood Simple, I sure hope Raising Arizona was in there.

Man, Photoshop, programming and Coen Brother’s? TRIPLE GEEK SCORE! Also the before mentioned commentator, who claims his name is one Jeff Tranberry said:

The component code names come from the Minnesota engineering team, specifically Tim Wright, who’s a huge Coen Bros. fan (The Coens are originally from MN).

I can’t believe I am actually quoting someone from the internet!  But it seems legit enough to me. On a creepy note when researching this I did find that Timothy Wright, the Adobe Systems Engineer  in question donated in the 2008 presidential election. See what sort of weird information you can find on the internet! Though the elections commission said precious little about the film habits of Mr. Wright.

Go check out the Deke Lounge…. and don’t forget to take off your shoes!

A Modern Totem

A Modern Totem

I saw this striking image from boing boing of what I consider a modern totem or tiki statue. A group of Dutch artists carved a tree trunk into the shape of a full-sized stand-up arcade video game.

It’s an interesting work on a number of levels, but this medium and style of video game is slowly going away. The iconic image of this style of arcade game seems dated in the world of personal video game systems, hand held gaming and the internet. I suppose there are still arcades, but this style of game system belongs, like the Jedi Knights, to an older more civilized time. Like the 80′s.

Perhaps someday people will puzzle on the meaning of this totem and it will be as unrecognizable as the fallen Moai of Rapa Nui or Easter Island. If video killed the radio star, who killed the arcade game?