BonFX

For pages 12-13 of my Art House Co-Op “Sketchbook Project” Moleskine, I wanted to do a simple exercise using quasi-isometric shapes. The inclusion of Blackletter type is just totally random. I drew the substructure in pencil and did the black and white work with a Micron .01. The Moleskine paper in this particular book has not grown fond of me nor I of it.

• The Moleskine paper is prone to bleeding anything and everything. If I open the Moleskine in room lighting, it looks exactly like the scan. I normally use a variety of acid-free, heavy weight white paper with the thick wire binding you see in various sizes at any art store. I have never bled through any of the pages. It must be this particular model.
• While the flatness and paper texture are wonderful, the Moleskine paper weight is not heavy enough to support really any media without bleeding. Oh well.
• As my project is entitled, “It’s not easy being green”, we can now add “It’s not easy drawing in a semi-transparent Moleskine notebook”, and hence, I have to draw concepts, if any, very lightly on the even page and focus on only using one side of the odd page.

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Drawing is fundamental to graphic design. Habitual drawing increases the skills of logo designers, page layout designers, and typographers alike. When a designer “makes do” by not sketching on a routine basis, the designer in some ways in shortchanging his or herself. Yes, designers absorb a lot of information from other designers and can “get by” by in the appropriate sense copying the great work of others. But, as some point, all the great design work we should and do borrow from, comes from the hard work of some designer with a good foundation in drawing. … [Read More]

There are 4 vital ways every freelance graphic designer must divide up their day if they want to continue to develop as an artist and stay ahead of the competition, be it agencies, design firms, or even other freelance designers. Let’s start with the first 3 you might already be able to guess: … [Read More]

Art House Co-Op has started The Sketchbook Project: Library. Everyone who signs up gets a Moleskine sketch book to fill up any way they’d like. However, each Moleskine is barcoded and themed. I got mine yesterday, with the theme of “It’s not easy being green”. I immediately misunder-read this as “It ain’t easy being green.” So, my first sketch is wrong. But my second sketch makes good the bad with its own piece of art. The entire project has to be completed and back to Art House Co-Op by December 1, 2009. From there, it will be on tour across the country with all the other completed sketchbooks. … [Read More]

In early 2008, a great question was posed on a midwest Adobe User’s Group list I belong to:

“A question just came up at the happy hour, and none of us know the answer. Standard resolutions in the web and print world are 72, 300 and 600. None of these are natural squares, which assuming a regular dot layout grid seems… well, confusing?”

I’m going to paste my reply as-is below. Several people found it quite useful but now it largely walled-up inside a Yahoo group archive. Since it’s a largely unedited stream-of-consciousness kind of post, I’d be glad to take questions about any and every aspect of what I’m now posting. … [Read More]