Popped into my head from out of nowhere a few days ago and I just had to make it. Figured out the Futura Condensed Extra Bold is the font of the original Smokey the Bear poster by running it through WhatTheFont. Took a headshot of ol’ Smokey into Photoshop, reduced it down to about 20 pixels tall and then blew it back up using “nearest neighbor” scaling to retain the pixelation. Took the resulting image into Illustrator and did a quick live-trace so that it’s easily scalable. Printed a few poster-size versions to hang in the classrooms at work.

Preview of a series in progress. I’m taking the official Street Fighter 4 artwork and making vector duotone silhouettes from them. Each character’s form is done in black and then an accent is added, matching the character’s main signature color and attack. The process of vectorizing is simplified with live-trace, but I’m still doing a lot of cleanup and individual adjustment to ensure recognizability. I got the idea from a series of linoleum block prints that I did back in college that were black & white silhouettes of 6 different Soul Calibur 2 characters.

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.