Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Colour for everything, especially wool

The post below is cross-posted on my Open Colour Standard process blog, but I thought it would be worth a look here, too.

There absolutely needs to be an open standard for print colour. I'm behind that and I'm working on it. But I'm increasingly of the opinion that there's more to it than print and screen. There's a world of physical things that depend on some sort of colour specification, whether loosely defined and changeable or rigid and consistent. On that first count, the loose and changeable, I've gotten to thinking about yarn and other animal proteins like silk and even human hair.

Anyone who knits knows well the pain of not buying quite enough yarn to finish a project, going back to the store, and finding that the yarn you've been working with, while still called by the same name, is a slightly different colour than before. Eventually, you learn to buy more yarn than you think you'll need, just for the sake of consistency. That's the problem with dye lots. Every batch of yarn, while using the same dye and same general process, comes out slightly different.

I'm not proposing to necessarily solve the dye lot problem. I have a hunch that a large part of it comes down to white and the inconsistency of the base colour of wool. But it has gotten me thinking. Wool is an interesting test case. It's easy enough to deal with, it has good possibilities for home brew colour experimentation and, most importantly, there's the dye. Wool, being an animal protein, can be coloured with acid dye. Or, to you and me, food colouring.

The food colouring angle is a good one. One of the biggest challenges of thinking about a spot colour system is sorting out the physical colour. It's been a hurdle in my exploration of colour for print. How, the thought goes, do you decide what the gamut of inks going into the spot colours will be? Are those colours consistent across ink manufacturers? And so on. This is the appeal of acid dye. In North America, at least, there's a handy gamut all ready to go. It's the set of dyes prefaced with the letters FD&C (food, drug and cosmetic) or D&C (drug and cosmetic). That's a limited gamut of dyes already carefully regulated by a government body. It takes away the gamut decision and just leaves questions of application and method guidelines/best practices, as well as the development of physical colours from those dyes and the translation of those colours into digital.

In short, expect some proof-of-concept wool and hair dye experiments from me in the near future.

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Monday, January 11, 2010

Chalkboard fridge

Fridges are great. They're great when covered in pages from old comic books, they're great bare and I'm increasingly of the opinion that they're great when they double as chalkboards. I say that, of course, because a few months back (call it October 2009 or so), I painted the fridge with chalkboard paint. It's handy for keeping a running list of groceries in stock, shopping lists, or in the case of the front of the freezer at the moment, my resolution for 2010.

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Sunday, January 10, 2010

Low art china cabinet

My parents have a china cabinet, full up of all the ancestral stuff. In my life, a china cabinet would be inappropriate. Such a severe piece of furniture would put my plastic cups and mismatched mugs to shame. Below is my answer to display storage. It has the same function as a china cabinet, that of showing off my tableware, but lacks the gravitas of more traditional styles. Mine is made of milk crates and the slats from a broken IKEA bed. It's held together by nuts, bolts and some truly massive washers. I quite like it. It isn't, however, new, only newly documented. It was built in either late 2007 or early 2008. But I've been on a documentation spree lately, so here it is.

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Saturday, January 9, 2010

Umbrella Lamp

Close to a year ago, I made the umbrella lamp. I'm posting it now because I've finally gotten around to documenting. It's fairly simple. The umbrella lamp is an old IKEA lamp with some bits removed and an equally old umbrella that's undergone much the same treatment. The light bounces off the umbrella spines, creating a slightly sparkly effect. It also casts a pretty excellent shadow. In short, dismembered IKEA lamp + broken umbrella = umbrella lamp.

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Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Cory Doctorow: illustration and article

This is the last one, I promise. But I'm incredibly pleased with this illustration and article. The article, based on my interview with Cory Doctorow, appeared in this week's issue of The Link. It's called The Digital Backwater, referencing the sorry state of telecom policy and infrastructure in Canada. And here's the pretty picture that goes with it. The copy editor has dubbed the laurel the Wreathernet. This graphic is significantly bigger than the one on The Link's website, for your zooming pleasure. And, finally, if you want to see the article and graphic as they should be, check out the pdf of this issue.

