I’ve talked about creating “stronger” designs for a long time. I’ve talked to people about it in terms of print-media, apparel, website, you name it – it’s been one of my mantras for a long time. I’m always encouraging people to avoid “good enough” whenever possible and go for designs that pop, that stand bold against the bland, that show tutti-fruity when others show plain vanilla. I preach about the virtues of creating the best you can within the scope of the media itself (paper, onscreen, print, etc.) and the expected viewer or customer. It’s about making the best art for the people who will see it in the way they will see it displayed.

I ought to know. I’ve allowed many pieces of mine out into the wild with the thought “they’re good enough.” I was a bad boy.

A few weeks ago I was having this conversation with a buddy who was beginning to set up a photography portfolio online. He asked me to help him whittle down his masterpieces so his portfolio would be filled with only the finest examples of his work (which all of his photos are exceptional – so it was going to be a daunting project). I warned him that I tend to take whatever people think are their top-10 pieces and destroy them down to two items, at best. Very little survives my “cream of the crop” list-filtering.

It’s not about being brutal or unconstructive. It’s not about being the best of the best (which I am most definitely not in any way, shape or form), it’s not about suggesting the art that didn’t survive the whittling-down were lousy pieces. It’s about distilling the top by category (absolutely best colorful photo, best black and white, best portrait, etc.). It’s about narrowing down what looks best, in his case, onscreen at 800 pixels wide. It’s about picking the best photos that would present him as a photographer worthy of spending money on for the type of clients he wishes to attract. That, in my opinion, is going to produce results that could be very different from a portfolio of someone wanting to show off their best “human” photos or best “landscape” photos. It’s all about the venue and “best” is subjective.

However, it’s still a topic that includes something I hope can be useful to others in the POD (print on demand) world.

I’d like to just start with the best example of what I mean by “stronger” designs because it shows a few evolutions and how the word “stronger” can mean different things – my own work.

Above you can an evolution of a theme I wanted to follow – “pixel pusher.” It’s a phrase I’ve used to describe work I do to friends. The best part of this example is that it not only shows, what I believe, is a great example of a terrible example, but also the cruel irony that a graphic artist (me) would produce such an awful, stinkingly bad piece of art to illustrate being a graphic artist. It’s a great walk-through of painful horrendousness in one graphic. I apologize – I don’t know what I was thinking?

Okay, check out the above thumbnails – at the top – “I Push Pixels” 2007. Behold that little train wreck of pixels. It frightens you, I know it does.

Part of what got me into trouble, and a great motivator for this blog post, is my buddy and I were discussing the pain of sorting through our own art and tossing so many aside in favor of a few, great examples. He wondered how a guy (me) could produce pieces like these and yet have the nerve to display that top, 2007 “I Push Pixels” monstrosity – especially as a graphic artist who pushes pixels!

I don’t have a great answer but I suspect that my explanation will sound familiar. As much as I’d like to claim that I was a noob artist at the time and didn’t know what I was doing… that’s not true. I’ve been an artist since I was a kid and a commercial artist for years. I think I was caught in a frame of mind that was thinking that I needed to stock up my online store (for which that was a tshirt design) as soon as possible… more products – more products! I felt it was “good enough” and probably left it at that. I suppose there was also a chance that I got tunnel-vision in Photoshop that made me get fixated on a design element (or two) and felt I had accomplished my mission when I saw those elements on screen. I didn’t bother to really objectively look at it and realize that just because it matched the written description of what I wanted… it still looked terrible.

Finally, one day I realized it was, indeed a really weak design and brought the neighborhood down in the rest of my storefront. I decided to do a new version – “Pixel Pusher” 2008. You may notice that I carried over one of those design elements I used in the first one (the blotchy splatter behind the text). I don’t know why? I thought maybe, by changing up the text to a variety of fonts, would convey some message but once again… it only served to convey a lack of focus and confusion. It was new, but still a weak design. In all fairness, it looks mildly interesting at full-screen on a black background. The fonts are, indeed, interesting and the broken-lines and negative space give some interest too. However, when all is said and done it’s weak because it’s mostly just text, the slightly interesting bits don’t make sense to the theme (graphic artist), and those bits don’t translate through properly to a shirt like they did in higher resolution on the 30″ monitor. I failed again.

