Brush mania

November 11th, 2008
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blendfu.com

Blendfu.com has become my new favorite site. There are thousands of user-created brushes (and shapes and patterns) available for download. And there are so many different interesting ideas to choose from, it’s a great place to go when looking for inspiration for a design project.

Chicago Sun-Times to outsource ad production — The rest of the story

February 20th, 2008
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Crain’s Chicago Business is reporting that the Chicago Sun-Times has decided to outsource its ad production to Elgin-based Affinity Express as a cost-saving move.

Here’s what the article, and Affinity’s website, doesn’t tell you about Affinity Express. While it is true that Affinity Express’ corporate headquarters are in Elgin, Illinois, the design work is outsourced to a design sweatshop in Pune, India and Manila, Phillipines. The work coming out of these sweatshops is substandard and awful.

When I worked for Kinko’s the second time around (around the time of the FedEx buyout), they had outsourced the job I had held my first time around with Kinko’s to Affinity. There was a procedure to input the order on their website. One of the items on the web form was creativity, with a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being ‘do it exactly the way the instructions state’ to 10 being ‘be creative.’ One memorable job was someone who wanted an 11″ x 17″ sign advertising Smoothies at $2.99. It was marked to ‘be creative.’ When it came back, this was Affinity’s idea of a creative smoothies sign: The background was a solid dark orange, with black Arial type set at only 72pt, and clip-art ice cream cones - 4 of them - on the left side of the page.

Tattoo Ideas

August 19th, 2007
Filed Under Design | 5 Comments

Those of you who have known me a long time know that I’ve kicked around the idea of a tattoo for many years now. My thing has always been that if I’m going to have a tattoo, using my body as a canvas, I want it to be of my own design, and not someone else’s. I’ve had many designs I’ve worked on over the years, and subsequently lost them. Well, I’ve been playing around in Adobe Illustrator tonight, and came up with some new designs. You can see them below by clicking on the image for a larger version. As for placement, I’m thinking on my back, below the collar line, between my shoulder blades. Either that, or a smaller version on my left upper arm.