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Cory Doctorow interview: the full transcript

It's a little dense, but it's complete. Below, the full transcript of my interview with Cory Doctorow.

12 November 2009
13h15ish to 13h40ish

GC: You said a few years back that you couldn't move back to Canada because of the bad internet

CD: It's getting pretty bad in England. It's certainly pretty bad here.

GC: The CRTC just came down with a ruling on traffic shaping...

CD: Which was basically:you can only do terrible, immoral things in a limited way that we may police if we decide to. Yeah. It was a pretty awful ruling. I think the CRTC is generally asleep at the switch. I mean, the media consolidation in this country has been just disgraceful. So yeah, I'm pretty unimpressed with the CRTC as a regulator. The sheer amount of consolidation, both in media and telecoms and the cross consolidation between media and telecoms has been I think a total policy disaster for Canada. Canada's really lagging in the OECD in access, speed, cost and equality. They keep trying to redefine what broadband is in order to make us look better on the OECD stats. It's broadband if you can download a jpeg in less than a minute. This is not broadband. Broadband is Korean standard: 100MB. And up.

GC:Everyone's really proud of 21MB right now. On the whole 21MB thing, have you heard about this new thing Bell is doing? The turbostick? It's pretty awful. They're going for mobile internet, with a 500MB a month cap.

CD: I think the thing about caps is first of all, it's hard to imagine any other industrial sector that would say “there's a lot of demand for our product, how can we reduce it?” I think on the one hand, this represents a kind of failure of entrepreneurial imagination that's only possible where you have these monopolistic, badly regulated industries. The other thing about caps is what it does to network behaviour, network use. It punishes experimentation because you have to ration your network use. What this does is it undermines entrepreneurship. If you want to start a new Canadian networked business, your capacity to lure customers into your business is undermined by the fact that any customer who clicks on your web page will reduce their remaining bytes for the month. And bytes per month is a really hard measure for the average user, or even a sophisticated user to get their head around. Do you know how many bytes are in a web page before you click it? Or after you click it? We have a very hard time predicting the amount of bits that we have. So it's very hard to contain our use. So we would become even more conservative of our use. As a piece of national industrial policy, if you want to encourage the greatest amount of entrepreneurial activity on the network, the greatest amount of civic participation... Say you're planning for a pandemic swine flu outbreak and you want to produce a bunch of high quality health videos that will help people adequately prepare for the pandemic, do you really want people going “Well, I can spend my bits this month, my allowance, on looking at that health information, or I can spend it on downloading my banking information and I have to make that trade off, or I'm either going to get cut off or hit with some incredibly high overage fee.” Do you really want people making that decision? Is that good national policy? It would be different if the phone and cable companies were not subject to such enormous public subsidy. But they are. First of all, in the case of the phone companies, they got an enormous public subsidy in the fact that they exist at all. All that wire was laid with public expense. But everybody gets public subsidy in the use of the airwaves, in the use of rights of way, they essentially have de facto monopolies. I feel like the CRTC should say “If you don't want to allow a free and open network on these wires, that's your business. We'll either buy them from you at the scrap value of this copper, or you can take them out of our ground and we'll find someone else who'll run those wires. Somewhere out there, there's an entrepreneur who wants to provide the network that Canada deserves. If it's not you, that's fine. We'll have a competitive market. We'll have these guys who want to provide the network that Canadians want and you can provide the network that you think Canadians want. And if you're right and we're wrong, then Canadians will buy your service. But for so long as you're a regulatory monopoly, you have to act in the public interest.”

GC: Actually, how is it in the UK?

