The next idea

So here's an idea that I'm giving up free to the internets/world, because i don't have the wherewithall to make it happen, but it's definitely within the zeitgeist of our times.

Someone out there needs to make a digital calendar which takes information, via bluetooth or some other wireless connection, from your computer/phone, PDA, etc, and posts it to a visual, digital calendar, almost like an RSS feed.

My main problem is that I have a calendar, which I sometimes jot stuff down on, but rarely look at. I have a calendar on my computer, but rarely input information into because it requires looking at a separate program from time to time, because I don't have enough daily events to use it like that. Also, I don't use Apple, so I don't have Ical, and even when I did, it's just another ding on the computer, I want something I can physically look at away from my computer, because all of that tends to jumble together. What I actually need is a visual reminder which tells me days when I do have something going on, something which I could input information directly from events going on that I could see in a central location, one that updates in real time.

I could even see a twitter-like service, which you could just write a quick note to the service, It takes the information, places it on the day specified. Facebook does a pretty good job with it's calendar, and keeps me informed, but since it's a social platform, it doesn't make daily activities too easy to input.

This is the type of product that would appeal to just about anyone. Make it under $50 bucks, and it would take off. It doesn't need fancy gimmicks, like music or pictures, or touch-screen capability (maybe an optional interface directly into the calendar), just the ability to take all my appointments and arrange them in a visual way.

And it is nowhere to be found, and I've looked.



There is an idea floating over at Crowdspirit, which appears to be some sort of real world Sourceforge, for something like this, posted last year. Doesn't seem to have gotten very far, was based around family use, was touch-screen, input needed to be physically attached, and was projected at $300. Frankly I don't see that happening. kids would forget (and one assumes that the kid has a pda/parents have time to input entire kids schedule into pda), and the thing would collect dust in a 2 months, plus the $300 price range makes it an extremely optional buy, for a calendar.

Keep it simple, make it cheap but functional. Someone please do it, I'll be the first to buy it.

Pixish helps you find work, maybeish

Via Laughing Squid

As an illustrator just starting out, I know it's damn tough to find any work out there. Internships and internship fairs are mostly useless to us, because it seems like pure illustration is either do or do not. They think you can either do the job, or you can't. And there ain't ton of shit out there for us, not like designers per se.

So there's a new site, Pixish which takes "assignments" from people looking for artwork, posts those assignments and whether it pays or not, and then takes submissions from whomever, and users vote on the best one, sort of like threadless.

Here's the rub, prices are set by the uploader, so you have to see if it's worth your time, and given the current rates (it's still in beta), not so much. I mean, a couple hundred bucks is a couple hundred bucks, but it's only a couple hundred bucks, knowwhatimsaying?

The bigger perk may be that it's available as a portfolio-sharing site, maybe like Illoz or the others. If someone is looking for an illustrator, scouring the profile pages might happen. And maybe you've got an image sitting around which might work for what someone needs.

A while ago, a note was passing around between designers on the net basically saying "do NOT take those $50 logo jobs on craigslist, you're only killing the industry as a whole. You're the equivalent of a third world country factory worker." And it's true, the net has made it really easy to undercut normal market rates, meaning you might get something now, but not as much in the long run. Any of the freelance sites out there trade on this idea, having you bid against others for services, so that end up working for stupid cheap. Pixish at least has a fixed payout, and concerns have already been voiced about it being just a design spec gatherer, so much so that the creator has said Pixish will only be concentrating on illustrations and photographs.

So yeah, I signed up, maybe I'll even submit to a project. We'll see though, we'll see if it is actually something you can build relationships in and through, or just another undercutter.

EDIT: the site isn't all that new, released back in Feb., the hubbub seems to have died down, and none of the critiques of the site seemed to have changed their policies. After further perusing the metafilter chat, the consensus seems to be for amateurs and students, it's an opportunity, but not a significant one, a way to make extra cash, that's it. it's still mostly on spec and not strength of talent and style, but it is a way to gain experience, but who knows if it's the right kind of experience. But to be certain, this is NOT a threadless style site, it's something different. Threadless, while it is user-generated, like many other sites, pays out of their own pocket for designs that make it. It's also on the strength of the design (or amount of friends) that a design makes it through, and more than one shirt can make it, that is somewhat of a market deciding what is acceptable. No, this is definitely a contest, one where the prospective employer can get free ideas and contract out elsewhere.

