Below are the 4 most recent journal entries recorded in metæducation's LiveJournal:

Saturday, December 16th, 2006
3:30 am [hostilefork]	Why Logos Don't Always Indicate the Businesses They Represent There's a psychological study in which an experimenter touches his/her nose, and then tells the subject "do this". The natural response for an adult is to take their hand and touch their own nose. But very young children don't yet understand the abstraction, and are uneducated on the social taboo of touching someone else. So they will instead touch the experimenter's nose. New graphic designers—like children—are unaware of the taboos...and when given a task will frequently make a similar "mistake" of being extremely literal. So if they are trying to design a logo for a car company, they might start from thinking about how to blend in the shape of a car into the logo. Yet look at these popular logos for auto manufacturers:     There's not a single car, or key, or tire...or any of the things that you'd associate with automobiles in any of these. If advertising and cultural context hadn't already provided you with the knowledge that these were the logos for car companies, you wouldn't have any idea what they represented. This article talks about some of the culture of design and the good (and bad) reasons why some of these conventions exist. (Please feel free to leave a comment on the material and I will incorporate your feedback.) ( Read the article ) (Comment on this)
Friday, September 15th, 2006
1:31 pm [hostilefork]	Roughing Out and Refining A Cartoon Character Logo Some things are tough to draw—for instance, human forms. Our minds are very unforgiving when we see a badly proportioned character sketch. This is one of the reasons why art students have posable dummies on hand to refer to: In the digital age, posable dummies (and human models) are great tools. Not only can you use them as a visual guide, you can take a picture of them and then trace it. But there's another place you can go to for imagery to trace and get some ideas jumping—and that's online. In this article I follow the course of my development of a cartoon character in several phases. I start with a very rough collage out of pictures from Google Images, assembled in about an hour. Then—once the "green light" was given on the concept—I show how I redesigned the artwork into a finished product. (Please feel free to leave a comment on the material and I will incorporate your feedback.) ( Read the article ) (Comment on this)
Thursday, April 13th, 2006
1:20 pm [hostilefork]	How To Control Where An Object's Outline Is Drawn Shapes in vector drawing programs are stored as idealized mathematical objects which are called "Paths". Like the lines you may remember from geometry class, a path itself has no thickness and is invisible. In order to see it, you must specify how it is "Filled" and "Stroked": But notice in the diagram above that the circles that are stroked are slightly bigger than the circle which is merely filled. The reason is that a thick stroke which is centered along the circle's path will be half inside the path and half outside the path. Though one might assume that professional graphics programs allow finer control over a stroke's alignment, that isn't necessarily the case! This article describes some of the approaches one can use to control stroke alignment. I'll start by describing some simple manual ways of dealing with it, and the reasons why such remedies don't always work. Then I'll point out the features that have been added to some specific programs—such as Illustrator and Xara—which can be used to solve the problem in a more elegant way. Finally I'll address the reasons why these features might be frequently overlooked by developers of graphics software. (Please feel free to leave a comment on the material and I will incorporate your feedback.) ( Read the article ) (Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 22nd, 2006
3:09 am [hostilefork]	Seeing the Shapes Inside a Vector Illustration There is a whole genre of books and tutorials which are basic introductions to drawing, and they usually show how to draw cartoon characters. The approach they encourage is to not try to draw the whole thing at once without making errors. Instead, one starts by drawing basic shapes in order to get the proportionality right. Then by using increasingly darker and more permanent strokes, the details are filled in while the lines from the guiding shapes are overwritten or erased: (from Cartoon Connections) This article discusses building composite shapes from the primitive palette of ellipses, rectangles, and polygons offered by various software packages. (Please feel free to leave a comment on the material and I will incorporate your feedback.) ( Read the article ) (Comment on this)