Play time
April 30, 2016
Doing more of what I love at 
The results!
Skillshare vs. Netflix
April 13, 2016
My favorite kind of homework. Hardest letters: S, Y. #brushpenlettering #brushguide (h/t to our teacher, Miami-based art director, Andrea Campos)
It’s no contest. Given the choice between, say, Scarface and a tutorial on brush pen lettering (above) or a primer on watercolour techniques, I’m going with the loaded brush.
I think Skillshare is one of the biggest gifts the internet has to offer.
Everything I could possibly be interested in in the realm of art, letters and digital technology is represented. The videos offer a homespun look at process and invite you to sit desk side with your talent crushes. Yes, you get to study the tchotchkes on and above their desks.
I gave up my Netflix subscription four years ago, and while I’m open to switching it back on, I’m much happier listening to Debbie Millman talk about visual narratives or watching Andrea Campos demonstrate the hand pressure you’ll need to create fluid upstrokes and downstrokes with your Tombo Brush Pen.
The very best of the human spirit is gathered at Skillshare.com.
Check it out. I’m guessing you’ll be drawn to the light too.
Godin is great
March 19, 2016
A Seth Godin blog post called “Reject the Tyranny of Being Picked: Pick Yourself,” published in March 2011, made the rounds on the internet again this week. And with good reason. (h/t to Gapingvoid cartoonist Hugh MacLeod for reviving Godin’s greatest hits in his crunchy daily email).
To recap, in March 2011:
- Twitter was at its finest and most useful.
- Instagram was a gurgling six-month old app with a small and dedicated fan base (and no ties to Facebook).
- Newspapers were carrying out mass layoffs, but still hanging on by a thread to (what they thought) was their rightful place in the media landscape.
In 2016, the digital economy has finally rolled over these decimated print media outlets, forcing mass closures and mergers with more closures to come. Channel-based TV and radio divisions (and their terrestrial stations) are also collapsing like sandcastles (CBS, BBC) as the brands go digital.
Translation: Godin’s discussion around the fall of gatekeepers in arts and culture is no longer a prediction but a full-on reality.
I leave you with Godin’s plea to entrepreneurs, artists and bloggers. Your ability to feel hopeful depends on your mindset and capacity for change:
Godin adds, while you’re working and doing your thing, “You will not feel safe, you will not feel like everything’s going to be OK. There is no amount of reassurance that’s going to help you [get past the doubt]. The hard part is doing work precisely because it feels like it’s not going to work. Living in two futures at once: the future of ‘it might not work’ and the future of ‘it might work’ at the same time is at the heart of what our economy is demanding from us.” (this quote is from Mitch Joel‘s interview with Godin from the end of 2014).
The risky business of publishing
March 16, 2016
We’ve lived with disruption and pitchforks for a long time. But the present always feels more perilous to us. My latest feature for Applied Arts Magazine takes us back to 1984 when that nine-inch comet, The Macintosh, first hit planet earth. It blew up desktop publishing and sent X-Acto knives and fuming glue pots flying in every direction. It also galvanized typesetters in a battle they had no chance of winning. Update: we’re still here, folks, and still publishing. The good news is, we’ve moved beyond beige.
*Please support this stunning publication by purchasing a newsstand copy. This is the 30th anniversary issue.
CBS artifact
February 17, 2016
When the choices were Green Acres and The Beverly Hillbillies, two gag-driven rural comedies pumped full of canned laugher, along came a sitcom more true to women and the times. The laughter was real.
Update: From Hollywood, James L. Brooks’s response:
Skills pivot
February 16, 2016
There are a lot of folks out there doing a skills pivot on their own time and dime.
They’re saying yes to mastering data science and website design, and no to obscurity and unemployment.
They’re plowing through long lists of recommended readings, and using Darwin’s Origin of the Species as the manual to justify preparing for an uncertain future.
Adaptation, iteration, intersection, reinvention, retooling: these are the most insistent words in our collective vocabulary today.
But another word trending in big urban centres is “Brave.”
According to my sources in L.A., “Brave” is being tacked on to all sorts of sentences and situations. (h/t Christina Walkinshaw for this update).
What was “Groovy,” “Bitchin,” “Rad!” and “Sweet” in previous decades is now “Brave” — as in:
“I just paid my iPhone bill.”
“Dude, that’s so brave.” Or …
“I ate a giant stack of lingonberry pancakes for dinner.”
“Ridic, girl, that’s so brave!” And …
“I picked up my first web design client!”
“Brave!!” trills your chorus of friends.
I like how language changes to reflect the concerns of the masses in good times and bad.
“Make love, not war,” said the hippies through the worst moments of the Vietnam War.
“Watch the fro,” said African Americans through the sixties and seventies, as if a dent in their painstakingly picked afros ranked higher on their list of concerns than an entire culture that felt justified physically manhandling them at every turn.
Of course, a pick lodged in a fro symbolized a collective No to oppression and a collective Yes to strength, self-reliance and self-determination.
Today’s “accessories” for the changing workplace are big, bushy beards and lots natural wool (both jackets and knitted hats) — all things we associate with greater warmth and protection against harsh conditions.
And we can’t forget the chunky, dark-framed glasses that many people are sporting. To me, they say, “I’m smart enough to figure my way through this.”
You wear them even when you’re not sure that’s true.
But, heck, it worked for Philip Johnson. And Iris Apfel is killing it in her chunky frames. At 91, she’s seen more change than all of us.
I drew these frames with with a Pentel brush pen.
I was never a journalist
February 9, 2016
I’ve never defined myself as a journalist, not with every fibre of my being. I’m no Christie Blatchford. Robyn Doolittle, I’ll never be.
Christie Blatchfords
For a while, I called myself a “journalist” when I typed it in the headline of my LinkedIn profile. But it was always a bit of a stretch, so I took it out this weekend and replaced it with the more rootsy descriptor, “Writer & Illustrator.”
We all know that the field of journalism is burning like Imperial Rome. But that’s not why I decided to mess with my searchability in LinkedIn’s employment algorithms. Nor am I running from a crisis or towards a more winning team. The change felt more like a reality check.
The truth is, I’ve never tried to fit “my definition” of a journalist which is someone who covers City Hall, follows the footsteps of the powerful and exposes human entanglements with the seven deadly sins to an incensed public and a busy court system.
Writing about a lipstick or smart phone that a company has sent you isn’t journalism, it’s branded content. Ten years ago, when I was doing it, no one called it that. Back then it was called “service journalism,” a term that shows just how thoroughly bloated the industry had become.
When the fire engulfing journalism finally runs its course and the land cools and starts pushing up small flowers, let the journalism that grows back stay focused on investigations into how society is running and being run. And let the public pay the journalists who are doing the best work dissecting it. We have the online tools to enable that direct exchange, and have had them for some time. Someone just needed to step up and away from the holding companies and government corporations enveloping the field.
Jesse Brown’s Canadaland podcast and website are doing it. His work is journalism’s next incarnation — by, for and of the people. Let’s keep it lean. Lifestyle writers, meanwhile, should continue to look for positions at branding agencies, not newsroom floors (their seats are long gone).
Meanwhile, I’m still turning both shoulders squarely towards what’s dear to my heart. As with all life edits, we cast off the things that don’t fit as well as they used to—sweaters, jeans, titles, identities. “Writer & Illustrator” is truer to who I am and have always been. “The Queen of gentle misfits,” is how my friend Melissa described me last week on Facebook. I agree. But gentle is simply incompatible with the needs of good journalism. Although it’s completely aligned with mine.