As a special note, I have nothing against text-designs. One of my store-favorites is one that was mentioned in a Wall Street Journal article I was featured in. It’s a simple text design made to look like a rubber stamp Does Not Play Well With Others. It’s hardly an Auguste Rodin original but it works because there’s a point to the simplicity of a stamp that implies its a label – a warning label. It’s become known and is uniquely identifiable (keep that in mind any would-be copycats). That’s why it’s a strong design – it accomplished its mission which included simplicity.

What I do think, though, is that there’s “text” and then there’s “text.” Sometimes, simplicity and message trump design. The words are key and too much flourish detracts from that. Then there’s times that the art and treatment of text-heavy designs gets taken to a higher level with the art. I think, if possible, one should try to push a design as far as it will go while keeping its integrity and purpose intact. Sometimes (as in my case) I frequently have to ask myself if I’m slacking off or if I really gave a design the full treatment it deserved?

It’s not hard to see I took a pretty drastic change in direction with the above. It’s still “pixel pusher” as that’s the theme I wanted but I wasn’t in love with keeping it specific. There was room to play. So, I decided that I’d stop reworking the existing art and just put down the graphic stylus and grab a piece of paper and pen and sketch. Sometimes, when I’m not bound by the mechanics of how I work in Photoshop and, instead, go back to sketching, I come up with clearer ideas of what I want. It’s weird, but sometimes white paper and pen is more liberating than a blank PSD canvas.

As you can see from the newer, 2009 silver emblem it makes more sense. It’s certainly easier to take pride as a graphic artist when your graphic art doesn’t look like poo… which the first two versions did. These next two versions, I feel, are evidence that I did, indeed, have more work to do and I couldn’t defend the previous pieces any more.

Obviously, this is all subjective to my own views. Customers may say otherwise by how they spend their money, family may lie and say it looks great. However, sometimes an artist just has to make an executive decision.

The 2009 silver emblem does have graphics that support, what I believe, are a stronger design on the theme… a graphic pen which makes sense, clean and bold design as an artist might aspire to make, and the extra “digital artist” text brings it home in case someone didn’t quite understand the slang “Pixel Pusher.”

This piece also represents a philosophy I’ve been getting more in-touch with and blogged about earlier – that of Designing for Presentation. In a nutshell, I created the silver emblem version knowing full-well that it had to look appealing at 200 pixels in a thumbnail. It could have had more detail, it could have had more intricate embellishments, but in the end I designed it with the ever-present idea in my head that it had to look good to a customer in the first way they’d encounter it.. the tiny section graphic.

The final piece, “Pixel Pusher Brewery” is not so much about taking a weak design and making it stronger but about playing to a niche market that enjoys, in this case, vintage style signage. It’s a stronger design in that market, that’s all. It’s a passion of mine but I thought others might enjoy the fact that the theme of “digital artist” could also take on some character with a brewery/beer-label style rendition. It narrows the audience, yes, but it can be a devoted following – those who like this style.

Well, 1500 words later and you surely get the point, right? It’s not about a design looking bad. When I say “create a stronger design” I don’t mean the previous one sucks out loud. I don’t mean that at all. What I do mean is that there’s potential that’s not being explored and you’re duty-bound to uncover it. It’s like having a Maserati and never really taking it out on the open highway and putting the pedal to the metal. It’s about creating art that totally jacks up the level of craftsmanship to the point where even you, the most critical artist, will agree the design is fully realized, and ready to unveil to the world. When you work a design up to maximum with text, colors, layout, art, balance, style, and focus… you’ll never have to look back and wonder if it’s good enough. You’ll never have to wonder if it’s your art itself that’s not appealing. Art is subjective – but only when you feel it’s the best that particular piece can be will it be considered a finished piece.

Happy pixels.

“Design for the Thumbnail!”
Topic: Designing tshirts with the storefront presentation in mind.

A free-form video about designing not only for the product itself, in a print-on-demand environment, but also for the online customer first-impression.

I’ll admit, it’s not a polished video by any stretch – I didn’t want to delay recording my thoughts in favor of editing. I hope you find my ideas useful nonetheless.

Some of you know that one of my favorite design styles is that found in beer and wine labels, brewery, and tavern signage. I don’t get to indulge in it as much as I’d like. However, I decided I’d be self-indulgent a little and combine a bit of my daily life (that of artist and designer) with this style. So, here’s a little treat to myself and perhaps others, who enjoy these things, may have fun with.

