Lately, I’ve been seeking sources of inspiration around drawing. I picked up some old Ed Emberley classics again and have been recreating the objects he teaches in my sketchbook. It’s been a very useful and meditative activity.
The drawings pictured to the left are the images I made following the instructions from the book Ed Emberley’s Drawing Book – Make A World.
“Language is a virus from outer space.”
-William S. Burroughs
We evolve our language to allow us to communicate with each other. As there has been a great deal of change brought on because of the Internet, we have needed many new terms to describe this change. These terms have helped us to frame larger concepts. Our technology has given us abilities that alter our reality. I can communicate instantly with anyone in the world. This changes the game.
We’ve come up with all kinds of ways to describe what is happening. We might well have just gone back to McLuhan to find that this has all been predicted. But we must, because we are human, redefine it for ourselves.
I’d like to share some examples regarding what I mean when I say, we need this language.
Jesse James Garrett coined the term, AJAX. As I understand the story, he was trying to think of a way to communicate to a client some complex concepts. The technology for what he was describing had been around for awhile, but nobody had framed it as Jesse did. This framing made it a much more accessible concept and desirable as a tool for business and design.
Tim O’Reilly came along with his Web 2.0 conference. I don’t think I’ve met a marketing professional that doesn’t use the term, ‘web 2.0′ multiple times a day to attach the concept to the work they do. We need to understand the significant shifts that are occurring right now. Language helps us grok the bigger concept and discuss that concept and its details.
These words and phrases help us ‘contain’ something. They help us to understand it and communicate about it. Even though it’s not specific, it is useful.
Even though I’d trip and hurt myself in this house, I LOVE it. 
Thanks to Creative Good for calling my attention to it.
And I am going to do some learning about that. I can’t wait til Monday. I don’t think I’ve ever in recent memory said that I could not wait til Monday, but I think I will actually look forward to it for the next few weeks as I’ll be taking a photography lighting class.
This is a very exciting next move for me in my favorite hobby.
Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path interviewed Michael Bierut of Pentagram Design.
It sounds like it boils down to having fun, remembering to enable imagination, and staying interested in the world around you and having the ability to get interested enough to make that real for other people. Sounds good to me.
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MB: Being able to make vivid counterfeits is one of the joys of being a graphic designer, and one that we don’t take enough pleasure in. One of my partners in London once mocked up a whole issue of Fortune to help a client see his business differently.
One of the hard lessons I had to learn as a designer starting out was that good design is not a self-evident imperative for most people. I tell students that they are spending time and money in design school acquiring an abnormal sensitivity to design that most regular people should not be expected to share. Yet various groups of these ‘regular people’ are usually the ones who initiate our work, fund and approve it, and ultimately are the audiences for it. So the biggest challenge we face is figuring out how to meet people on their terms, not ours. I never talk about educating the client. I hate that phrase. Almost always it’s the designers who need the education, not the client, not the audience. Yet designers and clients both tend to recede into their areas of expertise, and it takes work for us to wrench each other out of it. Making prototypes that help people imagine the effects that design decisions will have in the real world can be a very potent tool. Those fake Wall S
treet Journal articles were supposed to do exactly that: remind a client who had spent six months showing themselves PowerPoint presentations that there was a real world out there filled with people who didn’t share their fascination with their business strategy or, actually, care at all whether they succeeded. It’s a good reality check, and it helps to shift the design work from an internal exercise that’s done for management approval, to work that’s done because you’re seeking results with real people in the real world.
So of course—to get to the other part of your question—dealing with the real world means being as interested as possible in stuff that’s not about design. All of the work I’ve done that I’m proud of somehow emerged from the fact that I’ve gotten really interested in that other part: the subject matter of a book, the business of a client, the content of an exhibition. Luckily, I can get interested in nearly anything. And I have learned the hard way that there are a few things I’m just not interested in, and can’t seem to do good design for: I avoid these projects now.
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I guess what I’m trying to say is that this is something that should be remembered.
From Cluetrain Manifesto
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You are human
‘Scary isn’t it? Good. You ought to be scared. That’s a realistic reaction. You want comfort? Invent your own. Exhilaration and joy are also in order. But face the facts: the tracks end at the edge of the jungle.”
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I’ve been thinking about a podcast I’d like to produce for awhile now. I finally got all the pieces together and the time to do it. This is a start. It’s called evol’s PoemOfTheWeek. I will create and read a poem each week for your listening pleasure. Let me be clear what I mean by a poem. I’ve not got a very strict definition about poetry, so be warned, you could hear things you really don’t thing are poetry. But they are poetry to me and i’m the artist, so there you go. .
I’ve been writing some songs for my friend’s band. Ummmm, let’s clarify, writing some song lyrics. I have no idea what they are going to do with them or to them but I’ve sent them on to be built upon. Collaboration is a beautiful thing.
I don’t need another distraction. However, I’ve been having fun and that’s really the important thing about being creative. Following the thing you want to do at the time and just chasing it down until you discover that it has depth you can never explore in a lifetime OR you get bored and want to move on to the next thing.
I have struggled all my life with this desire to be creative. But that’s so vague and so generic. (not very creative frankly 
I’m finding my way now. After 30 some odd years of searching and seeking and being angst-ridden and then discovering you don’t have to be angst ridden to create good art I am finally focusing on some things that are productive and help me satisfy that need.
Most people don’t have this burning desire/nagging sensation. It’s always there for me. I can’t turn it off. The only thing that satisfies this creativity beast is creating. That sounds like a simple solution, right. Well it is but it’s easy to let life get in the way. We all have things to do, people to see, presentations to make, blah, blah, blah…..
Life is a journey. I happen to be lucky enough to have the ability to make choices. I have a drive and a need. It’s my responsibility to make the choice that’s right for me. Create. Be it good, bad, boring, inspiring. It’s an exercise of the mind and soul food too. Gotta feed the beast.
One very inspirational thing for me lately has been Chuck Close. His work is built over time and he follows process and allows that process to drive work. He doesn’t wait for inspiration, he gets to work. Pushes it forward…..How ironic that I find not waiting for inspiration to be the most inspirational of all.
I’ve been experimenting with Photoshop again. I like playing with the pictures I take, so much can be altered from the original. So much can stay the same. I’m having fun with colors.
This one is part of a series:
fire self portrait of evoljen
I am doing the work for two reasons
1. to track progress: I am taking these photos as part of a documentation of a new skin care regimen I have undergone. I wanted to see if it really made my skin look healthier and seeing is believing. It’s anthropological.
2. to engage in an artistic endeavor: inspired by two favorite artists, Chuck Close, who said ‘the process will set you free’ and documentarian Morgan Spurlock who shows us 30 days can change us.
Getting to know the canvas of something familiar may be the most challenging. It’s hard to look inside these days when there is so much external noise.
