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- February 16, 2013
Day 16: Dave as Product
February 16, 2013Read more
Today’s product of the day is a mockup of a book cover: “Developing Creative Independence”. While it’s not yet an actual book, by creating the cover I’ve established an umbrella concept for my various activities. For fun, I’ve made the cover available as a PDF. Each one is uniquely stamped with your purchasing email address, making them into unique digital certificates that I will accept as proof of your early-stage support and awesomeness as a human being.
What?
- February 16, 2013
Intermission: Incubot’s New Grendizer USB Drive
February 16, 2013Read moreAs much as I was tempted to claim this as today’s product-of-the-day so I could spend the rest of the day sleeping, my connection to this bit of awesomeness is just this: (1) Alen’s one of my best friends and (2) I helped him with the photos and video work for his first Kickstarter drive: the ambitious Anime Super Robot Grendizer USB Flash Drive! Here’s the video from the Kickstarter site:
When I held the first production samples in my hand, I relished the carefully-rounded edges of the sculpt, the motion of the articulating arms, and the crazy-amazing spacer dock. They all spoke of Alen’s sensitivity to nostalgia and craft, without crossing the line that separates “fun” from “preciousness”; this is an object for holding in your hand, not stuffed out-of-the-way on some forlorn shelf. Although this is emphatically NOT A TOY and NOT intended for young children, my inner 12-yo self was nevertheless filled with a joy I had almost forgotten. And since this holds 8GB of data on a USB flash chip, it’s arguably in the “office supply” category come tax-time. It would be irresponsible for me NOT to have one so I can expense it for FY2013.
This is the latest step in Alen’s 15-year journey to keep his love for the giant cartoon super robots of his youth alive. He started, innocently enough, by creating the ToyboxDX toy site in the mid-90s. After a few false starts, he began to create a line of “NOT TOYS” designed for adults like himself who still relished the feeling of having a favorite toy constantly by their side. Piecing together the means of production has been an expensive and time-consuming labor of love, and for this Kickstarter he’s done a ton of work to raise his game to its highest level yet. I consider it a significant creative milestone, and I’m so happy to see him offer it on Kickstarter so everyone can see what he’s been doing. It’s tremendously inspiring! Just look at this thing:
Of course you want one! Support the Kickstarter (expires Saturday, March 16) and select a support level; $45 will get you one of these. The tooling and design work has already been completed, so delivery should be quite soon should the kickstarter raise the necessary $8000 to pay for production.
» Reserve Your Grendizer Today on Kickstarter
Thanks for checking it out! I already ordered mine :)
- February 15, 2013
Day 15: Word Counting Calendar for March 2013
February 15, 2013Read more
Last November I participated in the National Novel Writing Month, AKA NaNoWriMo. The goal is to write 50,000 words in a month, and of course I had to make my own Nanowrimo calendar. To do 50,000 words in the 30 days of November, that required an average of 1,667 words a day. I decided to visualize this by providing a stack of 10 blocks, each representing 250 words, that I could fill-in from the bottom to the top. Success can be projected by looking for daily blackened blocks. If I filled the minimum of 7 blocks, I was doing well. If I filled in more, which I often did, I had a visual indicator of having “reached the pinnacle of achievement” for the day.
Later, several people asked if I could make a version for other months of the year. And so, today’s product-of-the-day is a version of the NaNoWriMo calendar for March 2013. I had to rebuild the template from scratch; apparently I had not saved the original in a place that was backed-up when I embarked on the Great Windows 8 Migration of January 2013. I was also out for most of the day, so to get the product-of-the-day out I decided to just cover March. Total production time was around 90 minutes.
This variation of the calendar, like the NaNoWriMo version, counts words. I made a few refinements: providing an explicit field for “total words of the day”, and also simplifying the weekly total column. For future variants, I have ideas for tracking percentages and other cool metrics, so if you have an idea for something you want to count, let me know and I’ll try to come up with something in the next few days!
In the meantime:
» Download Word Tracking Calendar for March 2013 PDF
Adobe Acrobat Reader is recommended for printing. The built-in "Mac OS X Preview" and "Chrome Browser" PDF viewers do not always draw dotted lines correctly.
Enjoy!
Groundhog Day Resolution Posts for 2014
I am challenging myself to create a new product every day for the month of February 2013. The Challenge Page lists all the products in one place. Check it out!
- February 14, 2013
Day 14: Spaceship Trading Card
February 14, 2013Read more
Today I thought I would try something much different. With J.J. Abrams taking on the Star Wars franchise, I’ve been revisiting my passion for space opera. Back in 1978, I’d started drawing spaceships with my friends and kept up the habit until freshman year in College. Back then, we didn’t have the digital production tools that we have now. I got to wondering what I’d be doing today, in 2013, if I was still into spaceships. With I was a kid, I spent a lot of time organizing and filing my spaceships on paper after I drew them, classifying them into 7 different periods of development.
As a valentine to my youthful spaceship-crazed self, I made a 3×5″ index card with a new spaceship on it. It took about 30 minutes to sketch, and 90 minutes get my ancient scanner to work because there are no drivers for Windows 8 64-bit; I ended up hooking it up on the Mac and then transfer the source assets—scans of the spaceship, some old graph paper, and the cardboard pattern—to my desktop PC. Then, about 2 hours to work the spaceship art into something simple that still evoked some excitement. The design isn’t the greatest, but I am pretty sure I would have been thrilled to get something like this in 1979 from FUTURE DAVE, and I’d have been inspired to print trading cards to barter for strategic alliances in Home Room and the Galaxy beyond…
» Download Spaceship Trading Index Card PDF
Happy Valentines Day, fellow space nerds!
Adobe Acrobat Reader is recommended for printing. The built-in "Mac OS X Preview" and "Chrome Browser" PDF viewers do not always draw dotted lines correctly.
Enjoy!
Groundhog Day Resolution Posts for 2014
I am challenging myself to create a new product every day for the month of February 2013. The Challenge Page lists all the products in one place. Check it out!
- February 13, 2013
Day 13: Black&White Update to 365-day ETP Almanac
February 13, 2013Read more
Today’s product-of-the-day is the black-and-white version of the 365-day Emergent Task Planner Almanac, which was in turn inspired by a tweet from dragonflylotus; she was having trouble getting the orange to show up on her laser printer. I will be updating the package so everyone who has purchased it to date will get a copy of the new black-and-white templates, optimized for laser printers. Thinner lines are the main change, aesthetically, since solid black-and-white renders very sharply on a typical laser printer, and thicker lines need to be toned down to maintain the visual balance of the design (in my head, anyway :)
It took a lot longer than I thought…there are four templates that each needed manual conversion from color to black-and-white, and then I needed to re-export from InDesign and rejigger the interactive form fields in Acrobat (I’m setting the default font to Helevetica, otherwise it uses Times Roman…ugh! Hopefully I did not miss anything in the conversion.
On the plus side, I’m now set for a quicker 2014 update! Working through Acrobat is the worst part, because it takes 10 minutes for it to process each form due to the number of interactive fields. The new templates are:
- B&W US LETTER
- B&W US MINI
- B&W A4
- B&W A5
Like the other templates, they all have interactive form fields so you can fill them in. You can purchase either the A4/A5 or US/US MINI packages from this page.
Enjoy!
Groundhog Day Resolution Posts for 2014
I am challenging myself to create a new product every day for the month of February 2013. The Challenge Page lists all the products in one place. Check it out!
