Austin Kleon

POST-ITS: PAPER IS NOT DEAD

random post-its from my sketchbook

NYTimes article on Post-It notes:

In 1980, when the 3M company introduced the Post-it, no one could have foreseen the effect the 3-by-5-inch Valium-colored rectangle would have on domestic life. Its beginnings were folkloric: 40 years ago, Spencer Silver, a scientist at 3M, discovered the imperfect adhesive that would adorn the Post-it; it took another six years for Art Fry, another 3M scientist, to find the application for this half glue, which came in a flash of inspiration after the bookmarks for his church hymnal kept falling out.

Nothing is more of a blessing at work than an inexhaustible supply of Post-It notes, especially when you don’t have your sketchbook handy.

MEGAN JAEGERMAN’S INFOGRAPHICS

Edward Tufte points out the great infographics work of Megan Jaegerman, some of whose work is featured in Beautiful Evidence.

Megan Jaegerman produced some of the best news graphics ever done while working at The New York Times from 1990 to 1998….To create this display, [she] did both the research and the design, breaking their common alienation. This design amplifies the content, because the designer created the content.

When I visited an information design studio during a school visit to Carnegie Mellon, the professor asked me for my input on some of the student projects, many of which were infographics like this. I kept blathering on about how much they could be considered comics. I said one girl’s work was basically a hieroglyphic, and one guy’s work was like a Family Circus neighborhood map (I’m not sure he took that as a compliment).

I Googled Megan Jaegerman and couldn’t find anything else out about her. Anyone have any leads?

HAND-LETTERING

David Heatley has a cool post about hand-lettering, and points out his mentor, Robert Wakeman. For me, hand-lettering is an essential part of comics: the words need to look like they were drawn by the same hand as the art, or the whole “unity of style” is shot.

Even when I’m doing my woodcut-style comics I letter by hand. Here’s a comics page erased to show only the lettering:

Here’s one of my cut-out fictions, done spontaneously by carving out the words as I went along:

Ray Fenwick does comics which are almost exclusively defined by his hand-lettering. Great stuff.

PATHETIC OR GOOD, I’M NOT SURE

Online Dating

This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words: ass (3x), crappy (2x), and limbs (1x). 

In a way, this goofy blog rating script could be more helpful than most of the other stupid things that make the blog rounds.  I did my own search for “dirty words” a while back, and cleaned things up a bit.  (Meg says that if you wouldn’t want your mom or your employer reading it, you probably shouldn’t post it to your blog.)  Unfortunately, I think this rating system falls short for me, as I have several cartoons featuring nudity and other weirdness on here.  So I guess it should be at least a PG-13.   

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