WOLVERINE!

My 48-Hour T-Shirt

The second 48-Hour T-shirt is now available. That’s the design, above: Two colors on a brown American Apparel 4.3-ounce fine cotton athletic fit T.
A summary of the research inspiring the design, below, is also available in PDF form, here.

A psychological study offers an interesting lesson in “false consensus.”
The research involved dividing into two groups; members of each were asked to read an essay about Rasputin, and then asked to evaluate their feelings about him. One group was given an essay that noted Rasputin’s correct birthday. The other was given the identical essay, but the date of his birthday was changed — to be the same day as that of the reader.

The latter (same birthday) group evaluated Rasputin notably more favorably than the control group did.
Mark R. Leary cites this research in The Curse of The Self, noting that if our opinions can be affected by such a “minor, egocentric matter,” it should be no surprise that “factors even more intimately related to our views of ourselves also influence our judgments of other people.”

So: Perhaps if you wear this T-shirt, you will make a good impression.
Design by Greg Eckler (www.theviciouscircus.com), MFA student in the graphic design department of Savannah College of Art and Design.

The T-shirt “I Show How You Feel” is available until 10 a.m. (Eastern) Wednesday, for $18 plus shipping. (We DO NOT guarantee delivery by Xmas. I think there’s a good chance you could get it by then, but we can’t promise. Please read the details related to delivery timing and other matters, here.) Order below

The aim of The 48-Hour T-shirt Project is to prod consumers to think more about our own behavior, about how we can be manipulated, and about how we manipulate ourselves. Yes, doing this by way of products may be seen as either ironic, clever, or hypocritical. That’s (part of) the point.

You can order the shirt here

Eddie Izzard + LEGO Star Wars = Win

48-Hour T-Shirt #1

The first 48-Hour T-Shirt is now available. That’s the design, above: Three colors (metalic silver ink, black, flourescent green) on a gray American Apparel 4.3-ounce fine cotton athletic fit T. A summary of the research inspiring the design, below, is also available in PDF form, here.

This phrase was quoted in a recent paper by scholars researching the subject of mimicry and its role in the day-to-day marketplace.

One study, for instance, found that a waitress received larger tips when she “mimicked” customers by repeating orders verbatim, than when she paraphrased their orders. According to the researchers, being subtly mimicked “creates feelings of rapport, affiliation, and closeness toward the mimicker.”

The research was summarized in the April 2008 issue of The Journal of Consumer Research, in an article titled “Of Chameleons and Consumption,” which noted that prior studies suggested “that mimicry serves as an important communication tool, communicating to the person being mimicked that ‘I show how you feel.’” This newer research specifically explored “the effect of mimicry on consumption,” and how it might be used in, for instance, sales techniques.

Design by Derek Black, MFA candidate in the graphic design department of Savannah College of Art and Design (www.redneckillustrator.com).

PLACE YOUR ORDER NOW! While you still have time!

4 Months In The Making

So what have I been up to? A little of this and a little of that. I finished finals last week with all As, passed my 45-hour review, and have been working on my thesis (working title: Play and the Discovery of New Ideas). So I'm doing well. But my current venture is a bit out of left field and at the same time perfectly me.

Four months ago I was contacted by a gentleman by the name of Rob Walker who wanted me to be part of an experiment of sorts. Rob is the author of Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy And Who We Are



and is the New York Times Magazine "Consumed" columnist.

The project is called The 48-Hour T-Shirt (link for the pdf flyer), it is designed to prod consumers to think more about their own behavior, about how their are manipulated, and about how they manipulate themselves. (He does state that doing this by way of selling products is ironic and part of the point).

3 statements where created based on research Rob had done (found) the first is inspired by research regarding mimicry and the shirt is "I Show How You Feel." The design of this shirt is done by my friend and fellow Graphic Design MFA student Derek Black. The second is "We Have The Same Birthday," based on research relating to false consensus and designed by yours truly. The last is a fake placebo"Veladone-Rx, It's Worth The Extra Money. Really." based on research of placebos and pricing of drugs and designed by Advertising Design MFA student, Angie Smith.