CD: It's not great. In general, the quality of governance in the UK is very poor. Partly because the political left has shifted so far to the right that there really isn't... I mean, I support the Lib Dems kind of generally because they're the only party that doesn't expect me to carry a biometric identity card. But as a left wing opposition goes, they're not very powerful and they're not very left wing. Labour, who are traditionally supposed to be the voice of the left, have shifted so far to the right that I think that they're... well... they're Bushites. Right? They went to war in Iraq. They are Bushites. Their policies are in line with those of George Bush. Including policies on civil liberties and so on. As a kind of microcosm of that, the network policy, the information policy is very poor. The government has been really reluctant to release information about its own operation. Quasi-governmental entities like the BBC are arguing for the right to put DRM on their broadcasts even though not only do they get public airwaves, but they get something like six or seven billion pounds a year out of the public's hands from the license fee, by governmental enforcement. It's really unseemly that they would argue for the right to DRM their signal. And now we have the copyright enforcement stuff. On one hand, you've got the anti-terrorism people saying that ISPs should be required to monitor and store all communications. That's also happening on the European level. Then you have the database nation where they're saying that we need, if not a national identity card, then a series of linked national databases that do the equivalent of a national identity card. And then finally, they're saying that we're going to have a three strikes regime where if anyone in your household is accused without evidence or conviction of three acts of copyright infringement you lose your network access and your name goes on a national register of people to whom it's illegal to supply internet access. This is really a dreadful piece of policy. I happen to live there and it's unlikely that I'm going to be moving away any time soon just for sheer inertia and the fact that my wife has a very good job, but they've got lots of network caps, they've got crummy networking policies. BT, who are the equivalent of Bell, really, in terms of being a legacy former national monopoly. BT got done for using something called Phorm, P-H-O-R-M, which I think may have had limited deployments here and in the U.S., I forget where. Initially, what they did was install Phorm as a piece of spyware on your computer without your permission. And what it did was inserted ads based on a tracking of every click you made on every page you visited. And then after they were told they can't install spyware on your computer without your knowledge, they went back and redid it as a piece of network middleware that tracks every click and does dynamic page rewriting again with these targeted ads. It's a revolting way of running a network. They're running it as an opt-out service. There's a huge amount of tracking that they're doing, a huge amount of monkeying with your network connection. It's very bad.

GC: You mentioned biometric ID cards. Of course, that's a pretty hot topic here right now because, of course, the border provinces need to comply with the U.S. Ontario is trying to roll out EDLs...