I just completed 14 days of test driving Wacom’s flagship product: the Cintiq 21UX Interactive Pen Display. I’ll assume that if you’re in the business you’ll either know about this product or follow the link above to Wacom’s product page to learn more. This is a review of my experiences using the device.

I had arranged to test it before purchasing because I have people who know people and they contacted their people and got back to my people and next thing you know I’ve got a big-daddy Cintiq sitting on my desk begging for me to drive it.

The real quick of what it is: It’s a graphic tablet. It’s one of those tablets digital artists use with a pen to “draw” with in conjunction with their graphic software. Whereas drawing on paper with a pen is second nature for most folks – this is putting a special pen to a digital graphic tablet to do the same thing with your computer. The biggest difference between more commonly known tablets (like the Intuos and Graphire ones I currently use) is that the Cintiq is also the monitor. It’s not just a drawing surface… it’s a computer display and your pen works directly on it. You draw right on the screen itself.

For me, the biggest reasons I want to upgrade from my tablets is because I want two thing:

1. A larger surface (as my Intuos is 12″x19″) and the Cintiq is a little over 21″ diagonal.
2. …more importantly than a tad more real estate, I want to eliminate the “disconnect” in having my hands on a tablet sketching while my eyes are looking elsewhere (at a computer monitor).

Over the years, as a painter and sketch artist, I’ve trained myself to view reference subjects so it’s not unusual for my eyes to be in one place while my sketching hand is at another. However, I’ve always been a bit annoyed that I had to train myself a step further and pretty much keep my eyes off my hand-area in order to stare at a monitor all the time – something that using a tablet requires.

I also already have two monitors for my workstation (three if you include a notebook computer on the same desk) and I still could find uses for more screens (eg. reference photos, additional program menus, brush settings, etc.) but I just couldn’t imagine buying a third LCD just for that. I really would enjoy extra monitor information but honestly would have to justify it a little better. So, having the “drawing area” where the pen meets the paper (so to speak) of a Cintiq was a fairly good excuse because of its dual-purpose as a surface and monitor.

Okay, the brass tacks about the thing…

The Cintiq 21UX has 1024 pressure levels. That’s a lot of sensitivity in how hard you press to affect a response (usually equated to drawing thicker lines or more solid fill in a stroke). The pen tip itself as well as the eraser (yes, it has an eraser) get this same resolution.

It hooks up to most modern computers (PC or Mac) via DVI-I with adaptors to VGA or DVI-D. It has its own power cord, too, so it’s hardly a “wireless” device. It uses USB for data, too.

It has an impressive 2 year warranty – I was pleasantly surprised to see this!

It’s a bit heavy. It’s something along the lines of 20 pounds. It also warms up a bit (it’s a monitor, afterall). So, these promotion pictures of some guy kicked back in an easy chair with a 21UX on his lap kinda’ make me laugh. Yes, you could use it exactly like that but seriously… who needs a 20 pound, 22″ wide, heatsink sitting on your whatnots even if you do choose to wear pants? That’d have to get uncomfortable after a while? Ah well, I can’t complain too terribly much… I have a Macbook Pro and those things get goofy-hot, too, but I bought a heat dissipation stand for it. Anyway, I digress… the point is this thing is heavy and a bit hot for putting it in your lap and drawing. As a drawing surface on your desk? …no worries – it’s like any LCD monitor.

It comes with a rotating stand that is just awesome. You can swing the 21UX around on that thing like a madman and set it at quite a range of tilt angles. As a sketch artist I was in love with the fact I could rotate it like I’ve done with sheets of paper for years when I draw – what an awesome thing to get back to. As a painter it was nice to sometimes tilt up at an angle as if it were a canvas on an easel. There’s sure to be a comfortable working position for just about anyone.

Yes – it has color management with ICC profiles and the thing is honestly a very accurate display for colors. I was prepared (much like when I bought the high-gloss Macbook Pro) to sacrifice color correctness but nope… Wacom didn’t drop the ball there.

Something that I love that probably is a non-issue these days is that it uses a pen that requires no batteries. I’ve had tablets of different kinds for a long time and, at only 38 years old, I’m still old enough to remember when a lot of stylus pens were either cabled to the device or required batteries which the pen ate like candy. Wacom has produced pens for some time now that use some kind of alien technology where they are always powered through electromagnetics and never require batteries. Hello, that’s a winner.

