[d]online

I’ve always been fascinated by the process more than the outcome.
A roundtrip’s destination is never as fun as the journey there.

I think that’s part of the reason I got into design as the journey to the final pieces—the exploration—is really the most illuminating part. Along the way there are hundreds of tiny little decisions that twist and contort the project. Each direction that’s taken could conceivably change the entire work drastically (The Sound of Thunder of the visual arts world). And when you pull your head up from your desk at 4am, hours before the project is to be shipped to the printer, you look at the final piece as the culmination of these infinite decisions. The creativity doesn’t lie in the product, but rather the journey.

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Since the beginning of the year, I’ve been working on an exciting new print project for an era//404 client. While I can’t really discuss the nature of the project, yet, I can say that part of this work entails me completing about a dozen sketches for the final book, along with designing its 52 pages. This is the fourth time that I’ve been hired to do illustration for clients, and the most demanding. The sketches are of famous scenes and landmarks from around the world; the taj mahal on the left is just one of them. Each one is pencil-sketched, inked with thin and thick sharpies, drawn over with carbon pencils, and “water colored” with diluted black ink. They’re then scanned and overlaid on old tea-stained sheets of paper (coffee works too!).

Updated: March 27, 2007 – Illustrations Now Online!
>> See the Illustrations

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I just finished a new original crossword puzzle called “In the Biblical Sense? (PDF). It’s about a “Wednesday” in terms of the New York Times Difficulty Rating System (read: medium). I hope you like it. Comments are always welcome.

>> All My Puzzles
>> In the Biblical Sense? (PDF)

If you’ve recently upgraded to WordPress 2.1 (or 2.1.2), you’ll notice that TinyMCE has stopped allowing <div> tags. This is unfortunate, because they’re the way of the future. Out with the <table>, in with the <div>.

Anyway our content management system (era//404 CMS) uses TinyMCE, and the best way around this <div> debacle is to just swap line 25 of the tiny_mce_config.php file (located in the js/tinymce/plugins directory) with the following line (make sure it’s only one line with no break):

Et voila! Your <divs> have returned. I’d obviously recommend saving a back-up of the original config file, just in case you don’t replace the line correctly, but that should do it.

I just finished a new original crossword puzzle called “90′s Rock” (PDF). It’s about a “Monday” in terms of the New York Times Difficulty Rating System (read: easy). I hope you like it. Comments are always welcome.

>> All My Puzzles
>> 90′s Rock (PDF)