safety in artmaking....

i wanted to address a common theme that i noticed with our triptych projects: safety.

safety is terribly important in artmaking - when you weld, or wield powertools near loved ones.

but safe images and safe thinking can limit us as artists, and certainly affect your audience. the triptychs that we saw were largely safe, revealing little about who you are, or insight into what makes you so astounding.

so i dare you guys to push harder, dig deeper, and find a way to reveal your thinking processes. please - don't expose yourself in ways that we can exploit or take advantage of - i'm not asking for us to become a group therapy meeting. but i want your work to be more meaningful, more potent, more striking, and that means taking some real risk, and possibly using examples from your own life that you can communicate with real visual power.

let me inspire you with this image by artist John Baldessari:

weird posting images

hey there! you may have noticed that your image uploads in a strange way - looking something like this:



if you find that you have some weird dead space, and that your actual image is awfully small, it means that there were some tiny stray marks on your artboard. to clean it up, open up your illustrator file, select all (apple a) and see what you find. that will show you all the shapes and objects on the page. go around and delete any extraneous marks that extend your composition.

forget how to save as a jpg? it's easy! go to file, find export, and change the format to jpg. remember to save it as an RGB color file, and bump up the image quality to 10.

text project...

hello gang!

Min Jung thought it might be a good idea to pass along the idea of downloading fonts for this text project. if you think you're interested in locating more exciting fonts than your computer has, or that our lab has, you can search pretty easily for free download-able fonts, but here's one place to start: http://1001freefonts.com/

keep in mind that you'll be unable to load any new font on the lab computers - we don't have access.

however, if you plan to pop some new fonts on your own machine, and you can't figure it out, give a shout and i'll help you out. or you could probably cut to the chase and ask Min.

this american life - camera man

here's a great, short animation that you might get a kick out of. it's an excerpt from This American Life, a radio show turned tv show. it's animated by Chris Ware, who you may want to look up - he's responsible for Jimmy Corrigan, Smartest Kid on Earth, which our bookstore sells. it's worth reading.

it's a terrific example of the content matching the style - it "looks" as strong as it "thinks." that's something i'll squawk about a thousand times...