Posts Tagged ‘webcomics’
3 items.
I’m on a short clock today, so I must be brief. First, sorry for today’s horrible art on the strip. Second, this announcement did indeed find its way onto my TweetDeck yesterday, and I’m pretty excited (for him) about it. I think a Chip Kidd-written Batman book could only be described as “a hoot.” Chip can only really be described as the world’s biggest Batman nerd, as well as the King Geek of Design, so this project has to be one of those life-long, dream-come-true situations. I get it: Read books. Read Batman books. Design books. Then design Batman books. Then write books. Then write Batman books.
Like Paul Rudd’s character’s line in Knocked Up, “I wish I loved anything as much as my kids love bubbles,” I’m not sure I can relate. This would be like me making a Star Wars movie, Halo game, and X-Men comic all at once.
Don’t believe me? Listen to our barely-safe-for-work interview with Chip Kidd and hear for yourself!
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I’d be lying if I tried to tell you I do not covet the Winterhouse writing award. I do. Like Boromir, I fear this desire will destroy me, or at least drive me to beat up Elijah Wood, which is something I really wouldn’t want to do.
Every year Design Observer puts out the call for entries and that amazing $10,000 prize taunts me like Mohammed Ali, letting me know that as much writing and commentary as I produce on design on a weekly basis, it is not worth $10,000. This could be a false assumption, because I do believe the first prize went to a girl who obsessively dissected emoticons. And that seems to be it: like most of the over-long and painfully dull (re:non-Bierut & Heller) articles on DO, you have to write obsessively about something nobody cares about. Like coffee-filter packaging or something. I’m sure somewhere right now there’s some obsessive-compulsive design writer putting together a three-part thesis on coffee-filter packaging and that’s probably going to take the 2010 prize.
I was looking through the 70 (if you count the one currently-produced Special) strips I’ve got here and feel pretty good about a few of them and the medium’s ability to comment on design, and then the rule set of the Winterhouse took over and I remembered the part about everything needing to be set in Courier. This, by the way, is basically designers removing the design from their papers, and I get it. It’s supposed to remove any typographic context. Maybe the judges have a hard-on for mono-spaced fonts, I don’t know.
With a relatively low entry fee (only $25), I am still considering entering the strip, if only to piss off the judges. However, I think I will wait for next year, in all seriousness, when my journals of milk-cap sticker designs and their impact on the American consciousness are completed.
This is a thing that really happened about a week and a half ago. Huge job shows up on my doorstep, practically gift-wrapped. And it’s big, it’s a lot of work. I send out a fair price, the client comes back, and we settle on something a little lower but still doable. Life is good.
A few days later I get the “guy knows a guy who’d do it for this.” And THIS turned out to be 10% of my bid. My response to this was, well, who the F is this guy bidding huge jobs that low? Was it a teenager? Because I can counter that in a conversation. No, it turned out to be a guy who makes a great living doing something completely unrelated, and just does crap like this on the side to make extra money for ipods or something. Crap Like This being the thing I make a living on.
And I wrote on my page: “I lost a job to someone who bid 10% of my price and in walked a man 10% of my size.”
Nate Voss is a designer, illustrator, talkshow host and design journalist. Working in Omaha since 2001, Nate served four years on the Board of Directors for 
Donovan oversees all creative development at