see it bigger

Drew this while reading Steven Heller’s excellent book, Design Humor: The Art of Graphic Wit.

You can get a good feel for what the book is about from Heller’s article, “Is there anything funny about graphic design?“

I’m always struggling to come up with good color themes. I was reading the Xplane blog tonight and came across this interesting technique: use the mosaic filter in Photoshop to blow up the pixels in photographs and show the basic colors. You can then use the palettes for your work. I did it on a couple of vacation shots, and here are the results.

Check out Adobe’s Kuler for a much easier way to build beautiful color themes.

I was Google Image Searching the I [heart] NY logo, and came across this great 2003 interview between Milton Glaser and Chip Kidd published in The Believer. Hard to believe Glaser never made a penny off the design, which he basically donated to the city in the mid-seventies in hopes of boosting the city’s morale (and cleaning the dog crap off the street).

I found nearly every bit of the interview fascinating, especially his thoughts about developing ideas with sketching versus computers, but the story about his mother and father really hit home:

In my parents I had the perfect combination—a resistant father and an encouraging mother. My mother convinced me I could do anything. And my father said, “Prove it.” He didn’t think I could make a living. Resistance produces muscularity. And it was the perfect combination because I could use my mother’s belief to overcome my father’s resistance. My father was a kind of a metaphor for the world, because if you can’t overcome a father’s resistance you’re never going to be able to overcome the world’s resistance. It’s much better than having completely supportive parents or completely resistant parents.

Best of all? When he was a kid, he wanted to be a cartoonist.