Now! Daily blog entries!

Hey, I'm now doing daily blog entries.

Er, about seed art.

Yes, You can keep track of my progress while I work on one of this year's entries in the Minnesota State Fair's Crop Art competition. Go to this link.

cropart.com/diary/diary2007

I'm doing a picture of The Prince from the video game We Love Katamari. In seeds!

Share the road

Here's the logo for sharetheroadmn.org. Good luck with that concept.

Have you ever been out riding your bike, stopped at a light right next to a car or truck (as shown in this logo)? Just idling, those vehicles generate serious heat! It's like standing next to a bonfire.

I know they burn gasoline and everything, but standing next to them is just uncomfortable.

Start Seeing Motorcycles

Letterspacing

I think that, in the original, the letters D-A-W-N are poorly spaced. So I fixed them. Moved the A and W one pixel to the left and the right. I think it makes the lettering look better.

My last Transformers post

"Transformers" bases its look on the least-successful part of the worst "Matrix" movie. The human-controlled robots that shoot -- and shoot and shoot -- into squirming clouds of computer animation.

Pixel hash.

"Transformers" has lots of movement and noise during the action scenes, but this viewer can't tell what's going on.

And don't get me started on Shia LaBeouf's motormouth, improv-fest, say-the-same-thing-20- different-ways monologues.

Transform Your Ride Sale

"Pauley" the polar bear and "Bumble" the, uh, Camaro is it?, together to promote auto sales. Transformers movie fever at Polar Chevrolet in White Bear Lake, Minnesota.

Fine-tuning Apple iPhone publicity photos

Cathedral of St. Paul lit May 2007

Some guy paid to have the Cathedral of St. Paul lit on the occasion of the building's 100th anniversary.

Nice sentiment, but all they did was park a big truck with one bank of white football-stadium lights on a pole and aim 'em directly at the front door of the building.

Point and shoot.

The result was rather harsh.

Transformers movie characters

I'm having a hard time matching up the cars with the Transformers robots. The car design is completely fragmented in the making of the robot. I can't easily tell which robot came from which car.

I've circled the cues I've found, but there aren't a lot of them.

And is it noteworthy that all the cars are General Motors products? Hmm. Wonder why the movie makers decided to do that?

(Pictures are from the Yahoo movie site.)

Super-strong thumb

What's with the bottle cap being popped off using the thumb?

Are you supposed to be able to do that? Something you can do if you drink Miller Lite?

Gr-r-r!

Nice sign painting

This was a sports-equipment store for as long as I can remember. But that store is now gone and in preparation for the next business, look at what was revealed.

Speed lines on "Race Place." And check out the painted stop light next to the real stop light.

Now that's graphic design.

Best parts of "Grindhouse"

The best parts of the movie "Grindhouse," you ask?

1. The first "Reel Missing" moment in "Planet Terror." Starts out there's a lull in the action. Most of the cast is hiding out in a barbeque restaruant. The two main characters bicker for a while then start of a tender love scene. Quiet music. Artsy photography. The film breaks before anything good happens. The "Reel Missing" card goes up. And first thing after the title card is a gigantic musical flourish and an exterior shot of the entire barbeque restaurant on fire. Huge flames.

I laughed!

2. Credit sequence of "Death Proof" starts with some actresses walking around and then goes to a car speeding down a backwoods road. Starring. Music by. Produced by. Then there's the title. An animated, fairly elaborate logo with the words "Thunder Bolt" -- but then before you even have time to read that, we are shown some very drab, white on black lettering, "Death Proof." Like they changed the name for some reason, but didn't go to the expense of redoing the title.

I laughed!

How to make your building look even better

Add cell phone transmitters!

New Coke can

The pre-New-Coke can was just red and white. Incidentally, I think it was the first can to use the "Dynamic Ribbon Device."

New Coke added a silver stripe to the ribbon and put silver around the logo. Coke cans have been getting more and more complicated since.

The current can has sliver around the logo script plus a drop shadow, fake sweat beads, a halftone pattern and the ribbon has multiplied and thickened.

Now a new design has surfaced. And it looks very much like the pre-'85 can. Red and white. No printing tricks. Looks great!

The problem with Comic Sans MS

Talk about typefaces for a while and eventually someone will say they hate Comic Sans MS.

I think the biggest problem with Comic Sans MS is the name. I'm a cartoonist and even I think it's a dumb name.

More people would like Comic Sans MS if it was named something cooler. Like, maybe, "Darabont" or "Worthy" or perhaps, "Lake."

Typo in newspaper!

This ad is obviously wrong. Chris Tucker getting top billing over Jackie Chan in "Rush Hour 3"?

Hopefully, the poster will be fixed before the movie comes out.

I bet New Line is really embarrassed about this!

Better than the Blue Screen of Death

Put a CD with documents on it into my work computer (a Dell running Windows XP) and got a spectacular lock up.

What is it? How do I fix it?

It's the company's computer, so the long-suffering IT guy has to deal with it. A restart fixed it temporarily. Or fixed it for good.

In the short run, I went to another Dell box and got my work done.

Louis Jourdan, Louis Jordan

I knew about Louis Jourdan the actor (pronounced "Loo-EE Jor-DAN") but I didn't know about Louis Jordan the musician ("LOO-ee JOR-dun") until I started listening to podcasts of WFMU's Old Codger. Boy, what I was missing!

Love and hate

Robert Indiana painted the original "Love," of course. Fantastic design. Pop Art at its best.

I did the "Hate," in the Indiana style, more or less. I don't know if someone else has done it that way, I just saw a "Hate" done the wrong way and I had to fix it.

The blog post that spurred me on to making these drawings is about stealing other people's artwork. (I'm going to take a stand here and say I'm against stealing, too.) One of the examples of stealing was a design like the one with the tilted "A." The blogger says it's stealing from Robert Indiana to do "Hate" in the "Love" style. I'm not so sure I agree. I think it's more of a tribute, or a visual nod.

But in any case, I don't think the tribute featured is tributing correctly! The "A" shouldn't be tilted, the "T" should be. The "A" has a diagonal in it and doesn't need the tilt. The "T" -- like the "O" in the original doesn't have a diagonal, and should be tilted to get the diagonal reverberating across the design.

Learned that in art class in high school.

If you're going to be inspired by someone's work, think it through.

Peeling billboard

There was a long, soaking rain and then the temperature went below freezing.

Result: Lots of billboards peeled. I like it!