Click the poster for full size options via Flickr.

Back in November 2009, I was contacted by a friend who wanted to know if I was interested in helping create a few posters for the Institute of Physics in the UK. The problem – one that the US shares – was that the hard sciences in general and physics in particular were seeing declining interest in the population of school children. Part of the problem, it was postulated, was that UK kids were not exposed to the interesting side of what physics is at a young enough age; by the time physics becomes a school course option, most kids have already relegated physics to the ‘boring’ category, and go on to pursue their degree in macrame interpretive dance. But even as an artist, I can say, this is not so! Physics is without a doubt one of the most far-thinking, philosophical fields out there; I’ve been a dilettante about the subject in general for years, and while I can’t claim to speak about it with anything approaching coherence, the fact that I could do anything for The Cause made me kinda pumped, something akin to what the Ghost Army must have felt when landing in France. (Was that too arrogant?)

Click the poster for full size options via Flickr.

Additionally, I had the great fortune to be able to work with Rich Seymour for the initial conception part of the project, which was great fun, and was inspiring to say the least. Meeting someone who has made a career for themselves by brooking no infringement on their creative vision and ideas, and sticking to their guns, even when it meant losing a job – that’s a kind of hard-assery that you can’t buy, you can just learn by spending years figuring out you’re the smartest mother-effer in the room.

Click the poster for full size options via Flickr.

As per Rich’s idea, we waded into some of the more far-out printing processes, ending up with two photo-luminescent posters, and one printed with thermal inks, that reveal ink underneath when one applies heat, with your hand or a flame-thrower or whatever. The design implications, challenges, and opportunities brought about using their rather esoteric printing techniques were eye-opening for me, and terrific fun.

The posters will be placed in classrooms all across the UK. In a few months, the impressional young eyes of UK youth will all be transfixed by this weirdness, which I feel pretty good about. I’m still in talks with the IOP people, trying to convince them to set up a purchase option for these posters, because I think a lot of nerds might be into these, but we’ll see. Don’t forget to click through the posters to see them full-size, via Flickr options.

One of the great ironies of influence is that one can’t necessarily pull apart what has caused you to be what you are, artistically, without removing a few of the key bolts that keep the whole structure in place. Asked to remove a specific influence from an artist’s work is a massive game of Jenga, and just because the artist is rooted in their field by the various flotsam and jetsam that they have been exposed to, it often doesn’t make the artist the sum of the parts. It is thus that, when my good friend Matt Rebholz approached me and offered for me to spend to a day make a silkscreen print with the infinitely generous and patient Greg Nanny of Drive-By Press that I jumped at the chance and told him to his shock I had never done one before.

Clearly, my work is heavily influenced by the analog printing process; my parents, founding members of the Graphic Workshop at Mass. Art, were old hands at the process, and our household was filled to the brim with incredible prints, from lithography to woodcuts to silkscreens. However, I also happened to come of age when the first Apple computer, the Mac IISE, entered into our house. Photoshop 1.0 was a revolution, and I totally taken with it. And so it went, me recreating the influences of my life (analog) with the tools of the future (digital). And last Thursday was my first dip back into the cool waters of influence. It feels good.

The above print is the first of a series of prints I’m planning on creating, based upon the lesser known tales of Phaedrus (Aesop), as translated by the amazing, amusingly old-school Christopher Smart . If you can’t read it, the text is below:

The Dog, Treasure, and Vulture.

A Dog, while scratching up the ground,
‘Mongst human bones a treasure found;
But as his sacrilege was great,
To covet riches was his fate,
And punishment of his offence;
He therefore never stirr’d from thence,
But both in hunger and the cold,
With anxious care he watch’d the gold,
Till wholly negligent of food,
A ling’ring death at length ensued.
Upon his corse a Vulture stood,
And thus descanted :-” It is good,
O Dog, that there thou liest bereaved
Who in the highway wast conceived,
And on a scurvy dunghill bred,
Hadst royal riches in thy head.”

