An idea for a WH40K battle Segway:

I don’t play the board game, but I do enjoy the setting. Incidentally, a quick web search shows that the Chinese police are ahead of the curve on this.

MS paint has changed, but is still wonderful:

..and my sketchbook still works as well:

I’ll post more soon.

…visit us for advice and tips”. A job for ASKO reklame. A hair salon wanted an ad and gave us the format and free rein. I made some sketches, but hit on the right idea pretty fast. I’m told the client was satisfied with the result. Some of the sketches:

The folder that holds the portfolio was more complicated to make than I’d originally thought – out of the ones I’d printed, only a few ended up okay, so I’ll have to rethink it. I think my plan is sound, though. My portfolio consists of square-ish cards, and there’s one project per card. On the front, there’s imagery, and on the back, there’s a description in oversized Garamond.

There’s a big version (cut out of A3-paper) for presentation, and a small version (out of A4) to leave behind in one of those folders.

Also, as I’ve been showing off my business cards everywhere else, I’ll have to show them off  here as well:

As you can see, they all have a piece of my portfolio, and as I hand them out, I ask people to pick their favorite – it’ll be interesting to see which I run out of first.

Last week at a roleplaying session, we started doing what I’ve now found out are called exquisite corpses. Armed with the knowledge that what we did was, in fact, not silly children’s games, but subversive surrealist art, I decided to ink up the plain pencil drawings we made, and make some proper pieces out of them.

We started off pretty straightforwardly with this two-parter:

The second one, a four parter, was also pretty standard, but the gentleman who drew the head had realized that we’re under no obligations to stick to humanoid features…

…and of course it was all downhill from there:

Some Scottish wildlife:

I made some desktop backgrounds of these as well, here they are. Mid click to download:

Yet another illustration for an op-ed in Studvest. More restrictive rules are being considered for bars and clubs in Bergen, due to the noise and violence that’s associated with Norwegian drinking culture.

So you have an op-ed in a student newspaper calling for a more inclusive attitude towards students who don’t drink, hoping it will lead to less noisy music and lively chaos. In other news, Beelzebub was spotted crying yesterday, as Hell is looking more and more like the ski resort of choice for this Easter.

I picked the Photoshop plugin, and I can now choose whether to make my photos look like they’re hipsterriffically vintage or part of a bland European advertising campaign. Thanks Onone!

Jokes aside, the plugin contains a range of preset actions with effects that are commonly used among professional photographers, including ones that simulate analogue effects such as cross processing. The interface seems kind of unfinished, but it’s fairly intuitive.

I didn’t see a single effect that couldn’t be achieved by using what’s already in Photoshop, but it’s a lot faster to combine several complex effects using this. Some of the effects do have that good «workhorse» feel to them, but many of them feel more or less like tired clichés. Even tired clichés can be useful, though.

I went for a more subtle effect on the image below.

Original photo:

After 16 different effects, mostly with low levels of opacity:

Say what you want about the plot of Tron Legacy, the visual style and the music is some of the most inspirational and striking stuff I’ve got from a movie for quite a while.

Knocked the above out in an hour or so after watching it while listening to the soundtrack. Drew up the basic composition in Illustrator, exported to Photoshop to add some grit, and just had a grand old time.

The two most important rules to remember when finding images are:

Let’s take them in order:

1: finding images you are allowed to use

Unless anything else is specified, you can assume that any image you find online is copyrighted. This means you can’t use it without the permission of the owner of the copyright, usually the creator.

When in doubt, ask, if you can’t ask, don’t use the image.

Sometimes the creator will respond to your attempts at contacting them, sometimes there’s no way to even figure out who they are. This is why Google Image Search is usually a bad way of finding images for non-private use.

There’s hope, though! You could always hire an illustrator or a photographer, if that seems a bit much there are both cheap and expensive stock photo sites out there. In fact there are even sites with free stock photos.

Either way, always take care to read the license, because you’re rarely allowed full rights to use the image however you want. Another option is to use images that are in the public domain.

Check the end of the post for more on where you can find images.

2: checking if your image has enough pixels

Most images that are in a digital format are stored as pixels – that is, as (usually square) blocks of different colors. A computer display will usually show the pixels one by one, each set of red-green-blue lights showing one pixel each – printing doesn’t work that way, and you’ll almost always need more pixels to show an image in print the same size as you can show it on your display – unless you want it to look blurred or pixelated.

If you want to be 100 percent sure that your picture has enough pixels, all you have to remember is that you need 300 pixels per inch (ppi), or about 120 pixels per centimeter. So if you’re printing an image at 10 by 15 centimeters, the image has to be at least 1200 pixels wide and 1800 pixels tall.

