Uh yeah, so it's inspiration and stuff.

Often, you'll find in blogs by famous people, they'll post other artists' work as an example of technique, or as pure inspiration to greatness.

...But today I just felt like posting amusing movie posters

New Year, New Stuff

So here is a foray into logo design. I attend a local Improv Workshop, and I noticed show flyers and official materials looked like this:

Mike Gordon is a great cartoonist, and presents his ideas with clarity and appeal, but, as I shot my mouth off, the typeography on this flyer is a freak'n nightmare.

There's Poor choice of typefaces, and a lack of readability and negative space. Gradients and drop shadows are used indescriminately. Plus, the colors are loud and obnoxious.

After everybody agreed to let me volunteer a logo, I asked the group leader a few questions. He made it clear that the workshop was to be more of a club than a performing troupe. The performance recitals are secondary, and the first order of business of the logo is to get people to join.

So what visual devices and schemes have organizations successfully used to get people to not only support, but actively participate in their organization or club?

Both Facebook and Greenpeace use cool colors and very open, balanced type to immediately set up a comfortable, supportive mood. White or white space is used, probably to make things feel airy and open. Also, Greenpeace uses almost every "good" symbol one can do in sillouette, people holding hands, plush-ready animals, a standard-issue tree of hope, and as a bonus, the curvature of the globe, showing that the group's goals are a worldwide effort.

Blizzard's "World of Warcraft" does get a lot of "joiners" in the form of paying subscribers, but the imagery in the WOW logo didn't seem like the right social atmosphere for an Improv Club.

Second, I looked at the typefaces for well-known professional Improv Venues or troupes, to see if there's some ready-made symbols or typefaces already synonymous with stage Improv.

Okay, there isn't. Second City's brush script emphasises the spontaneity of Improv. Upright Citizen's Brigade's "Stencil" look appeals to the 'underground' feeling of the troupe's branding. The U.S. version of "Whose Line is it Anyway?" uses an art decco look, which in my mind, emphasizes the theatrical experience due to connotations to the golden age of Broadway musicals.

Actually, my first thought for an Improv logo was a "Ransom Note" style typeface, much like the logo for the movie, Clerks.

But my first pass at a logo really stressed for the "public club" look with a built type.

The smaller text is "Creator Credits" a free font from Blambot I had in as a dummy, ideally the whole logo would be built out of the same typeface. I wanted to use perfect geometric circles as part of the font's anatomy, to evoke a sense of community through associations with the PBS "Viewer's Like You" vibe.

Okay, I kinda liked the sizing, the overall shape of the piece, but it just didn't have a feeling of whimsy. What Mike Gordon's little three guy graphic clearly put over, is that Improv is supposed to be funny.

Uh, yeah. Aside from being fairly clichéd, the titly text doesn't play well with the horizontal bars of text at the top or bottom. Besides, the small counters make the typeface fairly oppressive, looking.

Here's a mockup, keeping blambot's font as an element and that wacky comedic tilty text, but using scans from book jackets to make up the word "Improv". I like this clip-art look because it shows disparate elements and sources, making up a whole, which is what improv players do.

I knew when I started this, that any bitmap elements would have to be converted to vectors so that the source file could be scaled and played with, so here's the final, again.

Here I played around with spacing and font sizing for legibility. You'll also see I removed the horizontal lines from the P and the benday dots from the R, as they felt like the intense detail pulled attention from the statement as a whole. Also, I pulled the corners of the letter boxes around to give the word "Improv" a unified shape.

Honestly, I feel the bright candy colors from the bitmaps are more fun. But like I've mentioned before, this group is a club first. Ultimately, a unified, calming, stable analogous color scheme that's more "coffee shop" than "Malibu Circus" seemed to fit that purpose better.

A visit from Gregory: An Education Experience.

"Christmas with Gregory" was intended to be conceived, and executed this past November, giving at least two weeks of December address-grabbing to make a decent mailing of the project. Certainly, the project was with the best of intents, with a use of landscape format, and the research and pre-production steps one needs to take with any comics project.

But, like many artists, I have a pesky dayjob that interferes with this proposition. Mainly a retail gig that lacks regular hours, where shifts are frequently switched, and you never know which mornings and evenings you are gonna work week to week. So deadlines on the self-set production schedule get pushed back... and pushed back... and pushed back even more.

So fast forward to December, the race is on to get his mini drawn, lettered, printed and SHIPPED before goddamned Christmas. And by December 19th, it's set. except...

The surface of a standard Office Photocopier is 17" wide while the full size of the original artwork (including that centerfold spread) is 18" wide. First Proofs are cropped artwork, no good, and no time to resize it since I'm at the zero hour AND have a holiday-season store shift starting in ten minutes.

CURSE YOU PHOTOCOPIERRRRRRR!

Game sum total: no printed mini comic this year.

Which brings about some lessons learned.

Lesson the First: Format is vital! ALWAYS know the final format of your project: aspect ratio, codec, ppi, frame rate, interlacing, color codes,paper sizes available, and of course, the size of your scanner bed before you even set pencil to paper to brainstorm!

If it's a painting to be framed, know what frame sizes are out there, first! Neglecting to even measure the scanning bed of the Xerox machine I was gonna use ahead of time shot me through the foot at the finish line.


Lesson the Second: If you aren't in an environment conductive to your goals: get out of there! A large part of what killed "Gregory" was the simple inability to predict what times would be available to work on it, due to working for an outfit with highly irregular hours.

It's not the store's fault for interferring with the schedule, it's mine for allowing it to.


Lesson the Third: Be a royal jerk about it!

We live in a culture that neither appreciates or understands the practical aspects of making art, regardless of discipline. Try out the following statements :
"I'm sorry, but I have church/a shift at McDonald's/ a picnic to go to" vs.
"I'm sorry, I have to draw"
Which of those two is somebody gonna debate?

Nobody else gets it. Not your semi-altzemic great aunt who thinks working a register at Michaels puts you "in the biz", not the government with it's comparative disregard for cultural enrichment and miniscule change jar excuse for a grants fund, and ESPECIALLY not any well meaning person or rationale that gently reminds you you "can always do that later."

Hell No.

In such an environment, to really stick to your guns and make it through requires significant force of personality: traits such as selfishness, rudeness, obsession, stubbornness, and even the occasional tantrum... at least where the work is concerned.

Cause otherwise, you're gonna cooperate yourself right the hell out of what's really important.