The kicker is each shirt is released for the first 3 mondays in December and is ONLY for sale for the first 48-hours, after which it will not be made available again. Only the artist are making money in this venture [so show some love :) ], Rob is doing this as research for a future book that will include the three of us and this experiment. I've seen the work but can't tell you about it other than I think all of them are awesome (and mine is actually really cute). The shirts will sell through the Murketing.com site

It has already shown up in the online magazine Core77 (note: the days were listed wrong here).

Have a Happy Thanksgiving!

LEGOedween

So I've got a few more from my diggings over the past couple weeks. Mainly just from my small amounts of down time.

Firstly,


A better version of Me

next from back home,


Boots!

from SCAD


Derek Black


Holly Schmidt

and some Comic inspired ones for the holiday


Spawn


Juggernaut from X-men 3

Happy LEGOedween!

LEGOed: The Legend Continues...

So I have a few more. First some additions to the Mortal Kombat edition.


Shang Tsung


Johnny Cage

Now some personal ones:


I'm really proud of this one because it is freaking perfect.
My Brother, Gordon Eckler


Seth Akkerman


SCAD Professor, Scott Boylston


and I'm am pretty proud of this one as well.
SCAD Professor, Rhonda Arntsen

The Empire Strikes Barack

I'm not one to usually for showing political views, mainly because a lot of the time it isn't worth arguing with someone about. This morning I was going through my almost endless list of emails from The Daily Heller when one on political satire had this video.



This is great!

LEGOed: Mortal Kombat Edition

About a month ago I was able to pick up Mortal Kombat: Armageddon. In this game you can play any character ever in the series to date (note that they are coming out with a Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe that just looks stunning, not to mention you can be The Joker!). So I decided one day to make a few characters LEGOed, this is what I came up with:


Liu Kang


Kung Lao


Reptile


Sektor


Raiden
This one was the beginning of this adventure and I am especially proud of him.


ROUND ONE. FIGHT.
This would be my officially first LEGO vignette. :D

Screw the Bahamas

Since last year's presentation by Joe Duffy and his son here at SCAD I've heard nothing but praise for Duffy & Partner's Bahamas logo



Well screw the Bahamas logo I think the logo that they did for Gander Mountain Tall Tales Restaurant is awesome.



a beautiful use of positive and negative space, something a lot of designers tend to forget about when creating a mark.

LEGOed

So in my little down time when I am looking to turn off my mind but up my creativity I have started with what I am calling LEGOed. I dig through my (currently) 180 LEGO minifigs and see if any pieces remind me of people I know. Here is what I have so far.


ME!


My Mom!
(and I swear to you this one comes like this, it is Umbridge from Harry Potter but it looks EXACTLY like my mom)


PING!


Scooter!


Bob Newman
(one of my professors here at SCAD.)

and who knows you might be next...that is if I find a piece that reminds me of you :D

Christvertising

Okay so I find this hilarious, some people won't but this guy has a genuine sense of humor and some guts, that I like to see. It is hard to distinguish if it is a joke or not until you start browsing around the site which you can do so at Christvertising.com

Teaching Graphic Design

So for the past month I have been hired by the Boys & Girls Club of Savannah to teach a workshop in Graphic Design. The summer camp for the kids ends this friday so I only had four weeks in which to teach kids ranging from grades 5th to 9th, graphic design. It has been fun to work with these kids on this but I did need to do a bit of reworking of the course once or twice to compensate for kids missing and needing to catch up and for computer problems. All in all the kids I feel got something out of it and understand graphic design to be more than the computer, which is good because I wanted them to realize that ideation is the most important point and that a computer is a tool not an answer. In this way if they cannot afford a computer they don't feel as if they cannot become graphic designers later. I had a friend in undergrad, Graham, that never owned a computer the entire time.

I taught the kids Brainstorming, Sketching, How to Make Type Feel, Drawing Symbols and from this we worked on Logos. I made them a deal, they can make the logo for whatever they want, a video game, a sports team, a restaurant, anything goes but I am giving them the word they must use for the name. Everybody got the word Vortex. A word I borrowed from Bob Newman's Logotype undergrad class here at SCAD. The results were interesting since most the kids didn't know what the word meant they didn't get hung up on making tornados and such. At about the second day into the project I decided to do the entire thing in 24 hours just to show the kids an example of exploration and sketching from my own work.

