Collage-casting

Was fooling around with collage in the last day or so, as I am trying to make a banner for a personal/professional-type site (which is nowhere near complete, I feel compelled to mention. Making such a site was recommended by my graduate program, personal branding and all, oh boy. Please resist the urge to make a sarcastic remark...)

Back to the collage. Lately I've been interested in mixing art/ephemera and text, which I believe is known as art journaling. Probably there are a whole mess of people out there who art journal in blog form (must avoid browsing internet for this likely phenomenon and falling into 10-hour digital detour...)

This was more or less the idea I had for Silent Type 2, because generally I think, with the glut of content out there, that words need pictures to get noticed, but less cynically, that images enhance information. I've been doing loads of research on using visuals in information, and feel that hand-drawn art and ephemera in particular are compelling due to their rarity and personal meaning. Here is a mail artist I admire who does this kind of thing well.

Any further issues of Silent Type I might do, or other zines, would probably further look into this idea, although not anytime soon, oh heavens no.

I dare you to try collage in one of your typecasts.

PS, I totally love masking tape. It is my favorite art supply. What's yours?

A difficult thing

As life is reliably imperfect at all times, I'm sure you're dealing with a Difficult Thing. DT's can range from petty to horrifying, hopelly more the former, but it's always something, even if you're the positive-thinking type (I'm not).

I'm tapping out this post on a smartphone in the dark while struggling, as I have every night for eight months, with insomnia and an often-waking baby. This makes most nights of sleep into a chewed-up couple of hours at best, resulting in a sub-optimal, itchy eyed waking life the rest of the time. I highly discourage others from repeating my experiments with sleep deprivation, should you so be tempted.

My thesis here is that, should you be dealing currently with a Difficult Thing, I'll take the night shift of worrying about it off your hands, since I'm up anyway.

What has this to do with typewriters, you ask? Not one small thing.

Snohomish Type-In 2: Pictures

Last weekend, Snohomish WA had its 2nd type-in at Uppercase Books. I took some video in response to a challenge somewhere out in the typosphere to videotape people typing, but didn't realize the challenge had to do with a specific date in June.

Anyhows, here are still pictures from the videos. I may never get around to editing/uploading the vids, but hoping this will do for now...

Type-in prize: sketchbook (and a side note about copic markers)

Thanks to the Lambs of Snohomish, charming folks indeed, for another fun type-in today.

Since Little Flower Petals was not in attendance, I actually had a shot at the typing speed contest victory, prize of which you'll see below.



Uppercase books sells these altered-book notebooks, which I recommend as excellent sketchbooks because of the binder rings and hard backs (unless you feel that eviscerating old books in this way is tantamount to key chopping, which I don't, due to their overwhelming abundance).

I used my prize today to practice drawing with a few copic markers that I picked up on the advice of the visual designer Eva Lotta-Lamm in this excellent presentation on visual note taking, or graphic recording, which is something I've been posting about recently.

Copic markers have one end with a tapering, flexible tip, like a paintbrush, and the other end squared off, like a white board marker. They are good for adding drop-shadows and color accents to black and white drawings, and they are as expensive as hell. (Side note, the art shop where I bought mine told me they'd had $2k worth of the markers stolen earlier that week).

They are lots of fun for coloring in doodles and such, and price aside, I highly recommend them.

I sold my books (and a footnote about Blogger)

The post above was kind of grumpy, I concede. Most of my posts these days seem to be veiled complaining about my overall lack of time.

But on to more interesting topics. OH, BLOGGER! Guess I was not a minute too soon in my thoughts about moving Blogger to Wordpress.

Portfolios, Wordpress, and web hosts, oh my! (and a windy history of my internet efforts)

I've recently been chatting with Just Write about the techwriting industry, and thought I should finally take the advice I've been giving other people about career stuff for awhile: make a portfolio site. Someone in my grad program recently did a presentation about online portfolio creation that I recommend as a place to get started, should you ever consider this effort yourself (assuming it makes sense for the kind of work you do or want to do). Anyway, here's my site. There is nothing on it as of this writing, but it's up, and that's something.

Last night I tackled the installation of Wordpress on my web host, which I've always been a little intimidated by, but it wasn't so bad - a lot of hosts these days have "1-click install" that doesn't require you to edit any files or fool with FTP. Installing Wordpress has always seemed to me to be senselessly complicated, the sort of thing that requires trudging through forums to troubleshoot when something inevitably goes sideways, which is why I've used Blogger (which has the bonus feature of not requiring a web host), although tech snobs look down their noses at Blogger, and wouldn't be caught dead using a blogging platform that's actually easy to use.

Ironically as a techwriter I am not a fan of technology, just for the sake of complexity. Technical people, I say from some experience, often celebrate the mastery of needlessly complicated processes as a mark of their intelligence. Perhaps it is, but it's the needlessly complicated part that always gets me - software and web apps are often poorly designed and explained because they are created by people with no concept (or sympathy) for people who aren't technical for sport. I think I've had this chip on my shoulder about Wordpress, although I know it's supposed to be the mark of a "serious blogger."

Some of this is based on my feeling that over time, technology should get easier. I started posting junk online in the late 90's - frighteningly, it is still live. The Hall of Heads was a web site I created by coding plain HTML in a program called BBEdit (I learned HTML under duress at a job I had at the time) and learning some confusing junk about Javascript rollovers (see the heads in the left margin). Most of what I did is copy code from other sources and sit around editing it, not knowing what I was doing. Then I used Fetch, an FTP program with an awesome little running dog animation (still use it, because I like that dog!) to upload the files to my host. At the time, my host was a small local company run by a couple of dudes who actually sold Netscape navigator as boxed software in their storefront location. Oh dear.

All of this was somewhat confusing for me, but I made it work. This was in the days before blogging software existed at all, and I just edited and FTP'd each post by hand on tiny-dog (my second web site, which for the record lasted much longer and had a lot more content than Strikethru.net). After a long while I realized blogging software might work to my advantage, and somehow hacked my existing HTML template to include Blogger posts, all without a firm handle on exactly what I was doing.

So. When I decided to start Strikethru, I was pretty worn out. Just picking an existing Blogger template and fooling with that a little bit seemed all right with me (all the more time to spend on scanning typecasts). That was the official end of my tinkering with some of the more complex aspects of running a site, since tech gets easier over time. Right?

So you can imagine I was not amused by the general suggestion in the mid 2000's that, although Blogger offered a no-hassle and no-cost way to run a blog that you could even use with a custom domain, "serious" bloggers needed to move on to something more complex and time consuming. Sigh. I admit I have fallen for the hype nonetheless, and plan to use Wordpress for hosting my portfolio site. Do you have a portfolio site? Would you make one? Do you think writers need one? I've spent a bit of time at work trying to convince other writers that promoting oneself online is a necessity, and now it's time for me to walk the talk.

Whew, that was a long post. I bet you're not even reading anymore. I could say any old crazy ass thing at this point, and NO ONE WOULD KNOW...

On emotional honesty and art supplies

Drawing books for overscheduled insomniacs with no particular drawing ability: a (very short) list