CD: Biometrics are an incredibly bad idea as a security measure. Partly because any good security token needs to be revokable in the event that it leaks. You need to be able to change your PIN if someone finds your PIN. You need to be able to get a new credit card number if your credit card number leaks onto the internet. What do you do if your finger prints leak? Right? And fingerprints leak like crazy. How many surfaces do you think you left your fingerprints on today? As a great example of this, the Chaos Computer Club lifted the fingerprints of the German chancellor, who was responsible for pushing for biometrics in that country, and made ten thousand copies of them on acetate, which would work in most fingerprint readers and widely distributed them. As a security metric, these are very very poor. And to the extent that we actually believe that we need security at the border, we should have good security, not bad security. That's one really important piece of it. But you know, the general linking of multiple databases, first of all, creates a false sense of security or certainty among the people who run those databases. There's a tendency to believe the database over reality. So if they say “well, the database says you were here and then here,” it's very hard to prove otherwise. The database becomes its own proof. And we know that those databases are very flawed and the more we link them, the more flawed they become. So there's that risk. In terms of Terry Gilliam's Brazil, it's the Tuttle-Buttle risk. If the database says you've done something bad, then you must have done something bad and it's up to you to prove that you haven't. It really shifts the burden of evidence in a way that's very contrary to the general working of liberal democracy. And then, in addition to that, there's the potential that things that aren't crimes but are private will leak out. And we tend to confuse private with secret. There's lots of stuff that's not secret but is private that becomes exposed when you have these big databases. For example, your parents did something private, otherwise you wouldn't be here. It's not a secret what they did, but it's private. It's not on the internet, unless you have extremely extraordinary parents. Everyone who went into that toilet did something private. We know what it was, but again, they don't have a glass door. There's a lot of stuff in our lives that's private, and we behave differently when our private sphere collapses. In terms of cognitive psych, I think that when we are doing stuff, we are cognitive, we think about what we're doing. When we are analytical, we're meta cognitive. We think about what we're thinking about what we're doing. And meta cognitive has its time and place as part of your overall process, but you can't be meta cognitive all the time. I don't think you can write while you're meta cognitive. If you're revising while you're writing, you just stop. It's like asking a centipede how it can walk with all those feet. It stops being able to walk because it's now thinking about how it's walking. If you want to teach someone a sport, say stickhandling in hockey, you say things like try and hit through the puck or try and be a little looser. If you say try and hold your wrist at a 45 degree angle or try and put your left skate forward and lead with your left, most of the time, the people that you're trying to teach fall apart. Coaching is all about being cognitive and not bringing people into a meta cognitive state while they're practising. When you're being watched, you're meta cognitive and there's a whole range of really important creative and daily tasks, everything from an honest conversation to just real learning, that you can't do when you're being watched. It's like trying to teach your kid how to write and looking over her shoulder while she writes the letters and going “no no no, a little steeper with the riser on that letter A, sweetie.” You can't learn to write that way. And you can't be a fully fledged citizen of a democracy that way. That's the second piece. And then the third piece is of course the risk of exposure for things that you may be marginally guilty of but that have historically been outside the import of regime. It's the equivalent of a traffic camera that issues a fine to everyone who edges one mile per hour over the limit. And the corollary of that is Cardinal Richelieu: “give me six lines of an honest man's hand and I'll find you a reason to hang him.” If you have to account for every single thing that falls into a database, it may be that there's things that you can't account for that are a mechanism to make you look guilty even if you're not guilty of anything. This is what the no-fly list has taught us, what Maher Arar has taught us. The database made him look guilty and the Americans won't take him out of the database even though he's been totally exonerated, the Americans still say that he can't fly. The building of a database state, however we conduct it, has these major risks to the common good. It needs to be really closely examined. Given that it won't secure the border, because biometrics are themselves a poor means of doing that, we need to really revisit this. And the fact that the Americans say that we need to do it... I mean, your mom had it right: if all your friends were jumping off a bridge, would you do it too? If all the other G20 nations were jumping off western democracy and landing in a boiling pit of fascism, would you jump with them? That's not a basis for good governance [shouted humorously]! Like Monty Python: Watery tarts lobbing scimitars is not a basis for good governance. That Bush says we need to do it, carried through to the Obama regime, isn't a good reason to do it in Canada.

GC: Your stock in trade is science fiction. You get to constantly imagine the world that you'd like to see. You imagine these really grim things. Some of it's beautiful, but it's pretty grim. What would you like to see in your ideal world? What would you like to see in our future?

CD: I would like to see a kind of information bill of rights that mirrored the UN declaration of human rights and that was widely accepted as kind of rote by people, where you didn't have to explain why privacy is important, why neutral networks are important. And I think if we got that, everything else becomes easier. I think that technology has this innate characteristic in that it disrupts the status quo. It's always easier to knock something down than to build it up. If you assume that both attackers and defenders have access to the same technology, which is a good assumption, then the defenders will always be at a disadvantage. That's good and bad. It's good if you want to make things better for people who the status quo have neglected historically: people of colour, people of alternate sexuality, women, kids, all those people have an advantage now that they didn't have before because they have the same organizing tools that the people who have historically tried to keep them down have access to. Only they don't have the baggage that those people have. On the other hand, it does in fact give an advantage to bad people. It gives an advantage to spyware creeps and indeed to terrorists and to people who are exploitative and to people who are human traffickers and all those other people who [mumble, 15:02]. We won't be able to take the technology out of those bad people's hands because they're criminals, so making it illegal doesn't stop them. What we can do is effectively marshal to reverse any gains they've made if people of good will can have access to the same technologies. So, my utopia, my clear eyed utopia, the utopia that I think is plausible, is one in which people of good will don't have the tools to defend themselves against people of good will taken away in the name of stopping bad things. And then we are able, people of good will, to continually organize to rebuff affronts to our dignity, to our security, to our families and so on, using those same tools. That's what I hope for. And I don't think it's an unrealistic hope.

GC: That's lovely.

CD: Thank you.

GC: So much of the world is about the status quo. You prosthelytize, well, prosthelytize is a strong word, you talk about this a lot. What do you do when you run up against people who are resistant to...