My favorite quote from this class came from one girl who said "And I thought school work was hard!"

Here are some samples:


An Online Community "Sims" Game by N'yeema Noble (5th grade)


A Cafe by Alexis Merritt (6th grade)


A Florist by Kristine Walker (7th grade), and honestly the best and most appropriate use of Curlz I have ever seen.


A Fast Food Chain by Monica Mayle (6th grade). Whenever a kid said their logo was done and showed it to me I told them to draw it again. Monica drew her logo over-and-over to cover 8 pages of her sketchbook, what she didn't know was I was counting on her getting tired of doing it so she began simplifying the mark to get done quicker, the more she did it the better it got.


A Shoe Company by Juwon Johnson (5th grade), this little one impressed me constantly, his mind is just in the right place when it comes to design and art. He was another that I had do his sketch over-and-over because he thought he had it down pat the first time but he needed to simplify it more. This kid could be amazing one day, but I swear he has a bigger ego than me!


A Skateboard Wheel Company by me.

Quote Poster 1

This past Sunday I decided to isolate myself and create a poster for my girlfriend. I have a great enthusiasm for rock posters, custom lettering and quotes. My sketchbooks tend to be filled with more text than drawings since I tend to think in words, a trait slightly uncommon for a visual artist (at least that is what I have found). So drawing inspiration from the exquisite work over at The Small Stakes I set out to create a poster for her of my favorite quote about love.


"Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real" - Iris Murdoch.
If you would like a copy of the poster you can download a PDF of it here

I plan on making a series of posters much like this one and perhaps putting on a show of them sometime in the next year.

Photoshop Droplets

A little history. I used to work prepress at a printshop and in that environment you take any job whether it is Quark, InDesign, Pagemaker, etc. and print out a post script file that goes to a hot folder and off to a workflow production program such as Trueflow. The post script runs through a series of necessary commands and Trueflow gives you the perfect PDF for digital plate making.

So one day I wondered if I could create a folder on a Mac (like a Windows hot folder) that would run certain applescript commands (in this case in Photoshop) and have it perform actions that would render what I needed. In this case because I worked with hundreds of photographer photos that were 72 dpi, RGB, jpegs and wanted them made into 300 dpi, CMYK, tiffs. I studied applescript and eventually stumbled across something built into Photoshop called Droplets. No these do not make things look like they have water droplets on them. They are desktop based links to Photoshop Actions that you can drop a file onto and even if Photoshop is closed it will open Photoshop and run the Action commands linked to the Droplet.

This is an amazing feature and has been in Photoshop for years but almost no one knows about it. So I give you a PDF Trick-of-the-Trade for Photoshop Droplets (aka Lo And Behold I Am A God Amongst Men) ehm, the joke being that now you can get the computer to do a lot of this mindless repetitive work for you as you go for a "paid" break.

Enjoy!

How to create Photoshop Droplets PDF

Come back and visit from time-to-time as I post more Tricks-of-the-Trade!

A Touch of Color

So a friend of mine is opening a jewelry store and asks if I can design a logo for him. I give him my rates and send him a questionnaire/creative brief so I can get a better idea of what he is looking for. The name is A Touch of Color. Now many times as a designer we will often face having to work with something that seems a bit off. A Touch of Color may not (for some) feel like a jewelry store name so my job is to make you think jewelry store when you see it. The overall concept with both directions was the intertwining of elements in jewelry, this goes beyond just links on a chain but also the use of different elements such as materials, metal, precious stones and so on. Both directions do this but in different ways. Both logos are hand drawn and then inked (when his business loans come through) he'll have me finalize the one he likes, making it a digital version and I will begin to create color versions for usage. I start all logos in just black and white because if you get the mark to be strong in just one color than the addition of color can bring more life to it without the color being the sole strength of the mark.


This mark was inspired by some of the work by the brothers at Invisible Creature. Dealing with long and sometime ornate names of bands helps them create dynamic marks that speak volumes of what the audience is in for.


