harry, you're all right.

What oh what have I been doing?
Humming away at Adbusters, the latest issue, the January/February 2011 Big Ideas issue just came out.

A few spreads I designed:




This issue was the 3rd and final issue in the Adbuster's Revolution issues (Issues about Revolution, giving a history of it, and what kinds of revolutions are happening now and could happen in the future). The visual themes tying this issue together was light and colors (yes, I know, really broad metaphors, but it did help narrow down how to approach designing these spreads). So the issue goes from dark colors (Indigo, Violet) and transitions on through to angrier colors (Red) and into calmer more poetic ones (Green, Yellow). With each corresponding colors, the stories of the magazine follow the same sort of feeling, so dark stories at the beginning, and revolutionary, activist stuff in the middle, and ending on more thoughtful and quiet ideas.

I used so many bitmaps and what seemed like the first time ever, gradients. Have never used so many gradients in all of my time designing, always kind of thought they were slightly ugly and cheesy looking, but erm, I've changed my mind. GRADIENTS!

So yes, go look at the issue, and...buy a copy. It's a good issue.

Other things I've been doing, and this is kind of Adbusters related:

Being number 1 in the office Fantasy Football. :) :) :) :) . Although I did lose last week, a pretty brutal loss, 200 points to my 140 something points. That team was insane though. Let's hope that none of the other teams are as insane in the next 4 weeks, cause then...I'LL WIN!

Just started watching Twin Peaks. Man I really like it. Endearing townspeople with dark secrets. SPECIAL AGENT COOPER! Holy crap Kyle Machlachlan. Did you know he has a vineyard? And keeps a blog for his dogs? And takes on the strangest and most varied roles? Like really good ones like Special Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks and then stuff like the villain in the live action movie The Flinstones (I know this because for some reason I watched this movie over and over when I was a kid) and as Charlotte's first husband in Sex and the City? He didn't want to be type-casted I read somewhere. Yep, I think you've got that covered Kyle. Also I really love the theme song of Twin Peaks. It has the most cheesiest bass line, and it is slightly creepy, but man it is good.

I was walking home with Will (the art director at Adbusters) and I told him I've started watching Twin Peaks and he said that a lot of people when they're at my age watch Twin Peaks. I asked why. And he said he didn't know, just that they do. And I can see that being true. All 23 year olds, watch if you haven't, you can appreciate this donut image more.

I leave for Calgary in a couple of weeks. I was passing by an apartment and I could see their Christmas tree, and I don't know! It instantly made me fall in love with Christmas! Or at least start to get really excited and into it, and now all these Christmas related things are popping up that are making me fall in love with it even more, like, CHEESE BALLS! I haven't had a cheese ball in so long! I LOVE CHEESE BALLS! Here is a place that has a couple of interesting recipes for them: http://homesicktexan.blogspot.com/2008/12/cheese-logs-cheese-balls-and-aunt-betty.html

Anyways, that's the long and short of what I've been doing, working at Adbusters, killing the football pool, watching things, and eating and dreaming about cheeseballs.

Team MeatHeist

Okay.

So something that has been holding a lot of my interest lately, is my first ever, fantasy football team at work.

Ha.
Haha.
Hahahahah.

Yes. I don't know anything about football, when it came to drafting, Tom just told me who to pick for my first two players and then I just picked what Yahoo told me to pick after that. Admittedly I haven't watched any of the games of this season on TV, so yes, I have jumped onto the football bandwagon. How come no one ever told me how much fun it was?! But hey, Frank Chimero (aka a great designer, and wait for this,) has a fantasy football team (never would have guessed it), and his is apparently doing pretty bad (which means, ha I would slaughter his team, because I am oddly, doing pretty well right now, but yah yah, it's the second week only). But holy crap, if winning isn't fun enough (won both of my match ups and possibly will win the rest, HA!) the NFL has the most hilarious players in the world. And so many of them have twitter accounts, and all of them have hilarious tweets. Specifically, Chad Ochocinco (#85, Wide Receiver for the Cinncinnati Bengals):


What is Chad Ochocinco doing with a pigeon? Gawd I love this guy. I don't know how to explain why I find these players to endearing, but they really are. I guess it's partly has to do with that I like watching people who really love what they are doing and are really committed to it. I also like when I can see aspects of their personalities, and a lot of these football players, they put their personalities completely out there (although I am sure this is the same with like basketball and hockey) and most of the time it's pretty funny.

