Archive for the ‘Design’ Category

A rasterbated poster of the Kool-Aid man busting through bricks hung up on the wall next to my office door.

Every quarter we hang up student artwork on the walls of our floor. The wall next to my office door is pretty pockmarked from all the push pins used to hold up said work; it’s pretty ugly looking. Ricky thought we should cover the wall with posters, which I agreed was a great idea. We both came up with the idea of a nice big rasterbation. We both wanted something universally recognizable with a bit of pop-kitch. After a bit of brainstorming and image searching, I put together an image of the Kool-Aid man busting through a brick wall with his trademark yell of “OH, YEAAHH!”

What’s a rasterbation? Rasterbation is a process that takes an image and allows you to scale it to any size via a halftone reproduction and then tile the result across several sheets of paper. The name comes from “The Rasterbator” a popular free online program that will create an easy-to-print PDF out of any image you upload to it. Assembling the rasterbation is easy; simply cut out and arrange the tiles in the proper order.

The wall poster is pretty neat because it’s both a cool art piece and an educational tool. I’m teaching the Electronic Print Production class this quarter, which goes into detail about the ins & outs of how printing presses work. The poster is a great example of how a halftone produces an image, as well as a useful example of imposition and pagination.

The cover to a $90 textbook

What the hell. This is a real textbook. A real textbook that costs $90 dollars. Seriously, anime? This isn’t an isolated incident either; there’s also The Manga Guide to Calculus and The Manga Guide to Molecular Biology, among other choice selections for the discriminating Japanophile who cannot function unless absorbing information via Japanese comic art. Note that some are published by Manga University! Damn, I want a degree in Manga; I’d hang that shit on my office wall.

I cannot comprehend how that cover could lend any sort of legitimacy to the book itself; it’s not even a decent drawing. Look at the anatomy. Her leg seems to be growing out of her stomach, which is in equal vertical proportion to the head and those are some long-ass monkey arms. Don’t even try to pull the “personal style” card either. That’s clearly an attempt at a realistically proportioned person based on the scale and rendering detail.

As for overall design: why is the illustration in front of a blurred photo of (or CG generated) explosion? It’s way too disjointed and there’s no cohesive connection between fore and background. It reeks of lazy cop-out design; throw a sketch on top of a stock background rather than using a fully fleshed out illustration. The “thought bubble” that forms the title is done with a thick black stroke on ellipse primitives; another stylistic departure from the illustration. Drawing a matching thought bubble is. not. that. hard. Poor implementation of the dodge tool for the laptop screen “glow.” Failure of contrasting the yellow “5th Edition” text on top of other warm colors, killing legibility. The author names fall victim to the same fate; cool contrasting with cool (but at least it is strong enough to work).

I had a client approach me and ask if I knew how to customize MySpace. I replied “Sure can!” thinking that it couldn’t possibly be that difficult. Oh sweet merciful Jesus was I ever wrong. Instead of elegant semantic code full of classes to hook into, MySpace is a horrible mishmash of tables, divs, and transparent spacer images. You can’t directly style any ID elements, since hash marks (#) get stripped out whenever you save profile edits.

I dug through googled pages of style templates until coming across Hacking A More Tasteful MySpace by Mike Davidson. However, this was written almost 2 years ago, and MySpace code has become even more convoluted since then. Enter Alexander Agnarson (LOOK at that MySpace, WOW!) and his update to Mike’s excellent hack.

Honestly, my initial efforts pale in comparison. I’m a neat freak though, and my goal was to make all of the content boxes line up with even widths down the column and even gaps throughout, so mission accomplished. It’s still a WIP, now that I have the alignment all sorted out I can work on the flourishes.