The Quick Hits Are

A NEA report says that LA is the best place for working artists, as there are 140,620 working artists in the metropolitan area, 1st in overall amount, but 3rd in percentage of the larger population. but still, if 140,000 can do it, so can you, right?

I may have mentioned something like this before (I really need to fix my tag system), but here's a new psot about business cards: from the die-cut to the scratch-off to the tear-away parts, matchbooks and pogs, 70 innovative and interesting business cards

The Times has made 200 years of newspapers available online...that goes back to 1785. that's a hell of a long time. that's only 9 years after the American Revolution, what? conspiracy theorists rejoice as they now can chaos theory any event back to someone spilling their bread pudding on a lord back in 1794.

The new poster for De Niro & Pacino's movie "Righteous Kill", which you will be seeing around the city in short order was shot by Estavan Oriol and designed by Mr. Cartoon. For whatever reason, I am geeking out on this, those two have seriously made it to the big time, and good on them for real. They also have a retail space in downtown LA, ext to the Upper Playground shop at 6th & Los Angeles.

60% of the world's paintings come from one Chinese province most of them forgeries/reproductions. Still, I can't imagine the cranking that goes on over there.

The line between art and games gets a bit fuzzier. case in point: GTA IV

and finally, speaking of actionable things, congress has introduced a bill which require anyone to copyright any single piece of creative work. No more "once you've done it, it's yours type things" everything will be up for the taking. I can think of getting rich on copyright-squatting, like domain-squatting, but maybe then i'll be able to afford the $300 oer copyright fee on my own work. ugh. call your congressperson and get them to stop this. seriously.

The Reference Are

So I promised a large image drop post and it never materialized. Well, one or two bouts with teh sickness (Nickelback or whoever sang that song not included) and one set of nointernetitis later, we're back for the '08, with the newness.

So anyway, getting into it, today is all about reference, or "Scrap" as a couple of my teachers like to call it, or as I like to call it "pictures that look like stuff I'm going to draw". Whatever you refer to it as, it is indispensible to any illustrator looking to make something look like something else, even if you're going to distort it, or simplify it, reference is an important part of getting the feel right. Of course it's not the end all and be all, and going too close can lead to all sorts of problems, but as my illustration teacher pointed out to us: "Can you draw your cellphone from memory...exactly? you look at it all the time, but can you get all the details down right?" maybe you could, but you had to think about it a second didn't you? Well, same goes for anything else.

So I went through a ton of image sites and came up with a list of some based on some very indeterminate criteria. All I did was search for the same image (dog snarling) in each site and see what I got. Sites that gave a wide variety, different images than other stock places, keywords, tags, had an easy to use layout all got special notice. (and just to point out my bias, I use Getty Images pretty regularly, and that was basically my baseline). And I am not looking for resolution or price, just quality and variety of images, just looking for the visual information.

The Good
-Getty - easy to use, lots of tags/filters, large collection, only drawback is being unable to resize results so you can view more on one page.
-Alamy - keywords, big variety of results, can change results amount.
-Superstock - tons of images, tags & checkboxes included. A really well done site, if I didn't automatically punch in getty, this would be my default.
-Flickr Creative Commons - another well organized search using the Flickr pool of photos. harder to be specific as with Getty or Superstock, but the image results are wildly different than stock style.
-The Marsden Archive - Not very good at all-around, but I'm including this one because it features amazing spooky and gothic style stock images that are worth just looking at. There's a whole world of nice stock art which I didn't get into, because I wanted general, but this caught my eye, but if you have a specific topic in mind, and search for that plus stock images in the google, you're more than likely to find it.