CD: Well, there are a couple of good aphorisms about the status quo. One of them is that all laws are local and no law knows how local it is. So the status quo tends to be something that's pretty new and pretty local and pretty contingent and very much honoured in the breach. Often times, you can get around people's [mumble 16:55] about changes to the status quo by pointing out that the thing that they characterize as some original, endemic state from which humanity is falling is actually like seven years old. There's a great William Gibson quote: the seventy year period during which it was possible to make money off recorded music may be at an end. It's seventy years long. It's not as though we've been selling records since the time of the bards. It's this seventy year blip. And it may be over. It doesn't mean that the music industry is over. It means that phase of the music industry's history, that tiny little seventy year blip in the music industry's history is at an end. That's one aphorism. The other is Jim Griffin's aphorism which is that if it's invented before you're eighteen, it's been there for ever. If it's invented before you're thirty, it's the greatest thing ever. And if it's invented after that it should be illegal. And it's often a matter of just helping people understand that those things they think of as having been there for ever and the greatest thing ever, it's just the latest thing in a long history of things. It's about pointing out that the Bronfmans may get to cry piracy now that they're record executives but a couple generations ago, they were drug smugglers, running rum into America during prohibition. That's how they got the money to become record executives. I'm speaking at Bronfman hall at the ROM tomorrow. I always make a point of mentioning this whenever I'm in Canada.

GC: What's the conference?

CD: It's the National Literacy Strategy.

GC: Lovely.
...
CD: I'm a UofT dropout.

GC: Aren't you also...

CD: a Waterloo and a York and a Michigan State dropout.

GC: You seem to have done all right for yourself.

CD: Who needs a degree?

GC: There's hope for the dropouts.

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Thursday, November 12, 2009

Lawbot is going to Brussels (without me)

The good folks at Constant are at it again. The Verbindingen/Jonctions 12 festival is coming up, with the theme "By data we mean." Among all the activities slated to take place, there's also going to be a fine array of artwork on display. Our favourite robot sleuth, Lawbot along with Copycat and the leader of The Cabal are going to be in attendance in their fine, digital, text based form. If you're in Brussels between November 21 and 29, be sure to check out what Constant is offering up.

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Saturday, November 7, 2009

Coping Mechanisms for the Young and Ambitious

Just over a year ago, I posted what I called "A Manifesto for ginger coons." Much of the text of that manifesto is back, in the form of a zine. Now, however, it's called Coping Mechanisms for the Young and Ambitious. Just in time for Expozine next weekend. Photos below.


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Monday, July 6, 2009

Political awareness alphabet book

I'm working on an alphabet picture book that explains some abstract concepts of slightly higher difficulty than "A is for Apple." Here's the text. Next, I need to get on with the illustration.

A is for Anachronism, history out of time
B is for Budget, accounting for every dime
C is for Concept, an idea not concrete
D is for Diaspora, relocated in retreat
E is for English, colonial language of kings
F is for Future, not the present state of things
G is for God, a personification of morals
H is for Habitual, resting on your laurels
I is for Iconoclast, who fights against the norm
J is for Judiciary, those who keep the bench warm
K is for Karat, measure of golden worth
L is for Legacy, what's left when we leave Earth
M is for Management, who would organize all
N is for Neophyte, hoping to walk after the crawl
O is for Origin, where you got your start
P is for Power, influence over mind and heart
Q is for Quiet, the absence of sound
R is for Reconnaissance, seeing what's around
S is for Secrets, words no one will tell
T is for Truth, which claimants preach at a yell
U is for Utopia, not as perfect as you'd think
V is for Vermin, one you dislike or a mink
W is for Waste, leftovers after use
X is for Xenophobe, reacts to strangers with abuse
Y is for Youth, both fetishized and hated
Z is for Zeal, passion not yet abated

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Saturday, June 27, 2009

Consigned

Here's an idea for an art piece. A lot of beer tends to get consumed at the openings of shows. The idea of the piece (which would be called Consigned) is to take all of the empties from the opening party and stack them up in a corner into a pyramid of beer bottles. It's like the huge piles of bottles that collect after house parties, waiting to be returned for the deposit. The pile would also include the consumption of the artist over the course of the show. After the closing party, when the show is being torn down, the bottles will be returned for the deposit, which would then be given back to the gallery.

