Turn your Doodles into Cool Fabric Designs

I decided to take a break from home and work to enjoy the neighborhood. Leaving all the books behind I grabbed some scrap paper, my Faber Castell Brush tip artist pens and a circle drafting template. A stroll through the neighborhood lead me straight to the coffee shop and that is where the creativity exploded into full color.

After I finished my beverages and my doodles, I took a look at all the designs, some were great and some were not so great. At home I scanned in the good ones and cleaned up the files in Photoshop. I used Adobe Illustrator to create the patterns. After I was happy with the patterns, I exported the final files and went straight to Spoonflower to upload my designs.

Here are the final results!

Now I just need to order a couple of yards, pull out my sewing machine and make one-of-a-kind gifts for family and friends!

Sketching: the Visual Thinking Power Tool

Mike Rohde

When you feel inadequate in your sketching, pause and reconsider your perspective. Don’t worry how well you draw. Instead, think of your sketching as visual thinking, which works regardless of your drawing quality. Ugly gets the job done just fine.

Great reading on the value of sketching. If there is anything worth being dogmatic about in design that thing is sketching. If you don’t start on paper then you just might be nuts! Getting lost in tools like Photoshop or Illustrator first is the bread and butter of time-wasting.

Quick Grub for Hard Working Designers

Sometimes life calls for a break from glowing screens. Tender mouse hands need a little danger. So, go toil a little over the oven… for about 10-15 minutes. Yes, that’s right, a good meal that takes longer to eat than to fix. That’s an important ratio to stick to during the work week. Ironically, this comes on Valentine’s day, so maybe this can be a last minute upgrade from your already planned recession-friendly Valentine’s dinner.

With that, I give you spicy honey-glazed salmon with green beans and garlic butter toast. Stomach defeated.

Quin and I have developed grandparent-like tendencies of cooking without measurements. So, use your best judgment.

Gather

• Wild Alaskan salmon filets
• Green Beans (frozen or fresh)
• Simple bread that you like
• Honey
• Salt and Pepper
• Garlic (crushed or powder will do)
• Crushed or ground red pepper flakes
• Butter

Cook

Season the salmon with salt, pepper, and garlic. Drizzle some olive oil over each side.

While the fish sits, (make sure it’s not right out of the fridge) prep your honey-glaze. Fill a small dish with a decent amount of honey. 2-3 tablespoons perhaps. Then sprinkle a good amount of red-pepper flakes into it and stir. Warm it up so it’s easy to pour. If you do this in a microwave, a few seconds will do, if in a small pan, minimum heat works. It just needs to be ready to pour as your salmon is finishing up.

Put a little extra olive oil in your pan, and warm it to medium heat. Start the fish, skin side up, and cook it four minutes per side. I keep the pan covered.

While the fish is cooking, steam the beans and toast bread the bread with butter, garlic, and a pinch of sea salt.

Keep an eye on your beans, make sure not to over-steam them. Keep the crunch.

After you’ve flipped the salmon, wait until the last minute or so, then pour your honey glaze over it.

Eat

Grab your liquid of choice. Pop the fish, beans and bread on a warm plate and you’re off.

Neil Pasricha: The 3 A’s of awesome

Neil Pasricha:

You will never be as young as you are right now.

Quin shared this video with me last night. Sometimes it doesn’t take very long for the fresh start of new year to wear off. Suddenly, hopefulness fades and everything once again seems like a giant mountain to climb. Watch this whenever that happens.

View it on Ted or You Tube.

Paintings Inspired by Typography and a Good Book

Have you ever wondered where you get inspiration? What do you do with it? I get creative! Inspiration can come from anywhere, in this case, a good book. I always capture my inspirations on paper first, in my sketch book. I had several key words in mind, along with some imagery I’d imagined from the book.

First, I scanned in my new sketches, to prepare them to use for my paintings. After I saved the scans, I placed them in Illustrator, and chose a font closest to my drawings, kerned and set it at various point sizes.

Next, I printed the words on repositionable label material. I cut out each word with an X-acto to make a stencils. I placed each typographical element on the canvas. When I was happy with the layout I pulled out my acrylic paints.

Always start with your sketch book before you go to the computer and you will appreciate Typography, Design, and Art. In case your wanted to know, the paintings were inspired by Enders Game, and the font I chose was Anonymous Pro.

Fresh from the Oven: My Albus Logo

We recently finished this logo for non-profit My Albus, a California based start-up specializing in albinism awareness and education.

Welcome to the Black Doily Blog!

This is where we will pile up our thoughts: some contrived, some on a whim.

What can you look forward to?

Mostly, posts here will cover topics like design, technology and culture. Some will stray: Food. Good books. Film and music.

Over all, we want to publish content our current clients, possible clients, and others in our field will find interesting, useful or even educational.

Some tidbits for those who are not-so-technical…

Two Links of note in the menu:

• ‘Archive’ collects all of our posts
• ‘Ask Us’ is a little widget that lets you do just that: Ask us anything! Perhaps we can answer. Of course, we reserve the right to remain silent or lazy.

The Little Black Bird

• Shows our latest tweets from Twitter. If you follow us there, you’ll be notified of any entires here at the blog.

The ‘RSS’ link at the bottom

• This little link lets you subscribe our updates in your RSS reader of choice.

Example of stuff we won’t post about:

We won’t be pummeling you with pointless media like Cats Morphing into Croissants.