Archives

How trees work

May 23, '18

Looking out my window at the leaves that finally came in the last few weeks, and having played this video game Fortnight where you build shieldish fortresses, I can see that my tree building a shield so it can incubate things along its thick brown branches behind the green ruse we use, we and our […]

LIRR

Apr 06, '18

It started as I raced toward the escalator, trying to make it up to the train. They were getting on, only one of them casting a glance backward. Her eyes were deep and wet and blue and soft, the warm sun glinting from their epicenters. Then the mechanism of things pulled me away; I noted […]

Art as Anthropology part 1

Apr 03, '18

I often think of Picasso’s famous quote, “Art is the sum of my destructions”. I’ve always gotten that. Whenever I make art, I feel like the second I’m close to that perfect line, shade, shape or texture, there’s all this pressure that I’m gonna fuck up. When that happens, I imagine a little Picasso sitting […]

The Darkness

Mar 21, '18

I recently read an article about someone who experienced trauma when they were very young, and how it manifested itself for the rest of his life as “the darkness”, a kind of demonic presence that was always looming. It was a very sad read. Though a very busy person, he found no joy in work, […]

Operating System developers should stick to developing operating systems.

Feb 03, '18

Apple and Microsoft make some of the most popular OS’s in the world: iOS, macOS, and Windows. As software goes, that’s about it. Everything else they force down the users’ throats is pure garbage. I’m talking about iTunes, Mail, MS Office, Photo software, and the list goes on. I honestly don’t know why this is. […]

Variable Width Fonts

Jan 30, '18

I know very little, way less than I should, about the new variable typography stuff that’s been gaining traction and was discussed in css-tricks’ most recent shop talk episode.  However, I’m having serious skepticism about how they can replace entire font families. There’s a lot of the discerning human eye in creating various weights (and […]

On Teaching

Jan 02, '18

This spring, I’ll be teaching my age-old 2D Graphics course. Every time I teach it, I spend waaaaay too much time wondering what I should include in the course content. I change it every year. Adobe is the go-to graphics software company, and that hasn’t changed since they bought Macromedia long ago. I started off […]

On light

Oct 12, '17

We see because of light reacting with our crazy eyes and ocular nerves and brains. But there’s a lot to learn about where that light’s coming from. It’s either being emitted or reflected. The primary point of emitted light, for most of our existence on this planet, has been very hard, even dangerous, to look […]

Multiple master icons

Just like fonts, icons can be designed in different weights. Here’s how it works in my current design, chubbicons:   These are all rendered at 32×32. The bold weight was designed with 1 pixel wide stroke on a 9×9 grid, while the light weight was 1 pixel on an 18×18 grid. The solid is just […]

A standard for user interface icon design

Sep 09, '17

Editing this article to discuss general icon design standards, which I believe are needed. Icons should down-rez gracefully to small sizes, with vertical and horizontal edges aligning to the pixel grid at sizes as small as 9 pixels. A 3×3 sub grid should be adhered to when designing icons. [codepen_embed height=”265″ theme_id=”1″ slug_hash=”EvqZQZ” default_tab=”html,result” user=”empireoflight”]See […]

Cooper Union

Aug 22, '17

As soon as I was considering life after high school, I had my heart set on Cooper Union. I wanted to make “cool looking shit”, I was good at it and CU was where the best in the world did it. Plus it was in Manhattan, my favorite place in the world and a 45 […]