Well, I pulled a fast one and deleted a poster I created yesterday because I just didn’t like how it came out. This is another one I had been working on, off and on for a while. I finished it up to my satisfaction today and thought I would give it a post. You can view it along with all the other posters in the print section. As I said in the post I deleted, I have also put a bunch of my past type treatments in the type section as well.
The very kind and true purveyor of all things creative, Matthew Newton interviewed me this week for his ‘Made You Look’ column. It is a pretty long interview actually because anyone who knows me knows that I can be a bit of a rambler once you pull my string. He did a great job at getting across my personality though and I was able to answer some pretty fundamental questions about my ethos and established philosophy. I really appreciated him asking me to interview and please visit, not just to read my interview, but to support Matthew and his website because he is building a great interview archive there. Even if you are not a fan of my work, I can guarantee he has interviewed someone that you are interested in and would like to find out more about.
Thank you again Matt. You can read the interview here.
As you can see, I redesigned the poster last night. This time I decided to make it less about the typography and more about Buckminster Fuller. I wanted to better unify the marriage between the organic and the geometric, since I think that says a lot about what Fuller himself accomplished, especially with the geodesic dome. I actually think it works better than the last poster and serves as a better commemoration of Fuller. Ironically, by making the type smaller but centering it in the circle above the image of Fuller gives it more brevity and buries it deeper in memory. I decided not to do any erosion edging to the poster as well because it kind of impedes on the integrity of the geometry. I think I am going to print this leaving the white border as well so when it is framed, there will be a nice border around it if someone wants to center it with a black matte. Again if I print it, I will also probably use a heavier white stock. Anyway, its a done deal now and is going back in the book.
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I bet you didn’t think it was possible for me to create even more posters did you? Well, think again. There are yet even more in the PRINT section of the site and I am adding one at the rate of about one a week to every two weeks. I will be gathering price quotes later this month on printing and should have some in the store late this summer. I am looking into metallics, varnishes and potentially fluorescents. Should be a little something to love for every design nerd. Don’t take offense to that statement by the way, I am probably the biggest one of all. I have been experimenting with all manner of illustration style and typography. I am trying to really take one each poster individually and do something unique for each. There is a little more Brazilian love in there too since the love of my life is Brazilian. I will be going there again later this summer as well. I am ready now. I could really use a vacation.
There will also be a digital downloads section in my storefront later this year that will offer up, for a very low price, bundles of the vector art I have amassed and categorized over the last decade. I am also planning on offering up store space to my other bloggers, so there may be some of their tees, posters etc. available in the store later this year as well.
If you have yet to notice, I have updated my personal work section on the site with a whole bunch of shiny new candy. Specifically, there is new work in both the Print and Illustration sections. You may have seen some of the images recently on FFFFound. Someone over there has been picking up what I have been laying down. I have plans to start printing and selling posters to beef up the online store this summer as well, and you can see a preview of what will be available in the Print section. I will also be adding a digital download section to my store where you can buy and download all the vector madness I have created over the last few years to create the some 10 million t-shirts I have made in the last several years. I have amassed quite a library of vectors over the last decade and I think they could be put to good use by other people out there now. I will also be potentially adding merchandise from other friends and Editors on the site over this summer into next fall as well. The store will be getting a much needed makeover later this year as well. There are all kinds of plans in the works. I will be adding an author soon as well who will be writing more about independent film and short films.
If you have any suggestions for the blog, or you feel we are missing something that you would like to see more of, please leave a comment after this post or send me an email. Thanks again to all of you reading regularly, I am working day and night to keep searching for new and better content. I know you have voracious appetites.
I just wanted to thank each and every one of you out there that has been linking back to the site. The traffic has quadrupled since I started the blog in January. I have had people coming from various community blogs at Barack Obama’s website because of the posters I did for his campaign. Texans for Obama were also very supportive. People have really responded to the creative I have generated to support his campaign and that is really exiting. I did that work out of a sincere desire to show my support for Obama. An amazing website called Stumble Upon has been almost single-handedly responsible for a gigantic amount of traffic. One of my favorite design blogs of all time, Computerlove was also kind enough to grant me a link. The Denver Egotist has also been very supportive of my endeavors. Joyengine has had my back from day one as well and I can’t thank all the guys over there enough for all of their support. Because We Like To has also been very supportive and was another nice little local Denver, now Minneapolis blog run by two good friends who are also amazingly talented designers. Josh Spear has really helped me out as well and offered me some key advice that helped me make the final decision to get the current version of the site online. Design You Trust was also kind enough to post a link. I also have had a couple images floating around FFFFound lately which was exiting since I check that site religiously. Thank you as well to all of the other smaller blogs that have linked my site as well, there are too many to list and if I tried I wouldn’t want to forget any. So in the interest of diplomacy, I just want to thank all of you who have your own blog and have still found enough inspiration here to link back to. Thank you sincerely. I mean it. This is a community and it wouldn’t exist without you.
