I was more or less successful in my goal of doing bigger projects for year 2 of #msaed. I made a year 1 video, sort of finished the book version, sold a couple mugs, went to New York for WOLFPACK!, had the sticky notes appear in the Mind-Thoughts zine, started a new queer zine for Chicago and put out two issues, re-did my portfolio site, met the internet, proposed, finished a terrible painting for my father that’d been sitting in my apartment for 3 years, did layout for my brother-in-law’s first published boardgame, did production work for three other boardgames, finally learned some Javascript and coded some web apps for the iPad, made it through another year at the day job with a reasonably positive attitude despite 3 awesome coworkers leaving, posted 9,000 things a day to tumblr, increased my Klout score by 23, got retweeted by @nprfreshair, got way too many notes on this and this, took too many photoboof pics, contributed to a calendar about large hairy woodland creatures, drew both too many and too few boys, made some mistakes, fucked up some friendships, got in troubled, made things better, repeated the process, finished resetting the type for the print versions of my high school webcomic, and made five too many wrap-up posts on this blog.

So, what’s in store for year 3? I’d like to explore some new mediums but also return to doing some more frequent drawings. I really need to start painting again. I also want to do more video work. I’d like to do better things with type. I’m feeling a little Bodoni’d out. The type above is Attic by YouWorkForThem. It’d be great to do more of my own chunky vectors and Topher type this year. I need to do more writing, but that should probably be private. I want to do some new comics. I’d like to do more traveling and see some things that aren’t Chicago or Minnesota. There may be some big changes this year for me. Or things may just get bigger. Only time will tell!

Etc. (& So Forth)

4 months ago  12 notes

mugwumpian: Well fuck you too, Illustrator. So I’ve embarked on a project to collect and publish (on demand, obvi) the full run of my high school webcomic, Construction Paper Angst. This so far has involved digging up 8+ year old backup CDs with hundreds of Jasc Paint Shop Pro files and finding out one of the CDs is partially unreadable (not to mention that the early strips were all lost due to a fried computer when a friend incorrectly tried to install a CD burner). Finding no viable Mac conversion program, I put all of the files onto a Windows machine at work, downloaded a trial of Corel Paint Ship Pro Xtreeeeeeem and started poking around the files only to start a barrage of “FONT NOT FOUND” error messages. After going through the underworld of the internet (and downloading pretty much every free Blambot font in existence) I felt that I had a handle on the 30 some odd novelty fonts I used in my high school days. I started running batch conversions to make .PSDs, and guess what? In the ten years since I first used Paint Shop Pro, no one has been able to give the program the ability to export vector data. So every Photoshop file I have has a layer of flattened text and speech balloons. Also, I missed a fair number of fonts. Better still, the new version of Paint Shop Pro shifted even the fonts I did have about 7 pixels to the right, so now every single line of dialog in 300+ strips is butting up against, oh, 3,000 some speech balloons?  Which leads me to tonight! Drinking and reading comic lettering Illustrator tutorials because why wouldn’t I want to re-typeset the entire strip? Illustrator is now just plain mocking me. I know the work is mostly crap, and I definitely know my (lack of) design skills at the time were crap. I’m not going to fix that or rebuild completely from scratch. But what level of naive authenticity do I maintain? This is kind of a perfect #msaed project. What level of awful do I aspire to achieve in creating my own special edition? I have it in my head that I’m going to add some strips and clean up some storylines. Will I make Greedo shoot first? Why, ten years later, do I still care? This thing only ever angered people. I have more legitimate projects I could be doing. It’ll be weeks or even months of work culminating in a book only I’ll ever read. I can give a copy to my mom. Maybe I’ll debut it at my 10 year high school reunion in 2013 and hope I get sued. Have I mentioned I’ve been drinking?

mugwumpian:

Well fuck you too, Illustrator.

So I’ve embarked on a project to collect and publish (on demand, obvi) the full run of my high school webcomic, Construction Paper Angst. This so far has involved digging up 8+ year old backup CDs with hundreds of Jasc Paint Shop Pro files and finding out one of the CDs is partially unreadable (not to mention that the early strips were all lost due to a fried computer when a friend incorrectly tried to install a CD burner).

Finding no viable Mac conversion program, I put all of the files onto a Windows machine at work, downloaded a trial of Corel Paint Ship Pro Xtreeeeeeem and started poking around the files only to start a barrage of “FONT NOT FOUND” error messages. After going through the underworld of the internet (and downloading pretty much every free Blambot font in existence) I felt that I had a handle on the 30 some odd novelty fonts I used in my high school days. I started running batch conversions to make .PSDs, and guess what? In the ten years since I first used Paint Shop Pro, no one has been able to give the program the ability to export vector data. So every Photoshop file I have has a layer of flattened text and speech balloons. Also, I missed a fair number of fonts. Better still, the new version of Paint Shop Pro shifted even the fonts I did have about 7 pixels to the right, so now every single line of dialog in 300+ strips is butting up against, oh, 3,000 some speech balloons? 

