This week on 1PT.Rule it’s ALL HOBO DESIGNERS ALL THE TIME! These lovable little scamps are back at it, wandering, sleeping, tracking, and kearning all day long! You never know where they’ll end up next, or what kind of wacky misadventures they might find themselves in. The only thing greater than their ability to get into trouble is their ability to get into your heart!
To celebrate our love and friendship with all creatives, 36 Point is pleased to bring you our newest desktop wallpaper design. Featuring the popular Hobo Designers characters from the never-bitter 1PT.Rule, we think you’ll agree that this is the hap-hap-happiest wallpaper around!
Head on over to our downloads section for this and much, much more!
Just in case anyone thinks I’m unfairly maligning old, stale designers, today’s comic was actually meant to follow this one. Then Bierut had to go and redesign Guitar Hero and throw my shit off track, but here we are again.
It’s been a while since anyone’s accused me of “not getting it,” but I can admit that last week’s strip about DriftCreate went over about as well as ordering a hamburger at a Hindu wedding (try it sometime). The only thing I really want to say here is: let’s not confuse searching for a punch-line with not getting a thing. Believe me, I get the thing. I do. But the thing has a bit of a dark side to it, even though it may not be immediately apparent. Anyone who reasonably thinks that $200 is a good price for a logo design is either a.) Playing Graphic Designer the way children play House, because they obviously aren’t running a full-time business, or b.) a part of the fabric of everything that is wrong with our industry.
I do not think those guys fall into the “B” category, for the record. And the flip-side of “A” is that, by-and-large, most designers running full-time businesses don’t want to work with clients who only want to pay $200 for a company logo. Most of those clients don’t respect what we do as a profession. So, in a way, doing that kind of work quickly and then hitting the open road may be the perfect way to deal with them. If you’ve moved on to a new city or town, you certainly won’t be around to deal with them next week when they want a website for $50.
The very specific point where the thing becomes dark is in the offhand situation where a small, local designer would lose a paying job that he or she made a reasonable bid on because someone showed up and offered to do it for way, way less.
That being said, I present you with the work of the very two guys who totally get the thing, in response to the previous comic:
Well played, Drift. Cheers.
During our recent trip to Kansas City to hang out with the coolest people we could find (a successful endeavor to be certain), we quite accidentally ran into two dudes doing the exact same thing, only across the entire country. Then, in fact, we discovered they have not only been through our town (no doubt on a train car or dusty back road), but they knew our friends and, in fact, have profiled some of them.
They seemed polite enough, you know, for hobos. I don’t think they were actively being malicious or mischievous, but the way they afford to travel the country is, sadly, accurately depicted in the strip. Pray for them that they don’t knock on the wrong door.
Or that they do. I’m not here to judge your level of evil.
Apologies for the big, long Labor-Day break. I spent it working, which is, as they say, a problem I’d like to have, but sitting down to do today’s comic, which was meant to be posted last Friday when this kind of news was still relatively new, felt like going back to Calculus after spending a whole summer forgetting how to do it.
If you missed it, Michael Bierut, perhaps the nicest design mega-star (again, if there even is such a thing), brought two of my worlds together when he announced on the Pentagram blog that his team handled the new iteration of the Guitar Hero logo. This, of course, includes an entire Guitar-Hero typeface design, and endless visual interpretations that seem to center on fire and rock. Brand New, of course, has a great dissection of it as well.
Bierut gets the credit, and I really don’t have a problem with that, but the actual designer on the project was a fellow by the name of Joe Marianek, and the typeface itself was designed by Kai Salmela. The common problem with working at Pentagram and not being Michael Bierut or Paula Scher (or any of the other 18 or 19 partners) is that you often get overlooked by the masses when you do something awesome. The way around this, or so I’ve heard, is to start four or five of the most successful design websites ever, and even then you still have to quit to get noticed.
But it’s still no Rock Band.
