Thoughts/suggestions are very welcome.

Here are the process picture:

1. Sketch

2. Vectorize

3. Refined Final

4. Details.

Here are the photographs in a bit higher resolution.

1. This guy was standing outside of Old Navy.

2. This guy was just sleeping right on a street corner in the middle of the day. Ironically the bottle he has is actually a soda bottle, but I framed the photo to kind of hide that fact.

3. This guy was just too interesting not to photograph. 

4. This was one of those photographs that had I been 2 seconds slower I would have missed it. The juxtaposition is pretty fantastic.

Let me know what you think! Also if you have any ideas for venues where I might be able to do a show, let me know as well.

Well I was working on board two for a long time. I’m a perfectionist so its been tricky getting to a point where I felt like this was done. So I just let the board sit for a few weeks, picked it up, worked on it, then left it for a number of months. I think its at a place where I’m happy with it. However, if I didn’t just say ENOUGH, I could have worked on this thing for another few years.

So here it is:

Here are progress shots. If you want to see the very start just go click that link at the top to see how I started with WalMart skateboards, stripped them and got down to this.

Woo!

Finally work simmered down for a week or so, and I hopped back on this project. I designed out the poster and sent it to print. As I watched this huge 44″ piece of paper start to come out, I realized to my horror that all of the black color wasn’t printing. On top of that, there were a number of spots where the print heads had leaked onto the poster. I canceled the print and had to give up.

I followed up with about 6 different people before finally getting in touch with one person who claimed they might have some spare ink laying around. (Side note: it costs about $500-700 to refill the ink). So I waited and crossed my fingers.

I checked back at the printer a couple times hoping it had been fixed, until a few weeks later, I saw that instead of refilling the ink, someone had completely removed the printer. It was gone. My hopes and dreams crushed.

But then I remembered I had seen another printer that looked smaller, and less available for the public. I located it and while hovering, scanning the machine for any hope of being able to print, a guy asked me if I needed help. He said its easy to print and it would be fine if I printed. Filled with joy, I ran back to my desk, grabbed my laptop and prepared to print. I asked him what size it was and he said “I think its about 55 inches.” So not only was I going to be able to print, but I was going to be able to print super large scale.

When the print finally came out, I was so stoked. I showed it to my team, and they loved it too. Its all campaigns that my design team worked on, and its the alphabet, from A-Z.

Enjoy! [Click for higher resolution image]

Inspired by Michael Wang’s drawing about EYEO, I thought that a good way to motivate myself to read it would be to take visual notes about it, and turn that into a drawing in my moleskine.

I began, and after about 10 lessons I had a full page. But as I continued I was less and less excited about the blog. Turns out it was just a couple bloggers who attempted to post new posts about UX every week, no matter what the content. Some were lessons, some were just random thoughts. At the end (around week 39) they just kind of give up, and some guests post some stuff, and they die off at week 49… never even reaching the full 52 weeks.

I was able to fit a big chunk of the important lessons onto the page. It was super fun and easy to do since I used to doodle like this every single day in high school and college. It was low stress to do, and ironically ends up looking super jumbled and overwhelming, which is kind of the opposite of what a good UX’er is trying to accomplish. Good times!

Final note: I’ve lately been feeling like too much of my time has been going into finishing drawings and that more of my time should be doing more design work. Practicing my craft a bit more. We’ll see how things go.

I initially did a test for a card I did for a thank you card for my grandma.

For my moleskine I decided to try this blackletter font that seemed pretty cool. I was just going to do an alphabet, but I decided to write out a sentence that has all the letters of the alphabet. I discovered those are called “pangrams.”

The biggest issue was having confidence as I wrote. I still kind of have shaky hands since I didn’t know the letters. Also the moleskine paper seems to allow ink to bleed really easily. Perhaps my next experiments will be on thicker paper.

After that, it kind of sat and I was too nervous to pick it up again, but I had thought about various other things I could do with it. Tonight I forced myself to finish it, and this is how it came out.