I’m really pleased to officially release the final art for the EFF teeshirt I’ve been working on for their DEFCON offering this year. Check out the glow in the dark action here. From their press release:

Say hello to EFF’s second, limited-edition, DEF CON membership t-shirt! Only 340 premium-level donors who attend this year’s DEF CON 19 in Las Vegas will be able to get these new “ENCRYPTION SAVES” shirts, specially designed by Joe Alterio of the creative charity Robots & Monsters.

The folks down at EFF are not only templars for the righteous in my opinion, but they’re really, really nice folks, to boot. I’m so happy I got to do this for them. If you’re at DEFCON, pick up the teeshirt; and if you’re not, watch this space, I’ll be auctioning a few teeshirts from this site, get ‘em while they’re very hot!

UPDATE! Boinged! And Laughing Squid called me a ‘charity demigod’. Oh, you!

I’m pleased to announce that I have two iPhone wallpapers available on Poolga. Poolga is a site that offers some of the best illustrators work, for free, as downloadable wallpapers. I’m not exactly sure how they make money, but they definitely have some neat stuff. It looks like a lot of European illustrators, which I always love to get more exposure to. Check it out!

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!

Above is hopefully the first in a series of instructional animation that I’m doing for a company called VectorID. VID has a lot of super technical clients that deal with some pretty heavy technological concepts, and they started to experiment with something a little friendlier when it comes to describing hard-to-describe concepts, which is where I come in.

The idea of using graphics to get to the meat of a problem isn’t new, but it’s been gaining more momentum lately. The content above is neither that fascinating or is it really something that lends itself to easy discussion, so VID was looking for an out to allow explanation while keeping it somewhat bearable. 

I actually really enjoyed doing this little piece for a few reasons, one of which is I forgot how good it feels to animate, even with restrained budget that really limited me to animating between a key frame or two. But the slow, deliberate process really flicked a prong in my brain that hasn’t been flicked for a while, and I’ve been thinking about doing some cartoons ever since. I’m excited to hopefully get some more work for VID (with a bigger budget for some real opportunity for gesture), but also to start work on a project that has been peeking into my consciousness every now and again for a few years now. As if I ever have enough time to do everything I want to do.

The other reason this humble little piece pleased me is that I think the expression on the robot is pretty funny, and I think I aped the old UPA cartoon-style better than I have before, which makes me happy. I know it’s probably not good enough for John K., but John K. is a total maniac, so whatever. In that spirit, here’s a few cool UPA-style commercial cartoons I found. So I feel comfortable being part of a long line of respectable shill animators.

Esso

Bank Of America

From Wired, a piece about The Orb , a “glanceable” (chuckle) ambient information object that, instead of shouting data at you, is more passive in it’s presentation.

“That’s the power of “ambient information,” which tries to combat data overload by moving information off computer screens and into the world around us. The Orb was originally sold as a tool for monitoring financial portfolios. You could set it to shine a serene sky blue when your stocks were going up or pulse an alarming red when they were tanking. Studies showed that people were two to three times more likely to actively manage their investments, selling off deadbeat stocks and buying better-performing ones, when they used the Orb. This is the psychological paradox of ambient information: We’re more likely to act on a subtle but continuously present message than an intermittent one we’re forced to stare at.”

Great idea, cool object, and what a way to see the power of numbers when it comes to energy saving. But what I really love is that diagram above, from The Orb’s site.