September 17, 2023

Mandala

Finding ways to entertain yourself that don't require massive amounts of brain activity between baby feedings led me to try making a mandala using Procreate on my iPad.

September 7, 2023

Generative Baby Art

Last week my wife and I welcomed our child into the world, which honestly provides an opportunity for me to play around with the generative fill feature in the Photoshop Beta.

August 25, 2023

There’s plenty of Crying in Advertising

I really do believe that certain "taboo" subjects should be talked about more openly so they won't be taboo anymore. I've done it in the past when I posted about pay ranges for full-time and freelance and I thought it was time to do it again for one of the mental health issues plaguing the industry.

You normally only see people posting about crying in the office on places like Fishbowl where they can be anonymous. Everyone in advertising fears being seen as weak. I thin it's funny though, because to be truly great at it you have to be empathetic. You need to be able to feel emotion and relate to how others are feeling as well.

Being honest about being humans is the first step, so we should be able to talk about those moments of humanity we have without fear or being seen as somehow lesser than those who don't. And that's before we even get into the underlying conditions at agencies that cause it to happen to begin with.

August 23, 2023

Maternity Shoot

I convinced my wife to let me take some maternity photos of her before the baby drops. You can find a few more photos from the shoot here.

August 15, 2023

Minimal Alphabet

The other night I wanted to see if I could design a type face as minimally as possible. Starting with a base rectangle and seeing how I could distinguish each letterform with as few visual cues as possible. This was what I cam up with in my first 2 hour pass. I see a few things I'd maybe have done differently now, but as a thought experiment I think it shows what's possible.

I know more than a few people have tested their own minimal fonts/typography against the word minimum as well because of the similar letterforms so I thought it was a good test for this as well.

August 14, 2023

The Remix Edition

The other night I had a thought about how my wife and I are dropping a remix and what the tracks would be, all alluding to our incoming baby. Went ahead and mocked up the album art. I used a photo I shot of us when we were in Portland last summer. When I overlaid one of the ultrasounds, I realized it looked like either a scratch or a reflection and either way I liked it. Enjoy.

August 8, 2023

Baby Shower Invite

I designed the invite for my wife's baby shower a few weeks ago. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

I made all the elements except the base font for the type. However, I did customize it a bit using some of the glyphs and then going in and removing parts of letters as accents so the glyphs would read better.

August 5, 2023

Free Headshots

The other week I made an offer on LinkedIn to take free headshots of any out-of-work creatives who wanted a refresh. I only had one person take me up, so everyone else's loss. Brandi and I met up this past Wednesday over in Santa Monica and these were the results.

August 4, 2023

Family Matters

With the baby coming soon, I took some time to reflect on what it meant for my career. Seems to have resonated a bit.

July 19, 2023

r/cats

I posted a photo of Killbot's Paw Mitzvah portrait on Reddit's r/cats and it made it to the number one spot last night. It now has over 5k upvotes. Weird times.

July 10, 2023

Creative Kitchen

I'd been preaching the virtues of kitchen communication to my students for awhile, but while I was watching The Bear the other week I was able to add a new parallel to the comparison. I ended up writing about it and, well, apparently it resonated.

June 12, 2023

Paw Mitzvah

My cat Killbot 3000 is turning 13 next month so I decided to throw him a Paw Mitzvah. In reality it's just an excuse to grill out some food for friends, but how memorable is that? I also thought it would be a fun chance to play with Photoshop's new Generative Fill to see what I could make.

Below is a before and after so you can see what I did fairly quickly. The main thing I had to do manually was add in the Hebrew to the book along with the image on the page. AI still hasn't figure out how to do that stuff well yet.