My Design Work

The Art Assignment #3: Intimate, Indispensable GIF

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In which The Art Assignment visits New York-based artist Toyin Odutola and receives the challenge to create a GIF! But not just any GIF–it must articulate something intimate that is indispensable to you. My Entry: My (current) favorite words EPISODE 03 INSTRUCTIONS: 1. Think of something intimate that is indispensable to you. (It doesn’t have

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Amor Fati – New Shirt Design

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A new addition to my Redbubble t-shirt shop – Amor Fati. The three Moirai, the Fates, Clotho (the spinner), Lachesis (the allotter) and Atropos (the inexorable). This is one I didn’t draw myself, but found an old wood carving image (copyright free, of course) and scanned and cleaned it up in Illustrator. I’ve had it

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Kinsey 6 Shirt

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In time for pride, my new shirt design. You can buy yours here… If you were curious about what it means, here’s some information on the Kinsey Scale.

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Cat Tower Brainstorming

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Some ideas I have for a project I’d like to do – a cat tower piece of furniture for the cats to have someplace to sit. The first was an idea I got from a cartoon. The other idea I’ve been knocking around is a combo clock/cat bed tower. Not sure whether to combine these

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Team Pie and Team Cake Shirts

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I’ve been meaning to make these shirts since the first Twilight movie came out, because I never cared much for Edward or Jacob, but I do care a lot about dessert. I also have a vague recollection of having a (semi-sober) discussion (argument) with someone about whether cake or pie was better, which was quite

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Unreliable Narrator Shirt

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I was reading The Story Within the other day, and in the middle of the chapter about points of view, they have a section on the concept of The Unreliable Narrator [An unreliable narrator is a narrator, whether in literature, film, or theatre, whose credibility has been seriously compromised.] which is concept I’ve always loved.

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Online Housecleaning

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I’ve been doing a lot of housecleaning, site-wise over the past several weeks. I’m in the process of converting over some of my older blog sites to wordpress, shuttering others, and putting up fresh new “coming eventually” pages at all of the URLs I own. I’ve been playing with Foundation by Zurb as a CSS

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Aesthetics Department T-Shirt

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I saw some sweatshirts like this years ago in a catalog when I was too poor to buy one. Now that I’m older and have more disposable income, I haven’t found one like it – at least not a nicely designed one. So I made one for me. For sale on Redbubble.com. Aesthetics Department Shirt

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Nancy Drew “Girl Detective” T-shirt

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I’ve loved Nancy Drew since I was a kid, and I had a cool shirt with Pamela Sue Martin’s face on in when I was in elementary school. I always wished I had one with the silhouette on it, so I made one for myself. And you, if you want to buy one. They’re for

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Welcome to Brighton, Iowa Shirt

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Brighton, Iowa is the small town my dad’s family is from – my grandparents owned a family farm there for over 80 years and many of my extended family members still live there. Until a few years ago, there was a painted sign when you entered town that said “Welcome to Brighton, Home of Lake

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Captain Marvel T-Shirt

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I added my first Marvel Comics title to my comic book pull list today – Captain Marvel. The “new” Captain Marvel is the former “Ms. Marvel” — Carol Danvers the female adjunct to Captain Marvel from the old comics, before he died. She’s had a comic for years, but Marvel has reworked her costume and

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Produce as much as you consume project

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In the spirit of this article I linked to the other day on Jimiyo, And a challenge from the unmarketing blog on twitter: “For one day this week, stop consuming info and create something.” I’m going to try to set aside at least one day a week, (Saturdays) and possibly two (Wednesdays) in which I

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Things I totally did not do at work

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“The Tiger could be riding atop a firebolt that is dripping blood, while holding a scotch in one hand and a snickers in the other.” The results of a far-ranging discussion about what our team name and t-shirt design should be for the Global Corporate Challenge that our company is participating in at work. UPDATE:

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I heart Franklin Gothic

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I really do. Here it’s a lot more apparently why Franklin Gothic is better – the fanciful lowercase g, the Sturdy uppercase M. In Century Gothic and Futura, the M looks like it’s about to do the splits. In Century Gothic, the lowercase g is so round your eye bounces right off of it. Blech.

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All in a day’s work

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One of the best things about working for a big corporation is that you get to see real life examples of the Peter Principle in action. For example, I actually really received this as a note on a design I’m working on for a couple people very high up in our company: Add a search

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My Superhero Logo Shirt

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Because our team of designers at work is headed to the SXSW Conference in March, I decided I needed a reworked and updated shirt with my URL on it to wear to Austin. So I redesigned my lightning bolt logo and put together a newer t-shirt design with it for my Cafe Press Redbubble store,

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More Designy Goodness

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I’ve tweaked my new design here and there, made some color use more consistent and added some extra flair. There are still some css layout changes that I need to make to fix a couple of pages, and I have a one-off template or two that need some work here and there. I must say,

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Rethinking things

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I’ve been re-working my new prototypes for this site quite a bit lately, and rethinking the design, as well. I realized the other day that my dissatisfacting with some of my new direction is due to the quirkiness of the content and how long it’s been around, and how I use the site differently now

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Rough Cut: My New Site Design

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[/my_design_work/prototypes/commonplacebook/homepage.gif] Here’s what I’ve been working on all weekend. It’s quite rough, still, and needs a lot of refinement. I haven’t picked the correct font for my new logo, and there’s a lot missing and lots of little stuff that still needs cleaned up. But you get the general idea of where I’m headed. [/my_design_work/prototypes/commonplacebook/homepage.gif]

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PARODY of the "Citizens Concerned for the Constitution" Logo

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Eric Miller’s right-wing anti-LGBTQ+ hate group “Advance America” used to be called “Citizens Concerned for the Constitution.” This group has spent years lobbying in the Indiana State legislature on anti-LGBTQ+ legal issues intended to marginalize and eliminate LGBTQ+ folks from Indiana’s population. These are the folks that introduced legislation in the 1990s to get LGBTQ+

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