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Friday, June 19, 2009

Libre Graphics Meeting 2010 venue

Here's some exciting news: the city for Libre Graphics Meeting 2010 has been announced. According to the good folks at Open Source Publishing (who will be hosting the event), it's going to go down next May in Brussels. They have a very nice press release that deserves wide diffusion.

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Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Montreal Metro Map Circa 2032

One of my ongoing projects: imagining what Montreal's Metro system will look like in the future. Here's my fictitious 2032 Metro map, as released by the equally fictitious Societe de Transport du Quebec. (If you care to look at more fictitious future history, I collaborated on an article a couple months back about Montreal 2032, which you can read here.)

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Sunday, May 10, 2009

Open Colour Standard properganda

Something from the Open Colour Standard project that I feel is worth cross-posting here: my ever so lovely OCS properganda (not propaganda) poster. It sells Open Source graphics programs the easy way: by explaining how cheap they are compared to the proprietary stuff. Enjoy.

EDIT (12 May 2009): Here's a new version of the poster with better kerning. And I'm replacing the downloadable one on the OCS website with this newer, more correct version.

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Monday, March 2, 2009

Hipster Shoes Mk II

An updated version of my clipart-y shoes:

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Wednesday, December 31, 2008

The joys of fridge ownership

I've been working on a wallpapering project involving old books and my currently uninspiring living room. I'm afraid it's made me a little glue happy. I realized last night that the big perk of owning a fridge (as opposed to having one provided by my landlord) is being able to modify it. So: old Archie comics Mod Podged to my decrepit fridge.

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Monday, December 29, 2008

Pest Management

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Friday, December 12, 2008

Considerate Utilities

Something thoroughly awesome has just come to my attention. The Hydro Quebec guy was just here to do a meter reading. He stomped his boots on the front steps and then, as soon as he was in the door, he pulled out a pair of cleanroom booties to put over the real boots. Honestly. Little white plastic boot covers to keep the snow off of my floor. That just strikes me as spectacularly good planning for a utility in a profoundly snowy province.

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Insta-rugged bulletin board

More in my crusade to spruce up the blank walls in my hallway: I came back from Expozine this year with lots of things that desperately wanted to be pinned to a bulletin board. Real cork boards are, of course, too expensive. Padded, fabric covered boards are far too fussy for my tastes. Solution: Rip a box apart. Corrugated cardboard has a nice, industrial look to it. Nail some strips to the wall and bam! Insta-rugged bulletin board.

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Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Cartoonoculars!

Observe phase one of a super exciting project I'm working on: A nice pair of binoculars. They're proof positive that I can actually do things that look clean.

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Email? No.

Because I've been profoundly lazy about blogging lately, here's a nice, easy, pretty one. It's another darn illustration.

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Saturday, November 15, 2008

Tetrisland

I'm currently working on turning old video games into 3D environments. Eventually, once I figure out the game engine in Blender, the environments are going to be populated in a rather interesting way. Details on that later. For now, I present to you Tetrisland: Dark, forbidding, the cheery blocks denying the seedy underside of this impersonal, cookie cutter, sky scraper town. Ominous enough?

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Tuesday, November 4, 2008

A radical consultancy

The term "ginger group" was recently brought to my attention. Having done my little bit of research about it, I'm now a little bit in love with the idea of a group of people who exist to get everyone else thinking more radically. According to my beloved Wikipedia, ginger groups have traditionally been informal and organic and always within larger organizations.

Here's my clever idea: Create a ginger group for hire. It would essentially be a freelance ginger group, a consultancy that specializes in being radical. Looking for crazy ideas? Looking to get inspired? Hire the ginger group. I really must start such a consultancy one day because, of course, there's no one better for the job.

