posted: August 27, 2010

Nancy Stahl invited me to visit her home and studio during a recent trip to New York. I asked if I could take a few snap shots and luckily she didn't mind. Obviously I'm not a professional photographer, but I think these amatuer pics provide a partial glimpse into how this remarkable woman is able to stay vital, current and simply bad ass by surrounding herself with inspiration.

Thanks much for the hospitality, Nancy!

I wonder if I call you if this thing (left) rings. I certainly hope so!

There's no way that I could show everything Nancy surrounds her life with - just a wee little glimpse is all I can show here. Her space is remarkable and I walked away feeling that at every turn of the head, she's challenging herself  to constantly move forward.

 

Props, Seen

posted: May 7, 2010

The work of Drawgers Leo Espinosa and Edel Rodriguez were spotted at the Asheville Art Museum (which is the nice little museum in my nice little town). I only happened upon this by chance, as I was wandering through the galleries last night looking for the musical ensemble Barbez, who were to put on a night of fine entertainment in one of the museum galleries.

Looking for where the music was to take place, I paused to admire a rather handsome Chuck Close that I'd never seen before, lingered on a little gem by Thomas Eakins for quite a while,  turned the corner and spotted an Eric Carle....

I thought, what's this? Illustration? Pressing further into the gallery, I spy several pieces by Art Spiegelman and realize that I'm was on to something quite unusual for an art museum. Hadn't I just been looking at a Leonard Baskin and a John Singer Sargent? I'd rather look at illustrations any day!

Then, I look to one side and it's Edel Rodriguez! Oh Sweet Happiness! Turning around to face the opposing wall, it's Leo Espinosa! Joy compounded! My friends, in a MUSEUM! They looked right at home.

Really bad pictures of the stickers on the wall. I didn't want to draw any attention to myself by using a flash, because as you may know, taking photos in a museum is strictly forbidden!

And yes, I violated museum policy by taking a couple of quick snaps of the pieces by Leo! Somebody call the police!

And more unlawful activity quickly followed with really bad photos of work by Edel! I'm an outlaw!

------

Here's a link to the show, which is called Nouns: Children’s Book Artists Look at People, Places and Things.

 

posted: April 20, 2010

Got sleep? National Geographic gave us the call recently to program an online survey based on just that question. One week deadline!

What NatGeo wanted: Ten illustrated questions. Four possible answers for each question. Four final results based on how the ten questions were answered. Finally, choose one of four faces that you post to Facebook.

Here's a link to the final result.

For this assignment, I had to pull out some dusty illustration skills (such as they are), which I hadn't put to use in nearly nine years. While struggling with the doodles for this interactive, it occured to me that what I'd really like to be doing is collaborating with a real illustrator to make this project really pop. It's something to think about for the next interactive we're asked to do. Cool javascript written right here, illustrations from somebody that really makes the final project solid.

Details for Dorks

In the past, we did interactives such as this exclusively in Flash. For this one, we programmed the entire interactive in javascript and for certain, this will be the way we handle these sorts of projects going forward. It was faster to deploy, and at the end of the day, it looks better than having to rely on a Flash player. Not only that, it runs on hand-held devices, which Flash currently can not.

Getting our final code delivered to the National Geographic server provided an interesting look under the hood of this major site, which AdWeek recently named as website of the year. We were provided with access to the NatGeo CMS (content management system), which allowed us to simply paste our full code straight into a text field, save and then view. Having designed and delivered CMS systems for the last nine years or so, it wasn't exactly the most intuative or elegant interface, but at the end of the day, it worked and that's all that really matters, one supposes...

It was also a fine thing indeed to team up with Rob Covey again. Rob is heading up online creative for NatGeo these days. Back in the day, Rob made working with US News and World Report a real gas and at NatGeo, he's still making every project a real pleasure.

Whatever

posted: February 9, 2010

In January of 2006, I had this odd notion that a site where illustrators posted articles might be a fun place to hang out. At the very least it sounded like a place where I'd like to hang out.

Somehow or another, I got a few other people to think it might be fun as well. Dave Bamundo, Randall Enos, David Gothard,  Don Kilpatrick, Mark Matcho, Hal Mayforth, Robert Saunders,  Michael Sloan, James Steinberg, Nancy Stahl and Steve Wacksman  were all willing to listen to this rather peculiar idea.

Around 2:30pm, February 9th 2006, Dave Bamundo bravely clicked a save button where no man had clicked a save button before and just like that, Drawger was born. About an hour later, Mark Matcho wandered in, clicked on a comment link and  typed a few sentences. The first comment arrived.

The following day Randall Enos published the second article here at Drawger.

On Drawger's forth birthday, there are 7,632 articles here and 82,295 comments. Image galleries here contain over 10,000 things to wonder at. Getting Drawger started, I have to admit, it was a rather selfish thing for me at the time. I just wanted it for me, me me. Remarkably, it's now for thousands daily, because of everyone here.

A few  memorable milestones (for me)

September 11th, 2006 - The homepage became a spontanious memorial. Without a doubt, one of the most moving experiences I've ever had. I realized then that Drawger was much more than fun, it was deeply meaningful. Sample of that day, from Edel

Monkey Song - October 2006. A completely blank post by David Flaherty got 151 comments. I try to derive meaning from this, but never arrive at any.

November 2006 - Enos published his first My Life on the Slanted Board. I hoped there would be more. There are.

January 2007 I notice a very real spike in traffic and wonder what's going on. I track the traffic back to a rather obscure, politically right-leaning site. The reason people were showing up here? To convince themselves that the "artistic intelligenicia" were suffering from Bush Derangement Syndrome. It suddenly dawned on me that Drawger was having an impact. Until then, I thought we were all here just talking to each other. We got 50,000 unique visitors that month. 50,000 visitors is often a daily occurance here now.

September 2007 - Drawger is officially on radar as sites like BoingBoing (here linking to a Nancy Stahl show) and others start to take notice that something might actually be going on here.

June 2008 - Note to self: The most popular content at Drawger is Lou Brooks' Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies, with over 375,000 unique page views for the week.

July 2008 - Barry Blitt's New Yorker cover, titled "The Politics of Fear" just about crashes the server as thousands arrive hourly to send him hate mail (pro-Obama hate mail), even though his page here has nothing on it at the time. Fortunately for Barry who wasn't even able to eat solid food at that point, his email box was full and all that stupid crap bounced back to Drawger.

June 2009 - The New York Times refers to Drawger in print and then online, regarding Google's requests for free art in exchange for links. After getting an average of 10,000 hits per minute, Drawger goes down hard and we get a new server.

July 2009, Tim O'Brien posts Eyes, a portrait trubute to Neda Agha-Soltan. Visitors from around the world arrive by the thousands, we're linked to by sites I can't read. The portrait is displayed at her memorial service.

This is an amazing place to call home

A good neighborhood is made up of people who you learn to know and love, where you don't mind the guy next door throwing a trash can in the street at 2am, where your neighbor is willing to help you jump-start your car when it's 10 degrees outside, and where you don't have to lock your doors. To me, that's Drawger.

Happy birthday Drawger! I love you!

At Drawger

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