words, pictures, and sounds
I made an infographic! All of these were actually said to me in response to me saying something about Twitter. My personal favorite isn’t Farmville though, it’s the stalking comment. The person who said that to me has over 1000 Facebook friends, and an equal number of pictures. Text-only Twitter vs the media-bucket that is Facebook.
Category : Artwork
This is a coat of arms for me, my brother, and our friends Mike and Steve. It’s a joint Kwiatkowski/Pawlowski crest, so the Polish quadrant applies for us all. Basically we took stock of a ton of things that we either have done together, were inside jokes, and the like- and I turned those things into these. Masterchief and Link looked awesome flanking the shield, but you couldn’t read the banners well- so here’s a version without the two:
Rather than explain every last thing on this, I’ll just highlight the shield quarters:
Top Left: Tanks from Wii Play. We used to play this for hours.
Top Right: Polish flag and crest, simple as that.
Bottom Left: Our beverages of choice over the last half-decade. Game Fuel, Dr. Pepper, and Monster.
Bottom Right: This references Streetlight Manifesto, a band we have all sung along to for years, and The Contra Band, our rock band from 2006-2007. We never officially ended it, and we’ve all gotten better…
There are more than 40 inside jokes/memories in these pictures, but the hard thing about inside jokes is that they’re difficult to remember, especially 5 years later. If we could remember even a quarter of the stuff we’ve joked about since 2005 then this would have hundreds of of additional things tossed in. All the same, it’s not so bad now.
Category : Artwork
Lifting liberally from xkcd comic, I drew a map of the internet. I glanced at the xkcd map before drawing it, but naming the Ocean “sea of memes” was unintended. This map is based on my mindshare; the relative size and power each site or community has.
Notes
Reddit and Digg are at war, thus Reddit has Trebuchets and Digg has cannons.
Anonymous is not tied to any nation, but rather is a fortress island. It sends its agents out all over the world.
Myspace is so isolated, it still thinks it’s huge
Wikipedia is the Switzerland of the internet. Totally neutral, and full of skiing knowledge.
I created a visual resume! It covers up through May 2010. Influenced by this.
So maybe you were one of the many people who read this article in the last couple of days, and you’re trying to overhaul your businesses Twitter account. This article is intended to show you how to use Adobe Photoshop to create a simple, but effective Twitter background.
Step 1
Create a new .PSD file, sized 1920×1200. Download this template that I created, and open it in Photoshop.
Step 2
This template is very simple, and is intended simply to show you where you can safely place information. The bar works for screens set at 1280 pixels wide, and wider. Something like 70% of people are using resolutions greater than 1024×768, and for the majority of them, this will display just fine. Use the rectangular select tool to grab everything to the right of the black bar, and delete it.
Step 3
Decide what you want in the background. If you are artistically inclined you can create your own background, but if not, your best bet is to find something you want in the background and paste it there. For this particular background, I googled “cityscape” and found this awesome picture. Copy the image, and paste it into Photoshop. Drag the layer below the black bar.
Step 4
Add artistic touches and change the sidebar. What I did here was apply the “cutout” filter to the picture, grab a suitable color from the newly filtered image, and drag out a “rounded corner rectangle” shape. From there, I created a new layer below the shape and hit “merge down”, so that the shape was easily modifiable.
Step 5
Add information to the sidebar. Good info includes name, contact information, and maybe a mission statement, or statement of abilities.
Step 6
Make some final changes. For this image, all I chose to do was to erase a portion of the sidebar- but you can modify the background, make the sidebar more detailed, or whatever you want.
Step 7
Save and upload the image. You’ll want to save the image as a jpeg, and set the quality to 11. At an image this size, switching from the max quality of 12 to 11 will likely save you around 400kb, which should drop a 1mb file size to around 600kb- below the limit for Twitter. On Twitter go to Settings>Design>Change Background Image and choose your saved file to upload. Hit save, and Twitter takes care of the rest.
Step 8
The final product- on a 1440×900 screen. Total time of project should range from 10 minutes and 30 minutes, depending on the level of detail you put in to it.
Additional Info
You can use other programs like Gimp or Paint.net to create decent images, and these apps are free.
A very cool effect is to use a texture like wood or stone and set it to “Blend Mode>Overlay” and place it above your background. This will give whatever you choose a cool textured look.
Category : Artwork
Or at least- my mock-up of it. This was created for a Gizmodo contest, my idea of whats coming in iPhone 4.0.
Things of note- starting at the top:
1. Verizon- seems like the iPhone is coming to VZW this year, so its only fitting.
2. Docked applications- top right. Phone, SMS, Camera, Contacts. Whatever you want.
3. Location and weather- top left.
4. Apps and running applications- center. Scroll through them like a boss.
5. Recent Applications- last 7 apps used, on a scroll path.
6. Docked apps part 2- again, whatever you want to use.
Category : Artwork
I apologize, this is a cached mirror, but it should still work fine for a long time. This link got me thinking about creating a business card, and so I got right to work. I’d love to create a more exotic card, out of plastic or metal, but for now a design for cardboard is all I have access to. So without further to do- here’s a card design:
I used the “arabic typesetting” font that I’ve taken a liking to lately, and the color palette and rough style of a piece I did back in the summer. Since putting “sales associate”, “runner”, or “page” on a card doesn’t quite carry much weight I chose “blogger”, “podcaster”, and “designer”. There wasn’t a place for education on it, or any of the 49 cards at that link. I’d love to create 5-10 different cards, each of very different types, to warrant more than just a glance, or even a second look. Anyway, thoughts?
Category : Artwork
Its a prototype, but what do you think? The core components I wanted to include were a textured layer to overlay, a blueprint of some sort, and the same sort of text component as the Contracast art. The end goal is that it feels right at home both representing the show, and on an itunes page.
Seems like Blogger doesn’t have a good way for me to display a photo album. I guess that means that some point in the future has me creating a website with SquareSpace or Wordpress, because I kind of need one. Giving a link to my portfolio just doesn’t have the same appeal. Nonetheless, here it is.
