Here’s a Thank You card illustration I did for Daphyn for her Baby Shower. It turns out my wife is a pretty easy client. Now, if the baby’d just arrive .  .  .

I pretty much swore off print in college after realizing I was killing too many trees during the design process, but I made a rare exception for my friends over at TorchBearer Sauces. They’re introducing a new, taller bottle for their products that makes it much easier to pour their sauce. I took a quick stab at scaling the characters from the existing bottle designs but ultimately convinced the guys at TorchBearer to let me redraw all of the labels from scratch.

I picked up a few of the newly-labeled bottles at the last Vidian (hot sauce party). Judging from some of the pictures I took (like the one above), I discovered I still have a lot to learn about my Flashbulb and white balance.

It was a fun assignment, as I don’t often get to draw really wacky characters, plus no paper was harmed in the making of the bottles (thanks to my trusty Cintiq). There are a few older bottle designs still out there (as well as a few new ones that aren’t yet out), but the new bottles should be hitting Giant Food and Whole Foods in the near future.

It’s still a little weird to see my handwriting on labels when I go through the supermarket aisles . . .

I recently found Nexus for Facebook (via Flytip), a pretty cool social networking visualizer.

The graph it generates looks like something straight out of Clay Shirky‘s class, and the lower sphere definitely serves as a testament to how well connected ITP alums are.

I have a Facebook friend over at Microsoft and I just viewed their graph–which looks like it has about 7000 more connections than mine. I definitely need to get out more.

Ever since I ordered my Nokia 6682 I told myself that I was going to build a Flash Lite application for it. I purposely ordered an AT&T plan to subsidize the $600 phone cost and even paid Macromedia the $10 download fee for Flash Lite. The funny thing about working for yourself, though (and perhaps it’s the industry in general), is that you never make time for personal projects–regardless of all the personal promises and financial stability to do so.

Two years later, Macromedia is now Adobe, The Flash Lite player is free and is often pre-installed on phones (thank goodness), the latest Flash Lite Player version is 3, and I’ve since given away my 6682 and replaced it with an N95 North American edition. Oh, and I finally made the time to play around.

I decided to build a simple Blackjack game. After reading about Flash Lite’s processing limitations, I chose something rather simple. I initially intended to release the code for free under a BSD license, but have discovered the hurdles involved with Flash Lite deployment (they were hurdles I always knew to be there, but sometimes one  just needs to learn firsthand). I also considered inviting artists to create artwork for the playing cards, although I’m not sure it’s so worthwhile considering how small the cards are and how intensive bitmap caching is.

So, this will serve as Part I of an ongoing series of my experience working with Flash Lite. By the end of it, I hope to create some helpful resources for someone and possibly proceed with releasing the software for free.

Oh, and If anyone reading this is interested in learning more or testing our the beta application (and happens to have an S60 device with Flash Lite 2.1 player), I’m happy to provide it.

Between some intensive game programming for the past two weeks I’ve spent the tail end of the week playing tour guide to friends who’ve come up for the weekend. Yesterday, I dragged my sister-in-law Anna over to the MoMA, rediscovered Wyeth’s Christina’s World (I searched all over the Brandywine Museum in Chaddsford the other week for it), visited Design and the Elastic Mind (it was definitely weird seeing so many ITP alum I knew in the exhibit), and found this disgustingly-complex piece of origami (above).Oh yeah, and as always, I got furious over people using their camera flashes on fragile works of art. There’s plenty of light! Read the manual, people!

I’ve always wanted to play around with a Webcomic, and Thing-a-day 2008 is affording me that luxury. The characters are slowly evolving while I settle on a style I like, and the color palette is…atrocious (what do you want for a daily comic on the fly?!). Unfortunately, it’s not been comic-a-day with some of the jobs I’ve been trying to get out (and the fact that I’ve been bedridden with a stomach flu I caught in Harrisburg), but I hope to update it as often as possible this month. Assuming I’m not drained of ideas come March, I’ll probably switch to doing it on a weekly format. Check out Lost in Babble.

I’m excited to be involved in Thing-a-day 2. It’s like the anti-lent for artists where you agree to dedicate 30+ minutes each day in Feburary on being creative–and then posting your art onto a site.Talk about motivation. Join me and sign up before 1/31!

My best friend just happened to move about 2 miles away from the Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, and while I’m not a big fan of the rather depressing Charlie Brown, I’ve always liked Snoopy, so I stopped in.There was a tribute exhibit to Schulz that contained the art several other sequential art artists–I was rather surprised at how many of them still use traditional pen and pencil to create their strips (their original art was displayed). After reading Scott McCloud’s Making Comics and using a Cintiq firsthand, I just see too much convenience in drawing digitally.The mural, BTW, is Yoshiteru ÅŒtani. The guy apparently really likes Peanuts

I believe it was my wife who recently told me that my blog posts are getting way too technical. Of course, I just came off of a month where I did nothing but work, so this site didn’t serve for much more than archiving snippets of code… I suppose I can see how such posts just aren’t approachable for some of our friends, so this week I’m going to try and dedicate my posts to the non-technical, boring, everyday life stuff.

Restlessness on Friday night caught up with us, so we decided to head to Harrisburg for the weekend to catch up with friends. I think my in-laws are still convinced that I made the trip just to pick up my Willie Parker jersey, which was shipped to their house (Apparently, I won an eBay auction on an authentic jersey–for what I paid, I’m definitely not complaining!). Of course, I decided to stay home for the nationally-televised Steelers-Bengals game on Sunday and missed out on seeing the Bus stop in on Scruffy Duffy’s.

I stopped at the Oddones Holiday Bizarre at the Maennerchor on Saturday (which I found out about via Beyond Second). I guess I partially went just to see the interior of the building, since it’s not very public. I was happy to discover that the local art community is still doing well, as it was a pretty good turnout. The prices seemed to be extremely reasonable, too. I was hoping to add an official Jason Smith-designed (C)ondemned t-shirt to my wardrobe, but alas, there were none to be found. I settled for this pretty cool silkscreen shirt of the Broad Street market for $8.