This weekend was a little bit of good and a little bit of bad. We went to the company Christmas party this Saturday, which was a very good time, finishing it at Todd and Heather’s house, which was even better. Sunday we spent most of the day attempting to finish our Christmas cards. Jen did an amazing job with the artwork I gave her, and she produced a beautiful card that we’re both really proud to send out. What began as a three-day project though stretched out into a week-long project when it turned out that the copier I used for the prints had offset the artwork randomly. I also found the limitations on my printer’s resolution, so an upgrade in RAM is definitely in order. We did get the resolution and printing problems ironed out and finished them by hand last night, where it became evident that I cannot color in between the lines. Unfortunately, I wound up losing my wallet in a shoe store yesterday afternoon, which means that my Palm Pilot is now gone. Dammit.
A quick lesson in public service and damage control: This is a bad idea. This is a good idea. This is an even better idea, way too late.
I just finished cleaning up some very offensive JavaScript on all the main pages of my site. How embarassing. I apologize, everyone.
History repeating. One of the illustration jobs I worked on a few months back has been printed and is out to the end-users. Recently two international companies have launched advertising campaigns with remarkably similar concepts, almost down to the individual elements. I know for a fact that the AD for the job I worked on had proposed the idea long before the other campaigns went public, so it’s not a matter of copyright infringement or simple copying. I do have a theory however that most of the ideas our industry creates get re-used in cycles, and sometimes those cycles do coincide with each other. I’ve seen editorial illustration go through this cycle, and usually the style of the illustrator is different enough to make the end product fresh. Commercials, design—any creative professional has to deal with this possibility. My question is this: How do we explain this to our clients?