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 (800x600, 1024x768 & 1280x1024), though the 800x600 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?