You can see a larger version of the print on my Flickr page. The few still remaining will go on sale soon. Stay tuned.

So I thought I’d give a quick run down of March, now that it’s gone, because it was SO FREAKING crazy.

My show, the aforementioned Landscapes of Quarantine show, was a rousing success, I would say almost too much so; the place was so rammed with tight-clothed young people that the art was definitely secondary to the scene. Which isn’t to say that’s a totally bad thing; I suspect the copious amount of FREE BEER might have had something to do with it, but all in all, a fantastic time was had. You can check out the photos of the event here. The rest of night after the opening was a blur, but I do know at once point, we closed down a Cuban restaurant in Soho, after which the very nice waitress flicked the lights on and off so we would leave. Sorry, mystery waitress! I had like 37 whiskeys, my bad.

You can see the full 8 pieces, generously published on HiLoBrow here.

In other totally amazing news, the show actually got written up as a Critic Pick in Art Forum, with yours truly being name dropped. Oh, dang!

I awoke the next morning after the show, hangover in tow, to find that I had a bunch of work to do for a freelance job, in between which I packed, spent some time with my lovely and patient wife, and then HIT THE ROAD to Austin the next morning.

South by Southwest was a blast, and the panel was a raging success, judging by the tweet feed that was the result.

Best comment: “Best panel ever.”
Worst comment: “Disappointed by #incol panel – too unfocussed! ”

Make what you will of that.

You can see images of the panel and SXSW here, which is kind of a condensed version of the full photo album I have. Friends and relatives, check out my personal blog for whole shebang.

The SXSW trip was amazing and fun, I saw all sorts of cool stuff, as expected, and there’s plenty of great places to check it all out. It was also rather watershed for me, though, and for something that concerns SXSW – or the trip at all – only tangentally. After the end of the panel, halfway into my second beer, I started to feel very ill; unnamed, nice bizdev woman taking to me, I apologize for abruptly leaving midway through our conversation, I had to run and upchuck in the bathroom. The rest of the afternoon was a blur, and it was only through the generosity of my friends and fellow panelists that I got home to where I was staying. and promptly passed out for the rest of the day and evening.

There’s a lot of prosaic explanations for this sort of thing – food poisoning, 24-hour-bug, or what have you. However, in my traditional fashion, I like to ascribe it to a more goof-ball reason: I think my body was telling me I was spread too thin and pursuing things in wrong fashion. Over the past nine months, I have been involved in a workshop with peer crit reviews every week, running Robots + Monsters, planning for the SXSW panel, acting as Creative Director for a small boutique web firm, and handling all of my big illustration projects. I think it’s time I pare down, and focus on the one big thing that I’ve been avoiding forever.

That’s right: building my Death Ray. Finally!

A friend sent me over to 99Designs to check it out, and I had to have a glass of whiskey to drown the deepening sense of despair that overtook me. 99Designs is the digital equivalent of standing outside a Home Depot waving at pick up trucks as they pull into the lot, looking for a sheet-rock gig. It is digital day labor.

Let me say this, out of the gate: I don’t bear any ill will to the gentlemen who started the site:. It’s a good idea, on it’s surface, and it’s a market niche that someone was eventually going to fill. It’s just a shame that it was going to happen, regardless.

99Design’s site boasts

Number of Designers: 49,486

Prize Money Awarded: $7,296,679

Total Designs submitted: 2,835,483

Impressive stats on the surface, though some quick and dirty math suggests a bit more sobering numbers. Let’s assume that every one of those submitted designers wins one project, for the sake of argument. That’s about 147 bucks a project. Assuming that a standard, simple design job takes you two days of work (or about 16 billable hours), thats…

About nine bucks an hour.

Ouch.

