Design Something Every Day 29/365

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.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-08-29

• Web Design Boot Camp starts Sep 1st at @cre­ative­LIVE! Sign-up for FREE: http://bit.ly/webbootcamp #
• 12 Logo Design Mis­takes To Avoid http://goo.gl/fUDM #
• My god, it’s full of stars… great large jpegs from 2001 Stan­ley Kubrick — Deserv­ing of Wor­ship http://pineapples101.blogspot.com/ # Read more »

Design Something Every Day… Dude 28/365

A lit­tle thing I made for an upcom­ing event at Tem­ple De Hirsch Sinai. It’s based on The Big Lebowski of course. The Dude abides.…

Design Some­thing Every Day 27 of 365

To fol­low this lit­tle bit up, here’s one of my favorite scenes from The Big Lebowski.

2001: A Design Something Every Day Odyssey

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.

Design Some­thing Every Day 26 of 365

Here’s a few great Kubrick links and resources:

Stan­ley Kubrick: Inter­views (Con­ver­sa­tions With Film­mak­ers Series)
Ed. By Gene D. Phillips

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
• The Offi­cial Warner Broth­ers Site for his films.
• Kubricks IMDB Site

Finally the trailer to 2001: A Space Odyssey, what inspired this post to begin with.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-08-22

• Free #tiki music! Humu Kon Tiki » Blog Archive » Swank Vinyl Exot­ica I & II, Now Free http://goo.gl/TXuP #
• Great col­lec­tion of Book Cover Archive http://www.abudnitz.com/covers/ via @HOW­brand #
• Just dis­cov­ered a new func­tion on my iPod Touch. Appar­ently in can play music as well as apps! # Read more »

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-08-15

• Every dog has his day and some times you get lucky, http://bit.ly/9XBDX9 Amaz­ing video col­lec­tion of pedestrian’s close calls. #
• RT @Design­r­fix: A Guide How To launch A New Design Blog http://bit.ly/bCglDS #
• File under: Good to know. RT @Design­raid: 117+ Web­sites To Sub­mit Your Design News: http://su.pr/2cEXD8 #
• New Sounds of Exot­ica: Tiki Clas­sics Get Shaken, Stirred, and Per­fected by the Mas­ter­ful WAITIKI 7 | Got Music Tal­ent! http://goo.gl/JJp9 #
• The King at the Smith­son­ian… un hun.… National Por­trait Gallery | Echoes of #Elvis http://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/elvis/ #

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-08-08

• Cool tech­nique for the #pho­to­shop tool box! Change Col­ors In Pho­to­shop With The Hue Blend Mode http://goo.gl/SABL #
• mmmm.… beer Col­lec­tion of Won­der­ful Vin­tage Beer Adver­tise­ments and Posters | The Inspi­ra­tion Blog http://goo.gl/sYfE #
• Tiki Archi­tec­ture: #Tiki in the US Air Force http://goo.gl/veBp # Read more »

Adobe InDesign (really) Quick Tips

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

Design Something Every Day 25 of 365

A lit­tle elec­tronic ad for an upcom­ing event at Tem­ple De Hirsch Sinai.

Design Something Every Day 24/ 365

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.