My Design Blog

I am a fan of vector art and illustrator work. As a graphic artist now, sadly I have all but left my paint brush and pencils in favor of Illustrator. I have become much more aware of line and color work, gone are the days where I can use a brush and smudge colors and strokes all over a canvas to cover up my lack of talent. Recently I read a post on vectortuts.com.

The work displayed on the post ranged on work i found amazing, to work I found sub par for a professional illustrator.

It did make me consider the medium a bit more though, and I felt pretty inspired by some of the website examples they presented.

I would love to see a fall back to more illustrator work. I have always thought it shared a commonality with turn of the age graphic design. From the woodcut signs of the middle ages to the propaganda posters of the world wars. The feeling you get from an illustrated piece is like a characteur of life rather than something mundane we see everyday of our lives. Check out the vectortuts.com post here.

Yes I know as if anyone needed another eason to hear this song, but I think this monochromatic (mostly) ditty is fantastically done.

It is two of my favorite things. Dexter the best series I have ever seen on telivision hands down, and Shepard Fairey the hipster quasi graffiti stencil artist of his day. The poster looks great (accept for taht showtime logo in the center of it. The 30$ is not unheard of for a Fairey print. So why is it this poster is leaving a bad taste in my mouth. I am never the guy to say some one is selling out, and I will not even say it this time, but when your Shepard Fairey and your work in many ways speaks out against blindly following large corperations then it is going to make me question why you choose to do a poster for showtime. This is a quote directly from Fairey’s web site:

Since starting his growing Giant art campaign Fairey has said the experiment behind his explosive phenomenon is targeted to expose the “conspicuously consumptive” nature of our culture, the eagerness to buy in that results from image repetition.

This same thought crossed my mind when Fairey did a political poster for obama. Though with Obama my mind was quickly changed. Obviously Obama is the canidate Fairey identified with and to show his support he created a poster for his campaign.

Nothing in this train of thought says that Fairey is mindlessly following anything, or that he is attempting to have us mindlessly vote for Obama. In this same veign if Fairey happens to be a huge fan of Dexter (like me) why should he not create a poster for his favorite show. I am sure Fairey has done posters for bands before why is this not considered selling out. Even with this thought process the dexter poster does not sit well with me in terms of Fairey’s art. I finally came to the conclusion that Dexter being a telivision show is used to sell advertising and by Fairey supporting the show he is supporting the cause of advertising which he speaks against in many ways. I do not hold this against him, hell I am a graphic designer, I am a slave to advertising every day of my life, but I just saw this artistic outing as very odd coming from someone like Fairey. I think I will just take the rest of the day and admire my new Dexter poster and think about things.

I am always looking for different ways to customize my dektop, I am a bit of a neard that way I suppose. Recently Martin Lexow put out this packk of icons he calls “blobs” and I really enjoy the look of them on my dock. He has also included templates to make your own blob icons. I am also using a dock from kano89 from MacThemes that compliments Martin’s icons very well, it can be found here.

I am not a smoker but I do like Zippos and close to 4 or five years ago I visited a venue in downtown Nashville called Buffalo Billiards. Outside the venue were a bunch of 20 somethings with clipboards. They all worked for Philip Morris and were handing out zippos to anyone that said they were a smoker and would take their survey. So of course I got in line answered a few questions, and got my new zippo brand lighter. One of the questions on the survey was “when is your birthday?”, and now every year on July 16th I receive a present from Marlboro (among the countless coupons discounting cigarette prices throughout the year). In the past years I have received cookbooks, wallet bottle openers, and other quirky items. This year I got two over sized chrome dice and instructions on how to gamble with my friends (maybe over beer and cigarettes).

The design of the packaging is always eye catching and the fonts and colors are always very consistent, but I can not help but think every time I get one of these gifts “Is the CEO of philip morris the devil”. Why only push products like beer and cigarettes and stand behind them so strongly. I find it strange, and I guess their only motivation is money and not the livers and lungs of their customers, but something about it always does strike me as odd.