Not quite a square.

Project Description: Do Ligatures, Stacked Text, Figureground Reversal, Symbol Replacement to practice Illustrator skills for the logo project.

New Skills: 

• Ligatures
• Stacked Text
• Figureground Reversal
• Symbol Replacement
• Move Anchor Point
• Outline View
• Live Trace
• Place JPEG
• Divide
• Group

Self Reflection:

It's irritating how my final products don't fit together like a compact minimalist shape... if only, if only.  Also, I finished it before I was shown the ampersand reversal artbook, but I'll try my hand at that some other time.  It was remarkably difficult to to do entire words of symbol replacement.  In case you can't tell, it's coexist, Pokemon, cookie and Asian.  I'm a giant geek, I know.  

Participation/Project: 10/10?

Insert Enthusiasm Here

Project Description: Do VectorDiary 8-12.

New Skills: 

• Crayon, of which I draw crappy pears with
• Creating Brushes
• Shapes + Brushes
• Blend Setting
• Grouping Layers
• Compound Paths
• Stroke
• Brushes
• Gradient
• Fill with Pattern
• An Unwavering Enthusiasm for Adobe Illustrator.  Yay.

Self Reflection:

W-w-w-wrath on the pear.  YES TO THE SHAPES; NO TO PEN TOOL.  It's 8:23 and I haven't had coffee.  Can't self reflect.  Can't function.  Ahhh.  Edit: Now I have a cold but Tylenol has made me surprisingly lucid.  I can't quite remember doing this one, but I remember being extremely frustrated with the pear and button overlay.  Everything else was easy enough, like creating brushed, pattern fills, blending modes, compound paths and "spa" daisies (really?).   Fun times, fun times.

Participation/Project: 10/10?

Roach Dioxide

Cookie if you get the reference.

Hint: David Foster Wallace is awesome.

New Skills: 

• Compound Path
• Creating New Brushes
• Brushes
• Strokes
• Using Brushes for Strokes
• Compound Editing
• (Supposed to) Gradient Overlay
• Blending Effects
• MOAR STROKES.
• Badly drawn pears. 

Self Reflection:

Yay, vector diary days eight through twelve!  Can you sense my enthusiasm?

For some reason, the gradient overlay using screen just didn't work.  Result: white circle.  Makeshift solution: Opacity!  Adobe troubleshooting fail... 

My pear is lopsided.  I used pesticides.

Pretty spa flowers?  

And also, using shapes for kesy is SO MUCH BETTER THAN USING PEN; WORDS CANNOT EXPRESS WHAT CAPS LOCK CAN.

Participation/Project: 10/9.5

Also, I'm aware my self reflections read like existentialist ramble.  Think Thomas Pynchon meets ADD.

food, squirrels, food.

Wuuut.

This is kinda sorta amazing.

IT MAKES FONTS FROM YOUR FACE.
(that was not a your face joke)

It's very good for putting off AP Lang essays too.

Excess, of commas, ftw.

Chicken Soup for the ADD Mind

 So there's a key, and a bunny and a clover and a bone... ADD a'splode.  THERE ARE COLORS EVERYWHERE.

Before you go to the next one, open up this link.  Go ahead, I'll wait.

BAM.

Yes.  YES.  Props to Strauss and his ridiculously named Also Sprach Zarathustra. 

New skills: I guess pen tool, though I absolutely hate it.  Pathfinder, shapes, fills, pencil and gradient too, but mostly, I learned to abhor the pen tool.  Seriously, can I just go back to Photoshop?  Illustrator isn't my cup of tea.

Self reflection: Well. for one, everything was just hard. The key took forever until I just did an okay curve with the pen tool and copy/pasted like crazy to get it over with.  The pencil tool is alright, the hands took me a while, and the four leaf clover was easy thanks to the ever handy ctrl+c and ctrl+v.  PC ftw, I'm pretty sure 30% of my time was wasted since my control functions didn't work and I had to turn to the dark side (command, ugh).  Some of the functions in the tutorial just didn't translate whatsoever... rage.  Well, I spent one or two days on the whole intro so I could go do the spaceship, which looks infinitely better than some random shapes on an artboard that I did without trace.  The ship turned out well, but the introduction days (a) frustrated me and (b) are saved in a low quality JPEG, but eh.

Participation/Product: 9/9; I didn't know about trace at the time.  Que sera sera.  (Kind of) freehanded it.

The SAT Is Its Own Special Kind of Hell

You know it's true.

Everything Should Taste Like Bacon

Baconnaise.

Bacon Salt.

Mmmvelopes.

These men are gods.

Gaps

Gap's new logo absolutely sucks.  It looks like a fourth grader did it in some shoddy clip-art program.  Besides, the old one was practically an icon.

But it does leave room for delicious fun-poking parody.

http://www.craplogo.me/

I believe the term is 'win'.

Knockout Words

So, mandatory blog posts, mandatory blog posts...

Did my JPEGlicious knockout words.  Hurrah?

So, first off we have tacos.  Delicious, delicious tacos.  Mmm... I think I would like to 

... on them now.  Food is delicious.  

And last, the giant smorgasbord of image run ons, the mother of vector mask overusage.  Not sure if I should put a stroke on it or not because I don't want to to detract from the sheer non-effort and the fact I had to troll through my 60 downloaded images for good color value (not without some help from RGB/CYK adjustments).

Credits & thanks to: tacos, Cookie Monster, cookies, ramen, black forest cake, cherry pie, parrots, strawberries, peppers, peaches, maple leaves, violins, Nemo, oranges, finches, foxes, lemons, wheat, flowers. banana, more leaves, Monet, cacti, kiwis, turtles, canaries, the Caribbean islands, fish, Van Gogh, shark week and hummingbirds.

Special thanks to Jos Buivenga and his exljbris Font Foundry.  Museo is pretty much my life.  So is Diavlo.  And Fertigo.  And Fontin... I do believe I Love Typography.  Geeky... but awesome.

The cake is a lie; that is all.

We Live in 1713

I have found that the number of Chrome tabs I have open acclimates to how busy my life is.

Yesterday I had a mess of tabs, hemorrhaging MLA formats by Purdue, sweet social documentaries on Netflix, lists of quotes from Grapes of Wrath and The Jungle and above all, lots and lots of Wikipedia tabs.  I mean, heaps of information about pluots, Aileen Wuomos and Phantom Time Hypothesis.  Awwyeah, massive conspiracies based around time are what’s up.

Oddly, I’m not having a panic attack over the fact that I have yet to bang out three paragraphs of a bland essay that tastes like cardboard.  It’s absolutely horrible and chock full of bullcrap.

7:30 AM should be illegal. 

The Red Balloon

I just want to make something beautiful.

Also, where was my sentient balloon?