Which leads me to tonight! Drinking and reading comic lettering Illustrator tutorials because why wouldn’t I want to re-typeset the entire strip? Illustrator is now just plain mocking me. I know the work is mostly crap, and I definitely know my (lack of) design skills at the time were crap. I’m not going to fix that or rebuild completely from scratch. But what level of naive authenticity do I maintain?

This is kind of a perfect #msaed project. What level of awful do I aspire to achieve in creating my own special edition? I have it in my head that I’m going to add some strips and clean up some storylines. Will I make Greedo shoot first? Why, ten years later, do I still care? This thing only ever angered people. I have more legitimate projects I could be doing. It’ll be weeks or even months of work culminating in a book only I’ll ever read. I can give a copy to my mom. Maybe I’ll debut it at my 10 year high school reunion in 2013 and hope I get sued. Have I mentioned I’ve been drinking?

12 months ago  14 notes View Larger Image

I was going to post this Friday, but eh, weekend. The render is by a freelancer who’s been in our office for a few weeks, but the materials are all mine. I also gave him an old file, which is why one cover is set in Neutraface. I couldn’t offer a reasonable explanation for using Neutraface, so it’s all being set in Univers instead. Posting this here because “make something awful every day” is kind of how I feel about my job somedays. Other days I like what I do. I like where these books are headed, and I feel good about the design. I just worry about picking up bad habits and ending up being unable to separate good design from shit ten years down the road.

I was going to post this Friday, but eh, weekend. The render is by a freelancer who’s been in our office for a few weeks, but the materials are all mine. I also gave him an old file, which is why one cover is set in Neutraface. I couldn’t offer a reasonable explanation for using Neutraface, so it’s all being set in Univers instead. Posting this here because “make something awful every day” is kind of how I feel about my job somedays. Other days I like what I do. I like where these books are headed, and I feel good about the design. I just worry about picking up bad habits and ending up being unable to separate good design from shit ten years down the road.

2 years ago  1 note View Larger Image

I was more or less successful in my goal of doing bigger projects for year 2 of #msaed. I made a year 1 video, sort of finished the book version, sold a couple mugs, went to New York for WOLFPACK!, had the sticky notes appear in the Mind-Thoughts zine, started a new queer zine for Chicago and put out two issues, re-did my portfolio site, met the internet, proposed, finished a terrible painting for my father that’d been sitting in my apartment for 3 years, did layout for my brother-in-law’s first published boardgame, did production work for three other boardgames, finally learned some Javascript and coded some web apps for the iPad, made it through another year at the day job with a reasonably positive attitude despite 3 awesome coworkers leaving, posted 9,000 things a day to tumblr, increased my Klout score by 23, got retweeted by @nprfreshair, got way too many notes on this and this, took too many photoboof pics, contributed to a calendar about large hairy woodland creatures, drew both too many and too few boys, made some mistakes, fucked up some friendships, got in troubled, made things better, repeated the process, finished resetting the type for the print versions of my high school webcomic, and made five too many wrap-up posts on this blog.

So, what’s in store for year 3? I’d like to explore some new mediums but also return to doing some more frequent drawings. I really need to start painting again. I also want to do more video work. I’d like to do better things with type. I’m feeling a little Bodoni’d out. The type above is Attic by YouWorkForThem. It’d be great to do more of my own chunky vectors and Topher type this year. I need to do more writing, but that should probably be private. I want to do some new comics. I’d like to do more traveling and see some things that aren’t Chicago or Minnesota. There may be some big changes this year for me. Or things may just get bigger. Only time will tell!

Etc. (& So Forth)

