There are all kinds of myths surrounding the arts, especially where they intersect with commerce. Myths about working when the muse strikes, as opposed to working to increase the odds that she will. Myths about success (“It’s a mysterious mystery come by mysteriously…plus Twitter!”). Enough myths about money to keep the stick-shaking brigade busy for a [...]
Design
Even though the official Saluteâ„¢ is over, with six bags of books ready to go to the used book store on my next trip out that way, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at some of the titles that made the cut. I’ve pulled D.I.Y.: Design It Yourself from the shelf [...]
When normal people play hooky, they go to the movies or the beach or Vegas. When nerds take the day off, they go to see this guy, and come home 8 hours later, drunk with possibility, clutching a set of books so beautiful in both thought and execution, you get a little dizzy just opening [...]
Well, a mere five months later, we have launch! With the able coding assistance of master (or is that ‘meister’?) programmer, Michael Grosch, my new friend from Germany (by way of Austin, TX and SXSW), I’ve finally got the communicatrix | designs site up and running. It’s brand new, so there may be a missing [...]
Here’s one thing I learned pretty quickly in my capacity as self-taught designer: fonts suck. I mean, fonts RULE, they totally FUCKING rule, but they are delicate and unwieldy and fuck with your OS* like you wouldn’t believe. For years, seven of ‘em, as long as I’ve been doing this design stuff, I’ve suffered in [...]
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Best of the flyer table, II
Much as the Avid changed editing both for better and for much, much worse (back in my ad days, we called it "the version machine"), desktop publishing has forever altered the messy terrain that is the 99-seat theater’s lobby flyer table. Why use a boring old photo when you can add FIVE FILTERS in Photoshop…for [...]
I always thought auditions were horseshit. Let me clarify: I knew they were (a) necessary (evil), but I found it maddening the way people on both sides of the camera looked at them as a one-way proposition, with the power flowing from the producer end to the (ahem) “talent” end. Because frankly, that was horseshit. [...]
One of my continual frustrations as a theater rat with a scrabbly foot in the design world is the unforgivable lack of pretty in most show flyers. They’ll pay the lighting designer, they’ll pay the costume designer, they’ll sure as shit pay the director, they’ll get everything on stage looking Sunday-go-to-meetin’ purty, and then crap [...]
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New design portfolio up
I’ve uploaded a bunch of images to the second “photo album” containing my graphic design work, including some t-shirts I sketched out for Megan Mullally & her band, Supreme Music Program, right here. Link to the first one, exclusively postcards, is here. Feel free to hire me for all your graphic design needs, especially super-cool [...]