The resolution is nice at just over 5,000 LPI (lines per inch) however… I must say that for the pricetag of $2,000-$2,500 I think they could have done better. It’s sufficient and not a deal breaker but I think Wacom has been enjoying a free ride on the top-o-the-line scene long enough that if they’re going to keep pricepoints like this there should be an improvement in some more of these tech specs. That’s just my opinion but I’m not afraid to call it out when I think a company is resting on its laurels a little bit.

Now, a few features that I really do appreciate even if they’re not ground-breaking are the Express Keys that are user-assignable adn two “touch sensitive” strips on the perimeter of the frame. It’s great to have ALT/CNTRL/CMND/SHIFT functions and other modifiers at your finger tips. The pen itself has three switches on it but sometimes those extra “left hand” (for me) controls are worth their weight in gold. I immediately found the touch strips perfect for zooming in and out and increasing or decreasing brush size on-the-fly.

Oh, speaking of the pen… I hate the silicone rubber grip. Even ball point ink pens give me the same gripe. I prefer my pen’s barrel to be straight and without a “grip” insert of any kind. If I wanted one I’d add one. I know I’m probably in the minority and a little contrarian because I’ve made my own, ad-hoc pad for my other styli. I’m just saying I don’t like those rubber inserts. Everyone else will probably take hold of the pen and give the thing a squish and love it. Of course I’m also hoping that some day Wacom would either make or license another company to make metal stylus pens with switches and interchangeable nibs (which this one has in abundance). I’d give anything for a Parker-styled aluminum barrel Cintiq stylus. Yah, baby.

Oh, where was I?

Oh yah, pens, yadda yadda you can get other pens too plus other nibs. Some are very cool and appeal to my former art background because of the felt or brush tips to give a “feel” of painting or drawing with different tools or the airbrush device which totally rocks the mechanics of using a traditional, air-powered airbrush with rocker/roller switch on top and the shape/orientation of an airbrush. That’s very cool.

Yah, there’s also the usual roundup of 16.7 million colors, a good brightness and conrast ratio, as well as plenty of pixels so you could even use software to work video pixels as well as print publications. Very handy. Really, for many of these things the power of your software (for which I used Photoshop CS3 and Corel Painter X) really take on a new and greater life when using a Wacom Cintiq.

Here’s some pointers I pass along over the years that I’ve used different tablets:
Smaller tablets one usually draws “from the finger tips” – the hand stays stationary for the most part.
Medium tablets one often draws from the hand or elbow-down. You can move in larger, sweeping arcs if you need to.
Larger tablets (or a 21UX) you could really get busy and get your whole arm involved because it’s just such a damn, big surface!

I don’t want to scare anyone because it’s not like that. I’m just saying that these are generalities I’ve experienced and don’t always have to be that way – because everyone’s style of motion is different and each person can adapt to a larger or smaller tablet in their own way. Personally, for me, when I get tired of the large arm motions and it’s been a long day drawing… I just start using the zoom-feature programmed into the ribbon controller and immediately switch to drawing “from the hand” in smaller gestures over a zoomed-out canvas. It’s that easy and really requires no special adaptation to pick up. Problem solved. The reverse could be applied to having a small tablet and using your software to zoom back and forth on the canvas to compensate for the size of the surface you use. No worries.

I had it connected in a sort of daisy-ring configuration that took about half an hour to work out the logistics for. Mostly I think it was my problem because I was including the MacBook Pro in the loop as well as a Dell 21″ monitor and had some very particular ideas of what information I wanted presented in what screen. In the end I drew on the canvas via the Cintiq (as expected) and had tools and palettes that I used frequently on it, but larger tool sets were accessed via mouse on the MBP and the overall, fullscreen view of the canvas splashed up on the 21″ LCD for reference.

I found that if I really thought out the usage of those Express Keys I could pretty much do away with 90% of the use of the keyboard… a wonderful thing when one is in “artist” mode and you want less and less things in the way of the creative process. I suppose I could have hoped that Wacom included a few more of them but it’s not a big deal.

I also kick myself for not doing something I should have thought of on day one: use my Nostromo NS-1 multi-pad for some of these additional tasks. I’ve done that for years with regular tablets but didn’t even think of using it with the Cintiq. Maybe that’s a testament to how much can be accomplished using only the Cintiq that I didn’t even think of using my secondary controller I’ve come to rely on all these years?

Drawing on the surface is a pleasure. The screen is flush with the frame and it’s sturdy with really no flex. I finally got to the point where I didn’t flinch each time I banged the pen directly on the glass – something I hadn’t realized I’d come to do periodically on the plastic tablets.