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Grocery Cart People

It would take far too long to explain what sort of article this was drawn to go with. Instead, I'll just show you the illustration, sans explanation.

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Monday, November 3, 2008

Burning book

Below: An illustration I did for an article about Vladimir Nabokov's last, unfinished book.

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Sunday, November 2, 2008

Scribble Chair

Below is a chair that's been in progress for two years. It's my ever so exciting scribble chair. It gets drawn on whenever I'm feeling bored. I'm hoping that one day, there won't be any white visible and the whole thing will be a mass of sketches and scribbles.

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Friday, October 31, 2008

OCI logo revisited

The OCI logo I was so pleased with yesterday has been replaced by the OCI logo that I prefer today. Behold! Progress! Magenta progress, in fact.
I think this one looks far more dynamic.

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A very dapper decal

Forthcoming: a decal depicting this man. I can't decide yet whether he should retain his line art glory or become a solid silhouette. Thoughts? Suggestions?

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Thursday, October 30, 2008

OCI logo

I've been building iterations of a logo for a semi-secret project that I'm calling the Open Colour Institute. You can guess what the project actually is, if you want. The important thing at this point is that I've come up with a logo that I think I like. And here it is.

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The Illustrated Cinderella

I'm working on a project right now called the Illustrated Cinderella. I'm using the original Grimm text and doing decoupage illustrations from public domain images. I'm hoping to get the project finished in the next month, in time for a debut at Expozine. In the interim, here are some of the things I'm working on.


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Wednesday, October 29, 2008

The SPCC

There's a half funny, half serious idea I've been kicking around for the last few months. It's called the SPCC, or the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Creatives. The idea is twofold:

Part one of the SPCC is a helpline for bored and abused creatives. You're a designer who gets stuck cropping and resizing all day? Call and talk it over. Copy writer stuck with unreasonable deadlines and unresponsive superiors? Call the helpline and strategize. This half of the idea is quite similar to Designphone, an idea I blogged about last March. The main difference is that it would have a mandate beyond just serving designers and would instead be there for creatives of all types. It's part two that gets interesting.

Part two is basically a home for bored and misused creatives. Essentially, it's a retreat for creatives who just can't take it anymore. It would essentially be a sanctuary full of free time, other creative people, and the resources necessary to carry out personal projects. Creatives would be able to come down for a break from the monotony of doing boring, not terribly creative, creative work. It would also offer workshop retreats for open-minded management who would either like to reward their creatives with a break or learn how to be a little more creative themselves. Naturally, corporate rates would be rather different from the rates charged to individual creatives. Proceeds from corporate retreats would go to funding project scholarships for creatives with ennui.

The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Creatives: like that SPCA, only instead of saving animals, supporting commercial artists of all kinds.

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Monday, October 27, 2008

An interesting range of tables

I'd like to produce a range of tables with entertaining names and characteristics. The tables would have names like:
Uns
Irrisis
Indomi
Vege
Unsui

And so on... Do feel free to name more tables in the comments.

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Fork bookmark

Idea: Make bookmarks out of cheap cutlery. Cheap stainless steel cutlery is thin and easy to manipulate. Just hammer the curves out of a fork or spoon and you have a handy, awesome bookmark. Pictures when I make one.

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Saturday, October 25, 2008

A manifesto for ginger coons

[Having discussed the idea of mission statements for people, I set about figuring out what I need to remember when times get confusing. The result is the following point form manifesto. I'm posting it because I think several of the points are useful, not just for me, but for anyone else of a similar age and inclination.]
  • I will do things that interest me, come hell or high water
  • I understand that interesting things are sometimes accompanied by boring things. I will find joy in the boring things because they help with the progress of the interesting ones.
  • I must understand that degrees are only pieces of paper and that they may not make me happy or help me along with the things I want to do.
  • I will remember that there are twenty million (give or take) different ways to do the same thing.
  • I must remember to do things because they make me happy, not because I think I'm supposed to do them.
  • I will avoid sulking and stewing and hiding under the covers when I am unhappy. Instead, I will endeavour to take positive action.
  • I will not compare myself to other people. Everyone is different. That's the whole point. There's no reason to try to be the same as anyone else.
  • I will not seek easy answers from outside sources. They don't exist.
  • I must remember that most people do not achieve greatness before the age of twenty or even in their twenties. The people who do so are anomalies. I am not running behind schedule.
  • I measure my own success. People who try to measure my success for me are wasting their time and neglecting themselves.
  • The same goes for me: I have no right or time to measure the success of others. In short: I mustn't be judgemental.
  • I don't have to choose. I can do everything. I just can't do it all at once. I must learn to prioritize.
  • I will learn to excuse myself. I don't need to be right all the time. Changing my mind isn't the end of the world.
  • Grey areas are okay. Sometimes, "maybe" is a better answer than "yes" or "no."