With this direction I was looking towards something more traditional, using a combination of John Downer's Brothers and Zuzana Licko's Mrs Eaves both from Emigre. I redrew them by hand in order to create the interlocking letterforms but have the intention of making Mrs Eaves the workhorse typeface for A Touch of Color's business system. It is a beautiful typeface that I think helps bring about the feeling of the handmade and antiquity of the jewelry. And the entire package is only $95!

The Race Begins

So the Great Internet Balloon Race is up and running and will be for the next week. It is interesting to see little balloons drift across the page :)

and check out the view of the Race Map


and a little closer


Don't we look so much more interesting than everywhere else you could go!

The Great Balloon Race!

A small new addition to The Vicious Circus is a small floating orange raccoon balloon in the lower right corner! It is because we signed up to be part of the World's First Internet Balloon Race that was created by Orange (a mobile phone company in the UK). The race takes place in a few days and is absolutely free to take part in as well as to register your site to be part of the race. The goal is for people racing is they go from site to site earning "miles" and are in the running for winning a trip to Ibiza. This is an ingenious viral campaign and well it is free advertising for everybody. And like P.T. Barnum said "Without promotion something terrible happens...Nothing!"

Harley Quinn

Some time ago I found that Coop had done a pencil sketch of Harley Quinn. I am a huge fan of Coop's work, and this was the perfect motivation to study his work. I have his book Devil's Advocate and love perusing the pages of his work. I took his pencil sketch of Harley Quinn seen here



With my self taught talent and style using cell shading and gradient meshes in Illustrator I created this digital inked and colored version of Harley. I am a fairly good digital illustrator and this was my first venture into the inking and coloring side of things that is usually only found in sequential art.



I hope you enjoy it as much as I did creating it. It used to be a practice for artists to copy master works in order to study the hand of the artist, but sadly in today's world many people fear to create things not "original." People tend to forget what they can learn by simply tracing something. It was growing up redrawing Todd MacFarlane's Spider-Man that helped me years later not draw fingers like sausages.

Concept Vs. Gimmick - Round 1

I have always been bothered by people (often in advertising) that use the term Concept when they mean Gimmick. I've been working on an essay/rant about this recently. Since we were talking about what a Concept is last Friday I figured I have a good example of what one is in relation to the other.

A Concept is what Michelangelo had before he created his sculpture of David. An all encompassing idea that shapes the creation and form of a piece into a unified whole.

"Michelangelo's David is based on the artistic discipline of disegno... " "...he worked under the premise that the image of David was already in the block of stone he was working on — in much the same way as the human soul (may be) found within the physical body." -Wikipedia

The statement made of Michelangelo's discipline of desegno led me to look that word up on dictionary.com with the result as such: "drawing or design: a term used during the 16th and 17th centuries to designate the formal discipline required for the representation of the ideal form of an object in the visual arts, esp. as expressed in the linear structure of a work of art."

It is in this progression that I would most certainly state that as the best example of a Concept as I can find.

Unfortunately the meagre small-mindedness of some marketing/advertising people who quest to give their lives a more elevated venier by using "catch" words to invoke a professional sense of themselves mutilate this high-ideal word worse than those of us who often say experiment when we mean, exploration.

I had often heard it argued at my old job in advertising that something or other needed a Concept in an overused and misappropriated manner that would leave anyone who values good ideas (and good grammer) to take up beating their head into their desk as a recreational past time.

A Concept is Michelangelo's idea of David. A Gimmick is the toy in that box of cereal you wanted as a kid. However from reading Wikipedia entry for Cereal Box Prize reiterates where this misappropration came from.

"The cereal box prize is a concept almost as old as cereal; perhaps older." <(what the HELL does that mean? who writes some of these things?) "For example, Cracker Jack boxes often contained prizes in them, well before the boom of breakfast cereals." - Wikipedia

Concept, Idea, Gimmick. Our lives are overrun with the pastiche of a counter-productive language running head first into itself. Leaving the dazed and confused looters of current cultural trends (see advertising and marketing) to snatch at language well out of their range in order to compensate for actual understanding.

