i was just eating a handful of Jersey Caramels at 11pm and realised i have a problem. what are your favourites? do you even have Jersey Caramels on your planet?

any aussies watching? this is the only "sports" event i enjoy all year.

i just knocked my wifes laptop off it's precarious perch on the arm of the couch and it landed right on the fucking AC adapter pin, and rather than breaking the cheap male pin it broke the female socket which is a part of the entire body of the laptop. ever done something similar? does it mean death to the laptop?
something inside broke and now it doesn't recognise the charger so once it goes flat that's it, but does anyone know if it's even repairable? it's still got 6 months warranty on it but i don't know if that covers accidental stupidity.

One of our beloved bloggers has found himself in a terrible situation. He's essentially homeless, dumped, drunk, and needs to find money to relocate and get an apartment. You might know who I'm talking about but I don't want to embarass him by naming him publicly.
I thought between us we could save the poor bastard, since we've managed in the past to send people around the planet and things like that pretty successfully.

All you need to do is make a donation, whatever you can comfortably spare, to leon@leonryan.com and write "save ferris" in the subject line. Everybody who contributes will go in the draw for a $50 threadless coupon, and 2 runners up will recieve a $25 coupon.

I'm not sure what the target ammount needs to be or how quickly we have to deliver, but everyone loves giving away money right? I'm going to chip in $100 to prove I love him the most. Just try and beat me.

i just bought gta4 at last and i got a free month of Gold with it. anyone want to fight? my tag is royHandsome and i'm going to jump on right now and see what's what.

when you get hired to draw a cartoony party scene for the cover of a dildo catalog and you put a cocktail in one girls hand and the client emails to say some of the staff are alcoholics and they get offended by drawings of booze.

UPDATE: I just got an email from ryz saying they've made a code for my friends to get 50% off my shoes, but they asked me not to post it anywhere, so if you're seriously interested in a pair send me your email address somehow and i'll give you the code.


Suceda and I both had shoes printed at ryz.com today.

Sucedas shoe


and mine


i'll let you know what kind of quality they are as soon as i recieve my pair. in the meantime if you're a designer you should jump in now before it gets any busier there. especially if you're not very good.

sorry for calling you jerks right out of the box like that.

if you've never used the Illustrator pen tool before this may or may not help you at all. it'd probably be better as a Flash presentation but it isn't.

let's draw a razor blade

black hole blues by jack ladder. it amuses me.

i was looking at a bunch of vector art and noticed it all kind of looks the same because people let the software make too many decisions for them, so

1. never use the shape tools. if you want a circle or square or something approximate it yourself with the pen tool. even add a tiny curve to sharp corners because the generic shapes always look mechanical and bland.

2. never use a thick stroke as an outline, again because it looks dull and mechanical. if you have a rough shape that needs a heavy outline take the time to trace around it and don't be anal about making it perfect. tiny variations in line weight look a million times better.

3. avoid symmetry. if you want to repeat a shape or object at least nudge a few points here and there to change it a tiny bit, otherwise it just looks lazy and cheap.

4. never use 100% black. it's too hard and rich. ease off the sliders a little bit and it'll be a lot easier on the eye.

5. never leave huge expanses of flat colour on an object. you can always add a freckle or a hair or some random dot or line to break up a space.

there's times you can break any or all of these rules, but these are all suggestions to avoid problems Illustrator will impose on your work and all you'll do is artwork that looks like Illustrator created it. you want to put Adobe in it's place and make it work for you.