Chapter 6, "Take the Painting and Run"

The following is from Le Gentil Garçon.

There's something about the work shown on this site and even the site design itself that makes me smile. I thought I would share. I truly do wish that I could read French.

Look for "Take and Run," "Street Spirits" and "Snowmen" under the "works" section of the site.

Chapter 5, Everything Orange

The following is exerted from the MB Web Design Blog:

#2 - "Just one more small change…"

Though it seems trivial to "change everything from red to orange," you might have to change a PSD or PNG file, export all the slices, modify the stylesheet, modify some other details to complement the new colour… the list goes on. Only for the client to say "nah, I don’t like the orange. Make it red again."

In his or her blog entry, Nightmare Web Design Clients, the author describes many of the most common mistakes made by web design clients and how these mistakes impact their designer.

I have only been working in freelance design for about a year-and-a-half, but I've been working in the design industry for nearly thirteen years. While some of the specifics do change the ultimate facts are the same:

1. One can never charge enough for the amount of work that ultimately goes into any creative endeavor and truly feel financially rewarded.
2. In the end, your client is your customer and customers are always right--even when they're wrong.

Chapter 4, Resolution

Chances are, if the image that you're looking at on you computer monitor looks fine, it won't look very good when it's printed.

Images that are design for the screen are very different from images that are design for print. For one thing, screen images typically have a resolution of 72dpi (dots per inch) while print images typically require more than 4 times that (at least 300dpi). That means that for every inch that your image spans the printed page, an image designed for print will contain more than 4 times the data , which translates to more than 4 times the detail.

Here are some examples for you: (These are all designed to show the relative difference between these three resolutions when printed).

600dpi (nearly all printers can handle this, better printers go up to 1200dpi)

300dpi (This is what I would consider to be the lowest resolution that one might want to use when printing grayscale or color)

72dpi (This is an example of how images that you might pull off of the web, or from a screenshot will print)

As you can see the detail progressively lessens as does the print quality.

The moral of this story is: When you pay a designer to do work for you, pay extra for the full resolution artwork. That way, when you have go to someone else, years later, to produce a print ad for you, you don't have to tell them, "pull the images off of my website," and they won't have to try to explain to you why that won't work.

Chapter 3, The Super-Scary Manga Show

This is a sketch that I made of Eric Jones' and Landry Walker's characters from the Super-Scary Monster Show. It's a very badly rendered, manga-style drawing made during the Manga, Art & Graphic Novel Festival in Fremont, California. I was attending the show with SLG Publishing.

I don't draw in this style normally and consider this experiment to serve as evidence as to why I should not continue to draw this way.

I'm currently re-rendering the sketch in Illustrator and will post the results once it is complete.

Chapter 2, The Beginning has Begun

I've been working on a handful of projects, most of which are technical drawings for packaging products. These drawings are not very exciting, but I can't complain--too much.

I've also recently completed a mailer for a local interior design company. I'm not thrilled with what I've done for the front-side of the mailer, but I do like the back: I'll append this post with an example later.


Finally, I'm working on another Illustrator illustration and some sketches for my series of monster illustrations. Here's an example of the first in my monster series:


I have a limited number of signed and numbered prints available for sale. If you're interested in buying a print and have a Paypal account, contact me and I will make arrangements to ship a copy of the One-eyed, Martini-drinking Worm to you.

Chapter 1, The Beginning

This is the first entry in my design and illustration blog. I will use this blog to write about my current projects and report on their progress as well as to highlight noteworthy projects by other artists that I find online.