I understand that the assumptions underlying my argument are so specious that any good lawyer would have taken me out in the back and shot me. Allow me to justify myself a little bit. Obviously, not every designer gets a job. But this doesn’t make the picture rosier for the designers who do. Let’s assume only half the designers get awarded a job, with the same amount of jobs still on the board: that’s still time spent doing work, at 9 dollars an hour, for double the amount of time. A week’s worth of work at 9 dollars an hour? 360 dollars, or $18,700 a year. That’s at the official poverty line for a family of three, by US Government standards. And the US Government poverty guidelines are way out of whack anyway. (That’s ignoring the rate of about $2.50 per design submitted: I don’t even want to calculate the productivity rate of that.)

So what are we to make of this? Call it DIY Culture Wars:  The Level Playing Strikes Back. Before the web, creatives were creatives because of long schooling, draftmanship, internships, connections, and  occasionally, hard work. One of the great things about the digital revolution was that it gave the keys to everyone. Remember all those 1990’s solipistic tropes about “empowerment”?

There was a brief window of time when this “empowerment” was there for the taking by the early adopters, the geeks, and those with initiative and enough talent. The predictive and collaborative nature of the web is sometimes depressingly accurate; there’s a whole host of people that make a living creating obvious statements about where the web is headed (yours truly included.) I’m a firm believer in the collective unconscious. Does anyone really believe that YouTube wouldn’t have sprung up in another form, in another place, if Steve Chen hadn’t done it first? This is tough to explain to those that  have “made it”, but sometimes, “making it” is as much about fortune and luck as it is about talent.

Around 2003, empowerment in the creative class hit it’s stride, the idea that being a freelancer or contractor became not only doable, but desirable, talent be damned. And then another weird turn occured. The empowerment became less about the doing, and more about the accoutrements. When the the history of the great DIY Upsurge is written, stuff will play the villians.

Now, if you take a walk in the kitchenware section of a department store these days: nearly every other item is listed as “professional grade”, as if you need Wolfstoff knives and a copper pans to reheat Mac -n-Cheese. Look at the montrosities that hang around tourists necks these days, or listen to the pale salemen carp on about “megapixels” in the camera department. The 5th grader has a computer that can render digital video at lightning fast speeds, even though he uses it for little more writing papers, porn, and playing video games. This is where, finally, “empowerment”  has come to rest.

And so we turn back 99Designs, in which everyone with with nice computers, and (perhaps illegal) copies of Creative Suite, slings hastily slapped-together designs on a wall, hoping they stick, and trying to do it in as little time as possible, so that the pittance of pays is worth it. What used to be the firm stamping grounds of the manufacturing industry – doing it faster and cheaper, so that the middle class can hold their ground under the onslaught of rising costs and companies that pay less and less for labor – has finally come to the creative class, and it’s a sad day, for me at least.

I’m not the most talented person out there, I’m not a genius, and if I ever tell you I’m a ‘visionary’, please punch me in the face. But I do work hard, constantly, and I am very proud of my work. I also am very proud of how I get compensated. But it’s a sad day when you see the next generation of creatives being forced back into their cage; that which was made to free us has merely exposed us the wider economy, and what used to be our our special little clubby corner is now being outsourced. Far be it for me to sound like anti-populist, but Viva La Protectionism, comrades.

…according to TeeJunkie.com, anyway. Hooray! Thanks to everyone for voting and throwing me to the top of the list. Yay!

I would just like to thank Jesus, Mohammed, Vishnu, Yaweh, Santa, and the Noodle Monster for their infinite widsom in directing votes my way. The others guys were formidible competition, but at the end of the day, we just wanted it more than the other team. We stuck to the game plan, and our guys gave 110% out there. I’d also like to thank my Momma.

Anyway. You can buy a version of the teeshirt here. Thanks again, everyone!

I got an email this morning informing me that I’ve been nominated as teeshirt designer of the year by Tee Junkie. I’m really thrilled, considering the other folks nominated, so it really is an honor just to be a part of it. Then again, you are on my site, so do me a solid and go vote for me in the post of the contest. I’m about halfway down. Winners will be announced in April. Woot!

An artist more famous than me once said “Making money ain’t nothing exciting to me. You might be able to buy a little better booze than the wino on the corner. But you get sick just like the next cat and when you die you’re just as graveyard dead as he is.”

