Monday, May 25, 2009

From here to there.

Since I'm stuck at work on this Memorial Day, I'm going to update the status of the hole in my driveway I like to pitch money into: my aging Yamaha Motorcycle. This weekend I finally bolted together the penultimate upgrade to the bike to bring it into the realm of modernity. Yesterday was a series of quick rides between rainstorms to double-check my adjustments. Sometime soon, I'll finish tightening up the suspension, but for now I have a reliable rider that doesn't look like I pulled it out of a barn.

Behold! From this:


To this:


And in only two short years.

Thursday, May 21, 2009

It's no so much "where do you get your ideas?", but "why do you get them...."


I don't care what Picasso said. He was a colossal jerk.
Always cite your sources.


I tend to judge the minutiae of my life by one simple question: What would the 14-year-old me think of this?*

So when the local Rollerderby team approached me to design a t-shirt for the state championship they were hosting, my inner fourteen-year-old began jumping up and down while my outer 31-year-old started giggling and nodding like a madman.

My day job currently has me doing a good bit of t-shirt design**, so I wasn't going into this totally blind. I have several sources for inspiration for doing spot color design, notably this collection of vintage matchbooks. After paging through those, coming up with and (nearly immediately) shooting down a series of ideas, I decided a constructivist design would work well and looked up some examples of this type of work and almost immediately found this which was dead-on perfect, given the bandanna as the unofficial marker of a derby girl***.

This work was done by Rodchenko for a poster about book censorship, and a small amount of Googling revealed the original photographic image and thus was the design stolen called into being, printed on t-shirts and worn by hundreds of screaming fans at a rollerderby tournament.

*I have had thoughts of doing an occasional webcomic based off of this, since I first broached the idea here, but then I discovered that K. Beaton did it first and she can draw better than me, so I'll let her do it instead. But, I digress...

**Let this be a lesson to anyone who is considering getting an art degree in the hopes of being a working artist. Specialization is for insects. I have an undergraduate in photography, and am finishing up my master's in ceramics, and I'm working as a graphic designer (a field in which I have take exactly one college course).

*** Not so much a gang thing, but a utilitarian one as it prevents helmet hair. Pigtails are also a common theme, with visible bruises being the third most common. There's a sociology thesis in here somewhere on hierarchy and group markings in aggressive team sports, but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader...

Friday, May 15, 2009

Monday, May 11, 2009

Saying the perfect thing at the right time...

From here. Happy mother's day, mom.