{ Z X C V B N M C }

Work in progress: the final project for my Illustrator class is...

Mon, 13 May 2013 23:27:14 -0700

Work in progress: the final project for my Illustrator class is to recreate a tool.
Onto color, highlights and shades now…

I like this magazine cover a lot. The pink dots on the tongue,...

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 09:18:00 -0700

I like this magazine cover a lot. The pink dots on the tongue, the red inside the eyes and the shadows right under are just creepy enough. Who drew this? I want to see more.

"I realized I was more interested in figuring out how the brain works, than in actually cutting up a..."

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 20:29:41 -0700

“I realized I was more interested in figuring out how the brain works, than in actually cutting up a brain.”

- Marisa Mayer - On changing her major from Biology to Symbolic Systems.

First attempt at an auto-portrait using Illustrator. I am on...

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 15:43:00 -0700

First attempt at an auto-portrait using Illustrator.

I am on Dribbble.

Downtown San Francisco, as seen from 88 Kearny’s 20...

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 22:43:00 -0700

Downtown San Francisco, as seen from 88 Kearny’s 20 something floor. I was there for an event at Causes.org.

Breathtaking view, captured by my phone.

A tee shirt design I created in Adobe Illustrator.

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 11:15:00 -0700

A tee shirt design I created in Adobe Illustrator.

Set of white icons, also published on my Dribbble.

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 11:23:00 -0700

Set of white icons, also published on my Dribbble.

I miss Iceland’s raw landscapes… The possibility of...

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 22:25:00 -0800

I miss Iceland’s raw landscapes… The possibility of being alone in the world.

Here’s a simple UI set I worked on earlier this week. It...

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 14:04:00 -0800

Here’s a simple UI set I worked on earlier this week. It was a fun experience creating matching interface elements. I’m thinking the whole thing is possibly lacking contrast—it makes your eyes work a bit—so I’ll probably play with that when I have a chance.

Any suggestions for UI elements I could add to this set? Tumblr doesn’t make commenting easy but you can send me feedback on Dribbble.

You can also download the psd file from my Google docs if you like it. It’s free of rights. My modest contribution to this world.

Would you keep the $5 bill?

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 18:48:00 -0800

I just received a survey questionnaire in the mail, from a Florida-based agency called Simmons. It is a 4-page survey about media usage and leisure activities. Nothing surprising here, except that there is a $5 bill stapled to the questionnaire sheets.

The survey came with a letter explaining that my household had been selected to represent “hundreds of households in [my] community,” and that the agency was “very grateful for [my] help.”

The letter also said: “Please accept the enclosed $5 dollars as a token of our appreciation.”

This is the first time in my life I receive cash in the mail from strangers. And I feel confused.

Is this $5 bill thing a super smart and audacious strategy to get my immensely-valued feedback? Or is it plain stupid and disrespectful?

It’s stupid because I could have just trashed the envelope without opening it. I almost did trash it, in fact, as they didn’t get my name right, but I got lured into opening it by the colorful stamps. These look like stamps my mom would use—how smart!

Ok, so maybe it’s not that stupid, but it is disrespectful and aggressive to put me in a position where I feel like I have no choice but to fill out the survey.

I do have a choice, but it is in the shape of a moral dilemma:

I could keep the $5 bill, complete the survey, and feel like a tool.
I could keep the $5 bill, ignore the survey, and feel dishonest.
I could send them back the $5 bill in the prepaid return envelope they attached (oh yeah, there’s the prepaid envelope…)
I could keep the $5 bill and make an origami elephant with it, so I never have to think of it as money again and I can escape the moral guilt of not sending anything back.

Now if I keep the five without filling the survey, do I put it in my wallet or do I send it to my favorite charity? And if I do send it to my charity, is it tax-deductible? Ha.

Oh God.

Seriously, thank you Simmons, for giving me a headache.

I think I’ll just earn that money and buy myself a glass of wine.