The not-so-great
-Veer - decent results, very few tags, hard to specify.
-Corbis - no tags, less stock , more newsy style photographs in the results.
-Das Fotoarchiv - Newsy, almost too many tags.
-Aurora - meh.
-Punch Stock - decent returns & Keywords.
-Urban Dirty - texture based site, still I prefer just looking in google images for texture.
-Morguefile - arty results, however you want to take that.
-SXC - meh.
-123RF - royalty free images, low results.
-Graphistock - illustration based returns, good if looking for a idea jumping off point more than reference images.
-PD Images - Public Domain Images.

not reference, but damn cool
-I could do a whole post on image gathering sites, kind of like Del.I.Cio.Us or whatever it is, but there are a couple sites out there where people tag images they like and post them for others to see and whatnot. Ffffound my be the best of them, always something interesting going on there, almost always illustration and design based. Riot Clit Shave is more photography based, people usually post collections of interesting images. And finally, there's Space Ghetto, which, unlike most things, is a pretty accurate name, definitely a site not for the faint of heart. /b/chan is another place, but man, do you really want to enter that realm? stick with the image aggregators.

the bad
-I'm just going to list these, with no links, but these aren't even worth your time:
Comstock, Heffernanicons, Photonica, Photovault, Mira, The Image Bank, Dexhaus, Pixelib, Shutterstock, Dreamstime, Stockvault, Tastystock, Turbophoto.

There it is. This is all what I could find searching on my own, but I know there are a bunch more out there that I know about and have forgotten the name, if you have one you use I would love to hear about it. And as I hear of more, I'll update this post.

The Return Are

The school year has ended and The Illust (me) finally have some time to sit down and get some posts out of the way. Stuff has been piling up, and there's a whole host of things to pass on, as well as some ideas for features I never could get to. For now, it'll probably just be a bunch of quick hits of goodness, with larger posts later until I can set up some sort of functional routine. Anyway, here's some stuff I've had open in some tabs for a bit.

Steven Lefcourt - tastypaints.com Really awesome and surreal vector work. Somehow his digital paintings don't quite have the same oomph, but still very impressive...and awesome. Plus, one splendiforous site name.

Secret Wall Tattoos I feel like this site has already made the rounds on the internet, but anything good on the internet it like herpes, just when you think it's gone, it flares up again. Anyway, a really nice site devoted to stuff people have drawn/painted/left behind fixtures in hotels. Always look behind anything that's not suppossed to be moved. Looking through this site though, I can't help but wonder, do this many people really bring that much paint with them on business trips?

Hang coat rack F-ing love it. found via Design-milk, which looks very intriuging, will be keeping tabs and stealing posts, etc etc etc.

NY Times Mag Annual Year In Ideas Nothing too Illusty, just a bunch of ideas which looks pretty interesting. enjoy.

ha.

What The Illust reads

As someone who counts reading the internet as one of my favorite books, people sometimes ask me what sites I frequent a lot. Usually this comes up in the form of "Where do you FIND this stuff?", and the answer would be....a lot of places. At last count I've got 144 subscriptions in my Google RSS reader, that's a lot of daily information. Course with school and whatnot, I barely have a chance to get to it all within one day, but that's why these posts are so long, there's a lot of cool stuff out there, some related to art and design, and I like sharing.

Anyway, besides the blogs over there on the right, those are great blogs with good content always, I read teh webcomics. Some of them are web only, some are print based. but they're all funny stuff, and some of them are downright awesome to look at (some of them not so much, but that's part of their charm.

There's a lot of lists of the best webcomics out there, and that got me looking at a bunch of new comics, but also inspired me to make this post as well. So here we go:

Married to the Sea

All clip art with new scripts, good times.

Get Your War On/My New Fighting Technique is Unstoppable

Speaking of clip art, this guy started as a temp worker using clip of karate people to create weird strips in his spare time, moved onto strips about office life, and the started criticzing the Afghanistan/Iraq war from the get-go. Now he's in Rolling Stone and some alternative papers. Certified gold.

Achewood

weird and unsettling=success!

Alien Loves Predator

Mostly retired now, but the archives are great, Alien and Predator share a apartment in NYC, sometimes with Jesus, hilarity ensues.