So perhaps the next linguistic evolutionary step is not to create new words (Conidmick?) which would leave us looking like W. trying to finish a kiddie section word jumble. Our focus may be to return to the Renaissance and capture the essence of our meaning with a term like "Disegno."

Then again we would probably end up hearing an account executive in coming years state that this needs more disegno so that it can Pop. Like you can just pick it up at the grocery store.

Interactive Typography

Before I begin addressing the ideas and concerns surrounding interactive typography let me share with you an excerpt from Stefan Themerson's 1965 essay Typographical Topography:

"A page of a book is like a human face. Look at a page by Hemingway and compare it with Sterne and Marcel Proust. They are different typographical beings. But force upon them those ragged edges, and the influence of the author's style on the physical aspect of the page, their typographical physiognomy will disappear. No, unjustified setting is a sort of 'gleichschaltung through diversity,' a very phoney diversity. Produced methodically by chance. For the comfort of thee keyboard, and not for the comfort of the eye. The eye tolerates quite well thin spaces, and middle spaces, and thick spaces. There is absolutely no reason why we should be more puritan than our eye is and affect extreme strickness by using middle spaces only. On the contrary, by using them all, but intelligently (plus an occasional hair or a nut), one should be able to justify any line to a fixed length so that the reading eye will proceed quietly to the right, even if it meets on its way an odd nut or a mutton. It is the end of the line that halts it an sends it back to the left. With justified setting this scanning business is painless, and the eye doesn't take more notice of it than the foot does when you stroll along a promenade thinking of things that have nothing to do with walking. But when you force upon the eye that haphazard rhythm created by those paths of uneven length the process of reading becomes something self-conscious, like walking on crazy pavement where your foot doesn't know how long the next step will have to be. Poest are well aware of it all. That's why the breakline is one of the main weapons in their arsenal. They know that the end of a line, the eye halts, the lungs fill with air, mind is in suspense, the ear muffles the echo of the sound of the last syllable and prepares to receive the new string of rhythmical noises..."

Although Themerson's writing from 1965 take the idea of the composed static text set for the printed page it is important to remember that even in the world of dynamic text that rhythm created for the reader does more than conveys information but also creates a mood, a dramatic dynamic between the viewer and the viewed. In the range of interactive typography this element of poetic rhythm can be easily lost to the use of flashy segues and graphic interpretation that do nothing for the feeling nor convenience of the information and act solely as a form of decoration. In recent years the highest purveyor of this decorative dynamic text can be seen most clearly in what I will call "eXtreme" text. This is in league with advertisers gearing their ads to a young crowd by skewing the image of the product, which is pointed out by comedian David Cross here. This use of eXtreme text is the highest culprit to Bad Flash sites.

It should come to no surprise that the first in my list of Flash sites (I'll be going from worse to best here) is created by no less than Mountain Dew for there range of custom art bottles, known as Green Label Art.



You can experience this atrocity to web design here. Although I must warn you now that it is so incredibly weighed down in Flash effects that it may require you to force quit your internet browser. The use of overly heavy effects, music, flashy graphics that do nothing to convey any information combine to make this one of the worst web sites I have ever been to. Also let me take a moment to address the question "Why would a website designer choose this option?" Easy, because they or whoever is making the decisions is NOT a designer.

Our next look is at the Disney site for Pirates of the Caribbean 3.



This site loads slowly but at least not as bad as my previous example. The site is fairly convoluted and requires the viewer to interact with certain aspects in order to enter other parts of the site. It has a high entertainment level and even though it may be a bit heavy handed on the flash I must admit it is fairly fitting for the subject matter and conveys the mood of the subject matter.

Now not all Disney flash sites are that bad and one of my favorites to date is for the up and coming Pixar release "Wall-E." I'm honestly really looking forward to this film.



Here we see Wall-E become an integral part of conveying the information and mood of the site that for Pixar tends to be humorous and appropriately fun for all ages. I don't know if I can give a set loading time for a site, if the site is worth going to I might wait. In Wall-E's case I would wait, in Mountain Dew's case not so much.