There has been a lot of celestial activity these days, which...

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 23:04:00 -0800

There has been a lot of celestial activity these days, which inspired me to create this illustration of a meteorite falling over an Icelandic landscape.

This is a composite photo: the sky is a night sky I found on google images—I removed the moon—while the landscape comes from a day picture of a cotton field in Iceland, taken by a National Geographic reporter. The meteorite is basic vector art.

By the way, here’s the difference between a comet and a meteor:

Meteoroids are small chunks of debris in space. When they enter our atmosphere they start to burn and and streak across the sky, blazing bright for a few seconds. They are then called meteors (or shooting stars). When meteors are large enough to survive their trip through the atmosphere and hit the ground, they are called meteorites.

Comets are also chunks of space debris such as rocks, but they have ice mixed in as well. Contrary to meteoroids, they have very long orbits, and when they come close to the Sun, the heat boils off their frozen ice and pushes it into a long, bright tail. Comets are much bigger than meteors and they do not have to enter our atmosphere to be seen.

These are the fonts I’d pick if I could only work with 5...

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 13:02:00 -0800

These are the fonts I’d pick if I could only work with 5 fonts in my palette: a transitional font (Georgia), a slab font (Archer), two sans serif fonts* (Opens Sans and Proxima Nova) and a Script font (Respective). I rarely use script fonts but I feel a font palette isn’t complete without a script specimen in it.

*I tried and keep Helvetica out of this…

Experimenting with page layout (again)

Sat, 19 Jan 2013 19:05:32 -0800

Experimenting with page layout (again)

Error 404 - Page Not Found on Dribbble

Sat, 19 Jan 2013 19:02:00 -0800

Error 404 - Page Not Found on Dribbble

Experimenting with print layout.

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 20:13:00 -0800

Experimenting with print layout.

This is on Dribbble.

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 14:37:33 -0800

This is on Dribbble.

Planets on Pinterest

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 11:03:09 -0800

*Planets* on Pinterest

I spent 23 hours in bed today and broke a personal record: 2 and...

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 20:55:00 -0800

I spent 23 hours in bed today and broke a personal record: 2 and a half days without stepping outside the house. Thank you, the flu.

And also I like this cutout of Lana del Rey.

Holidays are slowly coming to an end. After spending Christmas...

Sun, 30 Dec 2012 18:32:00 -0800

Holidays are slowly coming to an end. After spending Christmas with my family in France, we stopped by New York on our way back to San Francisco. Today, third day of metropolis exploration, we went to the Guggenheim museum which I had been wanting to visit for ages. The main exhibit, “Picasso Black and White,” was mostly boring at the exception of a few pieces that managed to convey something close to a human emotion (would it be only boredom: portraits of bored women). I am exaggerating. A Guernica horse screaming to the skies, and a mother mourning her dead child got to my guts. But besides that, it was just a bunch of gray lines and angles; textures if you were lucky.
There was a small yet interesting Kandinsky collection. After three 180-degree black-and-white-Picasso loops, I welcomed color.
My favorite part of the exhibit were the Gabriel Orozco installations upstairs. Orozco gathered thousands of items of detritus from two sites: a playing field in New York and a protected coastal biosphere in Baja California. The pieces were neatly and artfully organized by color and shape. There was also a video he shot; hundreds of seagulls feeding on the decomposing carcass of a whale on a large and desert Mexico beach.
Actually, no. The best part of the exhibit was seeing the people walk down the spiraling levels of the museum. People interacting with architecture. Living art.

On the way out, we walked across freezing cold Central Park: icy roads and snowy gardens. I regretted not buying the $110 earmuffs I had seen a day earlier in Bloomingdales, and I fantasized about a winter coat made of a thousand New York squirrels’ fluffy tails…
We warmed up in the subway.

God I love New York.
And I can’t wait to be back to San Francisco.

The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the...

Sat, 22 Dec 2012 08:56:54 -0800

The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.

Tom Waits.