Dr. McNinja

Grand story arcs, a well computer drawn, mostly daily comic about a doctor who is also a ninja. hyah!

Explosm!

The first (in alphabetical order) in a couple of webcomics by someone who can't (or won't) draw. That doesn't make it not funny, or not irreverant, or not awesome.

Get Fuzzy

A print comic, but one that doesn't get a huge amount of love, except by people who really like animals. Personally I love Conley's visual style, and believe it's one of the better executed strip comics out there (not that kind of "strip" sicko).

Hobotopia (aka Laugh Out Loud Cats)

We all love I can has cheezburger?, and while it's almost over as an internet meme, this guy is prolific. Great old-school style, ink, rapid-fire (at least a couple comics a day), and cats, where do you go wrong?

Lio

Some say it's the heir to Calvin and Hobbes, it's got it's moments, especially when it lampoons other comics, but it's not C&H yet. But for being entirely dialogueless, and simple yet detailed comic that goes a hell of a long way.

Maakies

Maakies is like the Cerebus of strip comics. Still underground after tons of years, impeccably drawn, hard to comprehend, adored by people who know about it.

Thingpart!

Kind of a visual style reminiscent of when Perry Bible Fellowship (see below) goes low-brow, with a similar humor. I'm not saying it's a copycat in anyway, it's kind of like how Nirvana and Pearl Jam were very similar yet completely different.

XKCD

XKCD is sort of the pioneer and the most notorious of strictly web comics. Drawn by an engineer, and it looks like it, and the themes are mostly techy, but this guy is smart and it shows, which makes it worthwhile.

Perry Bible Fellowship

One of the best. The ability to draw in any style, irreverant themes (see a pattern?), offbeat humor, one to watch and hold on to.

that's it. there's other fun stuff that I watch, but that's all for now.

The Saturday Are

City of Toothpicks Ridonkulously huge model city made entirely out of toothpicks. Someone has got WAY too much time on their hands.

The Naked Body Zodiac Like NSFW and stuff. But who doesn't like fine art painted on bodies? Don't tell me you, cause I know you're lying.

Mozart's "Lick me in my Ass" Not really related to art or design, but really, you can't go wrong singing this to your significant other, especially in the original German. And yes, it is real, Mozart actually did compose a song about getting his salad tossed.

Drawn haiku's as Drawn puts it: "Submit ideas. An illustration is made And a haiku too.">

Art Deco blog One of the Illust's favorite new (to us) blogs Art Deco uploads stuff from the Art Deco era, too awesome.

A Soviet Poster a Day Maybe the only thing that beats Art Deco is Soviet Era propaganda, one a day with excellent commentary. These last two blogs are definitely worth putting in your daily sites.

The Real Costs "Real Costs is a Firefox plug-in that inserts emissions data into travel related e-commerce websites. The first version adds CO2 emissions information to airfare websites such as Orbitz.com, United.com, Delta.com, etc. Following versions will work with car directions, car rental, and shipping websites. Think of it like the nutritional information labeling on the back of food... except for emissions. " (See also The Oil Standard which works much the same way escept displays prices as oil costs.

Artist's draw on air to create 3-D Science, schmience, but if i can use virtual reality to draw that'll be awesome.

Clone your vinyl basically, silkscreen your own vinyl records, FUCKIN awesome.

Watch this video, it'll change your life, yeah.

The World According to Americans

Kerouac's Hand-drawn cover for On the Road

Carny Photos

The evolution of Sugar Bear

Tank Limo

English Russia

Storm-drain Graffiti

Homeland Security Blanket

Be Afraid Very Afraid

Local Revolution

As always, most illustrations via Drawn or Juxtapoz:

Richard Coleman

Jack Long

Jim Woodring

Azul De Corso

Jeremy Dower

Tauba Auerbach

Pascal Blanchet

Andrew Bawidamann

Dave Kinsey

Julie Morstad

Tessar Lo

Claire Scully (The Quiet Revolution)

Mike Rea

Gez Fry

Paul Pope