I don’t have a lot to say about today’s strip, aside from letting you know that it based off an actual conversation between me and my wife — and she wrote the funny bits.
Archive for comic
Happy December! For notes on John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Dickwad Theory, check here.
You’ll notice some changes in 1PT.Rule starting today and lasting through… whenever? The first is the lack of full color. I honestly wanted to drop the comic all the way to black and white, but I lacked the steel nerves to do so. The reasons for this are twofold: color is hard and I’ve been largely unhappy with it so far; and this allows me more time to focus on the “inks.”
The inks have been done digitally in Photoshop (CS2, if you’re counting), using a 6.5″ x 4.5″ Wacom Intous tablet. Largely, working on this tablet a few days a week is one of the best things going on in my life, but I’ve been unhappy with some of the lines I get working in Photoshop. The first few strips were drawn with a round brush and look horrible, and starting on the second week this was changed to a more calligraphic brush shape which I thought was serving me well, but ultimately has still left me unhappy with the final results. So today’s comic employs that same brush as two different weights, 10 px for fine lines and 20 px for darker strokes (I work at 300 dpi), and we’ll see how it goes. I don’t want to have a brush set of like twenty different brushes because I think that would lead to some pretty inconsistent art, but this line variation is getting me closer to where I want to be. As a reminder, I also do real illustration work, so you can see why my lack of quality here has been a constant thorn in my side.
On the last podcast we talked about how to leverage the Adobe student/faculty/staff educational discount to your professional advantage, a practice they seem to encourage now. The ins and outs of this policy are many and varied, but suffice it to say if you are not a student, faculty, or staff, you may need to find some back-alley means to upgrade your softer wares.
I know of three designers whom I’m close to who have the CS4, and no-one has really been able to tell me about it. I’m doing what I would like to think amounts to some decently sophisticated programming in Dreamweaver, taking advantage of the Sauron-esque powers of Adobe Spry effects on our way to a single-page site of pure sugar-coated awesomeness, and the Live View feature would be shortcut to success I am sure. I didn’t even know about integrating Photoshop smart objects into Dreamweaver until I went to the New Features page just now to check that I was appropriately crediting correct items, and when I saw that a very noticeable pang of excitement rolled through my body. Like a kid at Christmas who sees a present under the tree shaped exactly like that Gameboy box he saw in the store, and just knows. It was that kind of pang. I might need to download the preview for this.
Tackle the two issues in today’s strip in any order you choose: Companies who never update their websites, and companies with websites whose sell-copy is unhealthily focused. My third and final “real job” began at place where a website like this one seemed to exist, with copy that actually outright refused to explain the inner workings or details of the company to instead fawn over the supposed new client reading the page. Thankfully, more than a year later, that website has been updated.
–nv–
Capping off what must surely be the most vulgar week in 1PT.Rule history comes this gem, further exploring the inter-office dynamics between our pair of intrepid designers. Don’t forget there’s an intern in there somewhere, too.
So It’s been a solid month now since we started the strip and we’ve more-or-less tripled the amount of visits we get in a normal month, along with some other encouraging stats culled from the mind-grapes of Google Analytics. I won’t bore you the way I bore people at parties talking about the printing on the pizza-boxes being out-of-register by talking about specifics, but suffice it to say people seem to be responding well to our endeavor. Thanks.