So allow me some rank commercialism, dear readers, and urge you to visit Tee Fury today, and today only (1/12/09), to find a teeshirt designed by yours truly for the low, low price of 9 clams. Go! Go now! I need some pricier booze.

See you when you’re dead, Jack.

See the full size poster here.

Above is my most recent illustration, for the German software company Emnis. I’d like think it’s part of a bigger trend.

Before I pontificate, I’d like to thank in particular Tobias Zimmer, who was as great a client to work for as I’ve ever had: it takes a strong confidence and a belief that people operate best when allowed to be free to excerise their expertise as they see fit, and he did both, giving me minimal notes and trusting my choices in the end. I think the piece turned out really well, and both Tobias and all of Emnis seems very happy with it, and which makes me happy, too.

In an unexpected turn, Tobias also told me that the work and a small blurb will be in the German magazine Page, which is great, and he asked me about the idea of “album art for software.” Since my work for Blue Flavor at the beginning of the year, this is the work that has gotten a lot of unexpected attention. I have to give some credit to Blue Flavor for giving me the venue initially, and for their completely hands-off approach, which let me take it in my direction. So I’d be deficit if I took total credit without Blue Flavor’s opportunity.

But I think the idea is a great one: it finally starts recognizing and putting on parallel the creations from programmers as well as musicians. Video games were actually the earliest iteration of such a trend – it’s only natural to assume that the software of more prosaic applications would start to get into the act, as well. In fact, the more abstract the idea or task that the software is engaged in, the more a simple and effective branding process is needed, so that a visual shorthand can rapidly put both users and consumers on the same page: this is best resolved by engaging art that not only speaks to the software, but creates a visual excitement in the viewer. Most smart, successful companies recognize this, and invest heavily in their visual output. In the end, humans love to spoken to in visual terms – from hieroglyphics to illuminated manuscripts, stained glass to instruction manuals, comic books to album art, they want and need something pretty to look at and give them a shorthand.

The other great aspect is that, with the advent of small, short-run, focussed printing, and larger bandwidth that allows for more involved and artistic websites, the strength of the small, underground artist or illustrator has never been stronger. While you will find many large illustrators who will bemoan the current state of stock illustration and falling usage fees, the reality is that the playing field has now been leveled, in the favor of smaller artists. This means that while huge fees are less common than they once were, young, interesting and edgy artists who once were sidelined now have an increasing number of venues in which to get their works seen. If every software company gave each of their products a great graphic edge by hiring a unique artist, the world would be better looking and more visually dynamic place.

Anyhoo, the long and the short of it is that I think every software sompany, or upstart website or whatever, should start tot hink about the idea of “album art”: far beyond just some simple BS color branding or some boring swoops and blocks of text, having the stones to allow an artist to provide you with super-compelling visuals without much input is a net-benefit in the end I’m convinced. It ups the companies “cool cache” (so important in this age of Yelping blogposts alternatively raising and trashing anyone’s reputation within moment), and makes the company seems forward thinking and concerned with a customer-viewer approach, rather than a top-down, old economy approach.

So, you companies: go hire weird artists! They’ll thank for it, you’ll be operating in the tradition of the Medicis, and in the end, you’ll get some great looking stuff.

Go! Go now! I’ll wait.

This is the ticket for the Election Night celebration hosted by the Obama campaign tonight. If nothing else,you gotta the guy for his design team. I mean, god DAMN that is beautiful.

Or like white, kinda.

In any event, this new site looks pretty sharp, right? It’s all thanks to my partner at Squonk Studios, Matt Glaser, who’s abilities with Wordpress are approaching scary wizardry, and who we should probably hunt down, tie up, and throw in a river to see if he floats. In any event, please poke around and contact me to let me know what you think, or if you see any errors, or if you would really like to pay me a huge amount of money to draw something. Especially the last one. 

Suffice to say, with 10 days until my wedding, I probably won’t have time to post much until after November first. But after that, back in the saddle, I promise.

Thanks again, Glaser. I owe you.