There are many ways to find out how many pixels an image has, in Firefox, right click the full-size image, and click View Image Info. In windows 7, right click the icon and select Properties, go to the Details tab and look for Dimensions. Ignore whatever it says about resolution.

An A4 piece of paper is 21 centimeters wide, and about 30 centimeters tall – so you’d need your image to be at least about 2500px wide and 3600px tall. Try to figure out the same numbers for the size you expect your image to be printed at, round up to numbers that are easy to divide by, and math your way to what you need. You don’t need to be completely exact.

As long as you’re above 300 ppi, you are very safe – except for the special case of  one bit color images: in that case, try to get 1200 ppi. A one bit color image, is an image that has only two colors (usually black and white). With no intermediary colors to smooth them out, the edges will look jagged up close. Click this image to see:

Sometimes, though, you don’t need to worry about pixels at all…

Vector graphics

From the Wikipedia article: Vector graphics is the use of geometrical primitives such as points, lines, curves, and shapes or polygon(s), which are all based on mathematical equations, to represent images in computer graphics.

This means that a computer can render a vector image at any size without it looking blocky. Vector images are usually either stored as AI, EPS or PDF-files. If you have a file in one of the above formats, and you’re unsure if it’s a vector image, open it in Adobe Reader and zoom in as far as you can – if it doesn’t look blocky, it’s probably a vector image.

Professionally made logos almost always exist in a vector format (just make sure you find the right file), photographs never do.

where to find images

Obviously there are your standard stock photo sites where you can find and buy images. If your budget can handle it, Getty Images and Corbis are the giants in the field – but there’s also a plethora of smaller and less expensive sites like SXH and Istockphoto.

SXH lets their photographers offer up their images for free as well – just take care to read the brief “Availability” note next to the download button. Morguefile is another good site for free royalty free images. In fact, the image above is from Morguefile (user: procrastinator) and the photo of the pixels is from SXH (user: vincitrice).

Government and non-profit organizations often have images that you can use for free. Nasa is a great source, as is the American Library of Congress.

But the biggest source of images you can use is an advanced Flickr search for images with a creative commons license. Creative Commons licenses have been designed by an American non-profit corporation to make Copyright more flexible. From the Wikipedia article:

Mixing and matching these conditions produces sixteen possible combinations, of which eleven are valid Creative Commons licenses and five are not.

Wikimedia Commons is probably the biggest place to find photos and illustrations that are in the public domain, but there are lots of smaller sites with old pictures and illustrations. Have fun searching!

Another illustration for the local student newspaper. With the standard student loan and stipend provided to students in Norway, you can lend enough money to buy an apartment that’s six square meters in downtown Bergen. This is a suggestion for how to do the interior.

In my home town of Bergen, newspapers are, for most people, the main source of information about politics. The local newspapers provide excellent day-by-day coverage of local politics, but it’s the wrong place to go for the basics, or for getting an overview over an issue you haven’t been paying attention to. My idea is basically to make a website that compliments the role of the newspapers, by providing wider information and analysis, and definitions and explanations of terms often used in the politics of Bergen.

Content

What’s clear, and reasonably easy, is:

• It’ll be a website.
• The website will have information about the official positions of political parties on issues.
• There will be neutral information about the same issues. Pie charts!
• It’ll also be linking to editorials, op-eds, blog posts et.c. on these issues.
• There will also be neutral information about the political parties.

Less clear and more difficult. The site could contain:

• Timelines containing links to news articles.
• Information and encouragement for people to use the options available to them to make a difference.
• Information about comparable issues in other countries.
• The voting history of a given party on an issue. This sounds like an easy thing to track automatically. It isn’t.
• Information on the system and it’s philosophical basis, including arguments for and against. This also includes information about what decisions are taken at the municipal, county and state level.
• Anonymous demographic statistics about the politicians. Where they live, how much they earn, what kind of work they have et.c.
• The site will probably have to be organized somehow using tags, and everyone could be given permission to add tags.

Fun or more creative ideas:

• A common misconceptions page, because we all like feeling superior
• Official opinions of the different parties about each other.
• An interactive budget calculator, where you can post your budget to Facebook.
• The entire site could work like a game, with basic information available right away, while deeper information requires unlocking. This could potentially be a great way of presenting the content in a way that isn’t overwhelming to the user, while providing motivation for them to dig deeper.

Requirements

• Authority and neutrality: an important part of the way the site would be used is to inform debates on blogs and elsewhere.
• Accessibility: the language needs to be simple enough to be understood by a high-school pupil with below average language skills. The site needs to be available in English in addition to Norwegian, at the very least – and as much as possible of the information should be available in audio format.

I’ve been talking to a fair amount of people about the site. I’m yet to meet someone who doesn’t think it’s a good idea – then again, in the real world, the idea would be more concrete, and it would have a price tag.