Lastly I really want to thank Aaron and Matt who have been kind enough to start posting to the site. They are both incredibly talented designers and I can’t believe they are blogging on my website. Thank you so much guys. If you haven’t seen there work, you can read their bios now in the about section. Be sure to check out their individual websites because they are both incredibly talented designers.
Thank you in advance to my future bloggers as well. I have had a good response to the call for bloggers and am considering it closed for now. I will be selectively inviting more bloggers in the near future, so more will be added, but I think we have enough to get off the ground now.
Running a website like this, and I have had this site online for close to 6 years now, is a difficult thing. I haven’t exactly profited from it, but I have committed to it out of my sincere love of all things design and the desire to share that love with others. The global design community just keeps growing and blogs are a fascinating aspect of that social phenomenon. There is just so much out there to be inspired by that there really is something design-related for practically everyone now. You can really see design infiltrating mainstream culture right now on many levels and that is really exiting. Lets just hope we can all come together and find a way to use it to make a change for the better.
Thanks again for all of your support and keep checking the site because this is only the end of the beginning.
As you may or may not have noticed, I updated the Print section of my work portfolio today with another poster series I created for an art show a couple of weeks back. Unfortunately the show was canceled at the very last minute, after I had gone through all the trouble to create the posters. I created the entire series in only two days, both of which I stayed up until around 3 in the morning. I felt pretty good about how they turned out however and it was a great exercise in re-familiarizing myself with a side of Graphic Design that I love. It is always an interesting experiment to limit yourself to a certain amount of elements and see how creative you can get within the restrictions. I am always amazed at how complicated things can get when only using even the most sparing of elements. I usually and rather ironically, end up creating my best work this way.
Anyway, if you are interested in checking out how the series turned out, you can view them in the Print section.
I am seeking new bloggers at the moment. I would really like to grow Changethethought into a usable archive of information for Graphic Artists, Motionographers, Type-junkies, Fashionistas, Film Fans and young people interested in politics and pop culture. I am looking for people who are not afraid to express their true opinion about things. For example if you want to post something you think is relevant to a specific trend, but then call it out as something you personally think is lame, go for it.
I also would like people who have an opinion about issues, issues about anything related to design or politics. No fear here. If you feel strongly about something and want to talk about it, then I will support you. Our views don’t have to relate either. You don’t even have to like my work. A lot of people don’t. I am comfortable with that.
I would just like to start something here where people can find a little shred of truth and feel a connection to another person. Right now I am having such a hard time just keeping the content coming that it would be great to have contributors that would like to write more and not just link dump. Link dumping is really all I have time for at the moment.
I can’t offer compensation yet because there isn’t really any to be offered. I am doing this for free so far myself. I can promise you that I will send you a size run of all the clothing I have produced and any and all prints I may produce in the future as well. I know from experience that is more than most design zines offer their editors. I will also feature you in the about section with a link to you and your work. I can’t tell you exactly where all this is headed either because I don’t really even know myself. Maybe we can make something happen for each other. Time will tell.
If you think you might be interested, drop me an email at hire@changethethought.com and send me a link to where I can view your work or learn more about you.
I am slowly but surely updating my portfolio on a daily basis with cleaner and more product focused imagery of my work. I think when it is all complete it will look nice and slick but it is going to take some time and doing to get it all completed. So over the next couple weeks you will start to see the portfolio section get cleaner and neater. I will send out a note when it is complete and do another post. There is some new work being sprinkled in there as well.
I have some great news that I can hardly keep to myself. A friend recruited me to help make posters for Barack Obama’s Colorado campaign yesterday. I will be starting work on them this week. I was so exited to be contributing, even in a small way like designing posters, that I could barely contain myself. I was even told to just ‘do what I do’ and make them art. I can barely wait to get started. I’ll post images in the ‘work’ section and on the blog when I am finished.
Well, since this is still my blog to some extent, I feel like this is a proper place to air my intentions. I had an epiphany last night and I woke up this morning in a different state of mind. I realized I have been trend whoring much too much lately and I need to slow down a little. I need to find my center if you will. I spend so much time, for obvious reasons when referencing the blog, looking at the up-to-the-moment trendy work that is out there and I allow it to over influence my thinking.