I am really glad I did this. I was super hesitant at first, I don't really care about sports and to commit to something like fantasy football (you have to keep pretty up to date with it, who's injured, who's been suspended for a DUI or killing dogs or raping women, who's sucking, and who's not sucking) seemed really unappealing. But the prospect of smack talking and how fun it could be drew me in. And also everyone in my office was doing it and...to not have done it, I would have looked really anti-social and yah yah.

So watch out, Team Meatheist is going to...win. And steal your meat.

PS, isn't my kicker (the last picture and the only white guy on my team) cute?! I and apparently also the Chiefs picked him last. I wonder if they picked him for the same reason I did? Because he had a good looking face? And can get me 7 points a week?

Adbusters 90: The Whole Brain Catalog

So since starting at Adbusters, the first issue I got to work on is out on newsstands now:

The theme of this issue, "The Whole Brain Catalogue" was inspired by The Whole Earth Catalogue. The Whole Earth Catalog came about from a guy who was high on LSD back in the 70s or so and was starting out at the sun and (up until this point there was no image of the whole earth) and thought it was weird that there wasn't an image of the whole earth, and I guess somehow he got it to happen, or at least got the ball rolling, and then this catalogue came about where it sells items that hippies would like.

Anyways, this Adbusters issue is showing the whole brain and things to do with the brain. The visual theme of the issue was "madness". 

I had first discovered Adbusters in high school and was immediately influenced by the anti-corporate and consumer ideas and really took it to heart (but got kind of disillusioned with it shortly thereafter, I like to spend money and not be told in an aggressive way how to spend it). I was also truly inspired by the way the pages were laid out, even going so far as to try to do that in whatever sort of projects at school I could. I liked the hand done aesthetic and the aggressiveness of the design and it really (unknowingly) shaped my design process.

So it is super funny and interesting that I ended up working here. If you had told me in high school I'd be at Adbusters, I'd be like, no way! I didn't even realize back then that being a designer, laying out these pages, was a JOB, and that it was done by a PERSON. This was naive of me, but Adbusters was just this magazine, that just magically produced itself, and was done in some far off place that I would never be able to touch.

But here we are.

Working on this issue was exciting for me. It was my first time working on a real publication in a real job setting that was going to be seen by people. It was interesting to see the process of making this magazine and I have never used so much of the scanner, photoshop, and bitmaps in my life. My role in this magazine was, that the art director (Will Brown) would assign me pages/spreads/elements of a page to work on and to really just go crazy with the layout (aka do what I want but still get across the message of the piece). On all of the things he assigned me, the image was chosen by himself and the text was provided, and I just did the rest. 

The aesthetic of Adbusters, from what I gathered, is that they did not want any sort of visual fatigue. They want all kinds of styles on all different pages, and this creates a visual onslaught that can be either stimulating or overstimulating (so much so that you stop reading), depending on who you are. Before I had thought Adbusters was overly aggressive, and it still is, but I've gotten used to the craziness of the pages. Another thing was, if you have a crappy resolution on your image, or if you suck at photoshop, you can either a) try to learn better tools in photoshop, find a better image, and make it look pro, aka, find a pro solution or b)  acknowledge the crappiness and your limitations and play it up. That was really interesting to me, both of them are solutions/approaches to a problem, but I had never thought in those ways before, the goal for whatever you are trying to design, for me at least, is to make things look as tight as possible, to address and acknowledge crapiness is something I've never considered before. 

You'll see a lot of my handwriting in this issue. Angry handwriting. Here are some pages/spreads that I worked on that I liked:

The funniest thing I had to do for the magazine.

Check out the issue, yah?!