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Friday, October 24, 2008

Blogs in print

I've just thought of one of those ideas that qualifies as stupid-smart. So: Blogs use tags. Tags are what allow readers to check out other posts similar to posts that they like. Sometimes, reading things on paper is nicer than on a screen.

My stupid-smart idea: Make little zines or books or magazines of specific tags from blogs. If you were to do that to my blog, for example, you might make a zine based on the "clever ideas" tag. The whole thing would be a compendium of things that I classify as clever ideas.

I'm trying to decide whether this idea has enough merit to actually do. Of course, in the free market spirit, I could just make up a few copies of such a thing, take them to Expozine with me, and see if they have merit.

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A flock of pigeon stickers

New! Exciting! A variety of hand made vinyl pigeon stickers.

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Thursday, October 23, 2008

Sketchy animal stickers

Behold! I'm gearing up for Expozine 2008 by making some shiny new sticker/decal things.

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Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Plastic books for wet places

I'll admit it: I read in the bath. I'd read in the shower, but I'm afraid that would be basically impossible. This is why I'm thinking that there should be books for showers. Or beaches. Or pools. Or rainforests. Or any muggy, wet place that poses a threat to the wellbeing of books. So, I present yet another entertaining idea: Plastic books for reading in wet places.

Instead of paper, the pages could be made out of thin sheets of plastic. That would save books from puffing up in humidity, as well as from the dangers of shower water or bath time book fumbles. If such a thing existed, I could fulfill my dream of having a bath tub in the middle of a library without endangering the books.

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This is how we blog.

Having recently read an article about creativity (which is here, and thank you, Jasper, for pointing it out), I've realized that I'm losing a lot of ideas simply by not getting them down when I think of them. It happened to me again, just this morning, when I thought of something interesting but was busy writing something else. And now I've lost it. I can't for the life of me remember what it was I thought up. As a result, I've decided to attempt to blog every single damn idea I come up with from now on. "That's crazy talk!" you may say. And that's true. It is crazy talk. But I intend to try anyway. So, starting now, more posts, often shorter posts, less curation, more randomness. Oh yes.

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Landscaped metro stations

I've been researching house plants and humidity. It would seem that one needs the other, but also that the first does a rather nice job of regulating the second. This has gotten me thinking. Plants like humidity. Some metro stations in Montreal are so humid that they literally have stalactites extending from their ceilings. What's the clever, humidity regulating, life enriching solution to this problem? Obviously, the STM needs to turn metro stations into giant, beautiful terrariums. Plants would make the metro stations more comfortable for passengers. And they'd be significantly less drippy, too. The only major retrofit involved would be switching the florescent lights for something a little more grow light-y. Landscaped metro stations? Oh yes.

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Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Hot Couture

To do: Make ball gown out of polar fleece. Pics when I make it.

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Saturday, October 4, 2008

Instead of art

Boring walls? No art to hang? No problem. Here's a spectacularly cheap and easy way to break the monotony of long stretches of wall: hang your clothes. Just shove some screws into the wall at varying heights and hang your most interesting (or most frequently used) clothing. In my front hallway, I've hung all my outerwear and bags. It not only makes it way easier to find sweaters, but also gives the hall the benefit of some extra colour. Win-win!

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Friday, October 3, 2008

Spoon napkin ring


Yet another use for old spoons: Supremely awesome napkin rings.

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