What it has left me with is no real definable identity. For a while I thought this could be a mark of pride, but I am not so sure about that anymore. What I feel I am missing and craving is just pure old fashioned good design. Good typography, good use of space versus negative space, clean lines, simplicity and form following function. The designers I really admire tend to really know who they are and commit, in some sense, to their identity. Scott Hansen is one who comes to top of mind quickly. His work at Iso50 is just all around well designed. Some of it is trendy, but it is all well designed. The ‘good design’ aspect of his work is what will make his work a reference point for years to come while the trend whores will most likely fall off the map. It is as though he holds up a measuring stick to all his work and asks, “alright, this is done, but is it well designed?”
I haven’t been doing this, what I have been asking myself too much is, “alright I am finished, is this cool?” Cool comes and goes and changes as a matter of perspective. Good design has staying power. So, it’s time to clear out my attic a little bit and start self-editing. I am going to commit to this statement of purpose starting today and start holding up that measuring stick to my work. Don’t worry, I will still be attracted to bright colors, and I think you will still see a lot of my identity in the work, but I am going to put more controls on what I produce. I think ‘better design’ will resonate with more people than just producing heaps and heaps of ‘cool stuff’. Hopefully I will begin to find myself in the process as well and there will be more clarity in my work. Don’t worry about the site either, that is staying for a while as well. I do actually think the site, although it is trendy, is still far better designed than 90% of the awful looking sites and blogs that are out there at the moment.
I will most likely start with a series of posters, similar to Scott Hansen that you will see on the site sometime over the next few months and move out from there. Please don’t mistake me, I will not be ripping off anything Scott designs, I am just going to follow a bit of his ethos, focus on doing only a few things, but do those things very very well. I know this will take time. If you have an opinion about my epiphany, leave me a comment or contact me via the contact section.
There is an enormous amount of new work posted the ‘WORK‘ section of the site now. I still have a little bit more to go in the ‘type’ section but that should be up soon enough. The great thing now is, you can actually watch the television commercials I have been making over the past couple years in the broadcast section. The section may load a little slow however, and you will need a Quicktime Plugin to view them. Sorry PC users, gotta roll with my Mac homies on that one.
On the site front, as you can see there is work being done daily to fix up the site. The entire site should be optimized soon for all browsers. I have a web development company looking it over at the moment. So, hold your breath if you are still using Internet Explorer 6, I should be there with an oxygen tank soon.
So far so good. The SEO has massively improved, virtually overnight and the traffic to the site has been increasing daily, at a rapid rate since the new site launched and that makes me happy. Please don’t be shy and use the contact section to email me any and all suggestions for news to the blog. In the future you can expect some job postings, I am hoping to get KROP on board as soon as the site is optimized across browsers. I will also soon be inviting new news editors, so the content should be even more interesting and robust.
Also, I just fixed the permalink structure of the site. You will now notice nice little titles and clean little links to all the individual postings, should you so choose to save one or link directly back to it. If you don’t know what a permalink is, and most people don’t, then fuhgedaboutit. Overall, if you have any strong feelings about the site, be sure to let me know by sending me an email using the contact section. And please don’t be shy, feel free to drop a comment by clicking the comment link under the post title to tell me how you feel. If I post something that really pisses you off, then let me know about it. I can take it, I have thick skin and I encourage debate.
Thanks again for the patience.
I have decided to go ahead and let the chips fall where they will and keep the new blog up and running. I have several bids out right now to secure someone in helping me optimize the look and experience of the blog across all browsers. Wow, it really is a bit of a shock that Internet Explorer is that screwed up. How could such a massive company, who is considered such a global leader in their market, be responsible for producing such inferior products. It makes me happy I decided to go back to Mac. Safari is still pretty awful but it is still miles above Internet Explorer.
So, expect more posts this week and daily additions to the work section. Again apologies for the mishap. It should be resolved quickly. I will do a full scale launch as soon as the bugs are fixed. Until then, I thank you all for your patience.
Now back to business. I’ve got a lot of content to start generating.
Well, as you can see. I have made some major changes to the site. Please, and I know this is a strange request, refrain from linking the site for about a week until I do a major release. The reason being, I know the site is going to be buggy at first and I am going to have a lot of stuff to iron out. I am wholly new to the CSS and PHP game as well as WordPress. So, for now please use Firefox or Safari since those are the browsers I developed for. I don’t even have a machine where I can test Explorer, but I know it will be buggy on Explorer. I know it will be wonky on older versions of Explorer for sure, but all I can say is update to Vista or make the switch to Firefox. We are talking web 3.0 here, no more old school nonsense. The future is now and there is no turning back.
Anyway, send me any comments you would like for now about improvements or if you know how to fix the issues with Explorer, let me know that too. I make no claims at being a web designer so it is always tough for me switching site formats. I think WordPress is a great place to go right now though and I am really exited about the possibilities. Thank you for your patience.
Also, the work sections are no where near complete yet. The images are on my server, they are just waiting to be posted. So keep checking back at the work section as it will be quickly filling up over the next several days.