mugwumpian: Well fuck you too, Illustrator. So I’ve embarked on a project to collect and publish (on demand, obvi) the full run of my high school webcomic, Construction Paper Angst. This so far has involved digging up 8+ year old backup CDs with hundreds of Jasc Paint Shop Pro files and finding out one of the CDs is partially unreadable (not to mention that the early strips were all lost due to a fried computer when a friend incorrectly tried to install a CD burner). Finding no viable Mac conversion program, I put all of the files onto a Windows machine at work, downloaded a trial of Corel Paint Ship Pro Xtreeeeeeem and started poking around the files only to start a barrage of “FONT NOT FOUND” error messages. After going through the underworld of the internet (and downloading pretty much every free Blambot font in existence) I felt that I had a handle on the 30 some odd novelty fonts I used in my high school days. I started running batch conversions to make .PSDs, and guess what? In the ten years since I first used Paint Shop Pro, no one has been able to give the program the ability to export vector data. So every Photoshop file I have has a layer of flattened text and speech balloons. Also, I missed a fair number of fonts. Better still, the new version of Paint Shop Pro shifted even the fonts I did have about 7 pixels to the right, so now every single line of dialog in 300+ strips is butting up against, oh, 3,000 some speech balloons?  Which leads me to tonight! Drinking and reading comic lettering Illustrator tutorials because why wouldn’t I want to re-typeset the entire strip? Illustrator is now just plain mocking me. I know the work is mostly crap, and I definitely know my (lack of) design skills at the time were crap. I’m not going to fix that or rebuild completely from scratch. But what level of naive authenticity do I maintain? This is kind of a perfect #msaed project. What level of awful do I aspire to achieve in creating my own special edition? I have it in my head that I’m going to add some strips and clean up some storylines. Will I make Greedo shoot first? Why, ten years later, do I still care? This thing only ever angered people. I have more legitimate projects I could be doing. It’ll be weeks or even months of work culminating in a book only I’ll ever read. I can give a copy to my mom. Maybe I’ll debut it at my 10 year high school reunion in 2013 and hope I get sued. Have I mentioned I’ve been drinking?

mugwumpian:

Well fuck you too, Illustrator.

So I’ve embarked on a project to collect and publish (on demand, obvi) the full run of my high school webcomic, Construction Paper Angst. This so far has involved digging up 8+ year old backup CDs with hundreds of Jasc Paint Shop Pro files and finding out one of the CDs is partially unreadable (not to mention that the early strips were all lost due to a fried computer when a friend incorrectly tried to install a CD burner).

Finding no viable Mac conversion program, I put all of the files onto a Windows machine at work, downloaded a trial of Corel Paint Ship Pro Xtreeeeeeem and started poking around the files only to start a barrage of “FONT NOT FOUND” error messages. After going through the underworld of the internet (and downloading pretty much every free Blambot font in existence) I felt that I had a handle on the 30 some odd novelty fonts I used in my high school days. I started running batch conversions to make .PSDs, and guess what? In the ten years since I first used Paint Shop Pro, no one has been able to give the program the ability to export vector data. So every Photoshop file I have has a layer of flattened text and speech balloons. Also, I missed a fair number of fonts. Better still, the new version of Paint Shop Pro shifted even the fonts I did have about 7 pixels to the right, so now every single line of dialog in 300+ strips is butting up against, oh, 3,000 some speech balloons? 

Which leads me to tonight! Drinking and reading comic lettering Illustrator tutorials because why wouldn’t I want to re-typeset the entire strip? Illustrator is now just plain mocking me. I know the work is mostly crap, and I definitely know my (lack of) design skills at the time were crap. I’m not going to fix that or rebuild completely from scratch. But what level of naive authenticity do I maintain?

This is kind of a perfect #msaed project. What level of awful do I aspire to achieve in creating my own special edition? I have it in my head that I’m going to add some strips and clean up some storylines. Will I make Greedo shoot first? Why, ten years later, do I still care? This thing only ever angered people. I have more legitimate projects I could be doing. It’ll be weeks or even months of work culminating in a book only I’ll ever read. I can give a copy to my mom. Maybe I’ll debut it at my 10 year high school reunion in 2013 and hope I get sued. Have I mentioned I’ve been drinking?

I was going to post this Friday, but eh, weekend. The render is by a freelancer who’s been in our office for a few weeks, but the materials are all mine. I also gave him an old file, which is why one cover is set in Neutraface. I couldn’t offer a reasonable explanation for using Neutraface, so it’s all being set in Univers instead. Posting this here because “make something awful every day” is kind of how I feel about my job somedays. Other days I like what I do. I like where these books are headed, and I feel good about the design. I just worry about picking up bad habits and ending up being unable to separate good design from shit ten years down the road.

I was going to post this Friday, but eh, weekend. The render is by a freelancer who’s been in our office for a few weeks, but the materials are all mine. I also gave him an old file, which is why one cover is set in Neutraface. I couldn’t offer a reasonable explanation for using Neutraface, so it’s all being set in Univers instead. Posting this here because “make something awful every day” is kind of how I feel about my job somedays. Other days I like what I do. I like where these books are headed, and I feel good about the design. I just worry about picking up bad habits and ending up being unable to separate good design from shit ten years down the road.

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Why be good when you can be awful?

All work (unless otherwise noted) © Topher McCulloch.