Drawing directly on a surface is also a great way to draw something right the first time. Man, it’s awesome to practically forget what using UNDO is like. If I make a mistake I naturally reverted back to flipping the pen around and erasing something and then get back to drawing it properly without ever hitting Control-Z.

I did have to calibrate the monitor, which wasn’t hard, and the results were more than good enough to get an accurate sense of colorspace. If you have a color profile you must work from or going to print then you may want to check the numbers in your software or palette or simply check it against a good monitor that’s been profiled and color metered with a colorimeter as profiles aren’t always enough.

Oh, and a couple things that caught my attention that were noteworthy but not deal breakers:

If you sketch down on it (like a sheet of paper on a table) then you’re probably going to notice the glare of any ceiling lights you have. If you’re in an office environment with a lot of fluorescent tube fixtures you’re going to be in agony. The glass surface will reflect all that. So, a simple solution is to just increase the tilt angle of the thing and honestly… it’s not hard to get used too. Most people never hover over a 21″ canvas for sketching anyway – most of the time it’s tipped up on an easel anyway. The tilt will solve that glare problem unless you’ve got a bright window behind you – at which point you’re screwed and you’d know that because your computer monitors will have been giving you trouble already. Really… what kind of art studio are you working in??

For me, no big deal, because my home office and studio have accent lighting I use more than anything. I can’t remember the last time I needed the primary lighting turned on and with three computer monitors in the room already… I often had the lights off anyhow. I also, long ago, learned the value of putting up reliable blinds or curtains to control light anyway – it’s not my first rodeo as a digital artist. Good curtains were one of the first things I put up in my new home studio.

Another “essential” to me is to own a SmudgeGuard. Hell, they’re so cheap you should buy two or three in different colors – including black for evening wear. They are a more modern version of an artist-glove one might see a painter or sketch artist use (like charcoal artist) back in the day. I’ve bought quite a few cotton gloves over the years and either bought specialty fingerless gloves or just cut three fingers off myself (or even bastardized a brand new package of white tube-socks to make my own). However, the SmudgeGuard gloves are great not because you have to worry about smudging ink on paper but to cut down on the friction or perspiration your hand will surely encounter when sliding across a glass surface. Trust me… grab a SmudgeGuard and you’ll be a happy camper.

Oh, and I had to swap out my chair. I have a couple of nice office chairs but even the height adjustment wasn’t enough to save me from the fact the Cintiq 21UX sits on a stand itself and that raises the height of it a few inches more off your desk. If this gives you any idea of the height issue I find comfortable – I had to go into my music studio and bogart the bar stool from my keyboard setup and use it instead. Honestly it felt awesome. Granted, I’m 6′2″ and not everyone will have a chair that maxes out like mine – and I’ve always been one to hate sitting with my knees perpendicular to the floor. I always have to have my knees a little lower than my hips so the bar stool routine is a little more “my thing” than typical of anyone else.

Oh, and last little gripe, is that there’s a teensy bit of space between the outer surface you draw on and where the display itself generates the image, which is probably unavoidable. I think it’s a combination of air-space between the two panels as well as the natural thickness of the glass. You can use the software to offset the drawing “sensation” of your pen hovering a few millimeters in the air as opposed to where Photoshop’s brush displays on screen. That helps a lot – but it’s not 100% like having the point of a pencil touch the surface of paper… there’s a tiny amount of space and it’ll be worth it to run the calibration program to fix it to your hand-eye vantage point.

In the end, I’m extremely happy I test drove this thing. I’ve also re-affirmed that it’s probably the next, most-important investment I’ll be making to my work (thank goodness for tax deductions, eh?). It’s not perfect but then again neither is pen and paper. It is, however, arguably one of the most advanced tools of its kind for artists who work the digital space and prefer to have an interface to the system that mimics traditional, physical interaction. It also is one of those tools that just makes software like Photoshop or Painter take off to an entirely new level. It’s the same improvement I found in moving from a mouse to a tablet to draw only now it’s even moreso in 2008.

The time spent connecting and calibrating are necessary and really not a big deal – and probably not likely to have to be repeated very often. There’s a bit of an acclimation to make but nothing nearly as adventurous as when I moved from mouse to tablet (boy, that took a week of awkwardness, as I recall).

So, I think I’ll just leave some space on my desk because I’m convinced that my next purchase will be the Cintiq 21UX.