What about Flash as a conveyor of information but not so much on the interactive side? Well let’s take a look at Hoefler Frere-Jones, who uses a simple Flash animation to advertise their latest font release Archer.



Typography.com is the home to Hoefler & Frere-Jones and acts as a storefront for the fonts designed by the type foundry. The simple use of he Flash Animation show the selling points of their latest release without bogging down the site with unnecessary decoration that would make interacting with it tiresome and frustrating.

Lastly we come to what I can find as probably the best use of Flash in a website at the AIGA design archives.



The design archives are simple yet dynamic at the same time, acting as place holders in which we can use to organize as well as peruse the work collected from past AIGA design annuals. The ability to hover over a certain piece and then let the information become apparent to what the thumbnail connects to is one of my favorite web interactions to date. The use of Flash in this case became a vehicle in order to create a simpler more dynamic site instead of its polar opposite in the realm of eXtreme text and flashy graphics that some people (usually in advertising) find to be ways of YELLLING at the general public thinking that this is a great way to get someone to notice you. Honestly unless you are engulfed in flames I don’t' really think there is ever a reason to run around screaming your head off like many of these "Bad Flash" sites often do.

We must become adapt not only in the classical forms of proper typography as proposed by Themerson and be able to properly and objectively design with the reader in mind but also begin to realize that this conveying of information in a rhythmic manner adheres itself to dynamic interactive texts as well. Today we must look into the eyes and soul of the human face of the interactive as well as printed pages.

What Is Graphic Symbolism?

I was once asked "what is graphic symbolism?" In order to answer such a question we must first begin by delineating the meaning of such a term to it's base definition and then broaden that to cover what exactly it is that we mean by "graphic symbolism" in terms of graphic design. The basic definition of "graphic symbolism" would as simple as can be put be, the practice of representing a concept, object, activity, place or event by forms of graphic representation be they typographic, photographic or illustrative.

If in terms of the idea of illustrative graphic symbolism we would be speaking of pictography. Pictography by definition is a form of writing in which a picture represents a word or idea. This could be said to be the practical foundation of typography itself when a letterform created in conjunction with other letterforms creates a word that becomes the signifier for an idea, concept or object. But I digress that we in this base case of "graphic symbolism" should state that we are speaking of the pictographic language of the graphic representation of ideas, concepts, objects or actions.

The most successful modern interpretation of "graphic symbolism" is one that everyone everywhere is familiar with, because face it everyone poops, and that is the modern Restroom sign
.

Otl Aicher initially created this “graphic symbolism” when he was commissioned to create the signage for the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, Germany. Otl set out to create an international language of pictographic symbols that a unified international audience could read, understand and respond appropriately to.

Here is a sample of Aicher's pictograms from icographic magazine.

If in discussing "graphic symbolism" we are looking for the ability to communicate effectively with any range of audience be they a subcultural division with it's own syntactical signifiers or to that of the broader audience (sometimes called the lowest common denominator) we must keep the words of Otl Aicher in mind "Design must surrender to practical criteria." A failure to do this in the realm of "graphic symbolism" can be found in a photo I took while in San Francisco of the warning label on a dumpster.


The image shows the conventional idea that these objects should not be submitted into this bin. It however fails if the person reading the label doesn't have a cultural reference to what these objects may be. Aicher's work became emblematic for the pictographic language he strove to communicate with, however it was created in context of a specific audience that would have a previous knowledge of what they were looking at and for in the illustrative representations of the signage.

The most current and prominent failure of "graphic symbolism" is when the image used is no longer culturally significant. At any firehouse in the United States you are most likely going to be greeted with this image in order to warn you that your travel may be impeded by the need for a fire truck to gain access to the roadway.

Since the usage of Hook and Ladder fire trucks has gone the way of the Dodo it seems in and of itself entirely redundant to warn people of something they may or don't know what it is. It is in these cases that the reinterpretation of the symbol used or perhaps an overhaul of graphic language needs to be addressed.

So what is "graphic symbolism"? Well honestly in an ever-changing visual culture it may be entirely worthwhile to ask, what isn't "graphic symbolism"? Anything that can be represented by means of illustration, photography or typography is quite simply "graphic symbolism."