It has been a fascinating week for me in social media and I am still dizzy with the implications. So, fellow travelers, I pose a question:

• Is it better to be completely dugg, make it to the front page and have more traffic than you can handle?
• Or is it better to make the top of the heap of upcoming stories and get more targeted diggs and traffic?

I recently had occasion to be voted on in the magical world of social media. I created a fun resume, just as an example of creative stimulation, and it went semi-viral.
All Data From Feb. 10th, 2009 - Chart from Feb. 20th, 2009

I received 883 direct hits on the site, including directly to the image of my resume. I am concluding that the majority of this was click-through from several sources, including digg, reddit and twitter.

I received 253 incoming visitors from reddit.com, which is about half the up-votes I received (549) and if you look at the TOTAL votes up or down (622) one could conclude that somehow these aren’t all showing up under my G-analytic account. Or people were only looking at the thumbnail and making pointed comments about my Mother. Even my proper statistics, built into my service, only registered 297 from the specific reddit page. Reddit traffic was more commentary, more critical and more votes. I saw it on the hot page, much to my surprise, so that type of exposure nets a bit more general attention.

Digg traffic (174 diggs) was very specific, as I was in Pics under the arts and culture category. This was not enough for the front page, but who did see it?  Well, the people who did see it were not just front page lookie-lous, they were there either in that catagory or in pics digging. Involved in the process. These were people who would repost it to a tweet, a blog, and other places. Funny, my digg.com / refferal number for incoming visitors for the entire month so far is 13. Even my regular stats say that digg is a search engine and I register an 18 for incoming visits.

The biggest surprise for me was the tweet network, which contributed to several of the unsolicited e-mails I received and was by far the most organic, rendering in sharp relief a strange and beautiful fractal of exposure (60 - 90 unique visitors). A large portion of it in Brazil, I would love to “kick it” in Sao Paulo (94 unique visitors) sometime, so let me know if you have a couch for rent.

There were a few social news aggregators that picked up the various submissions and posted them, but the next biggest linkage was from blogs (85ish), where I received some more fun commentary.

• First a shout out to yet another Michael Anderson, who posted about the resume here. Thanks and back at cha.
• Then the biggest source of individual blog traffic was this gentleman. Of whom I have great respect for both reading the post and taking my “data” with a grain of salt. This is also a source of good and respectful commenting, which I will address later in the post.
• Also, this very nicely designed site and a thoughtful comment.
• And a Russian(I believe) blogger posted it as well.

So, what lessons have I learned?

• Blogs need comment sections, duh.
• All of the feed back in any language was potentially the best objective, 3rd party advice that I have ever received.
• Anyone who is going before such a wide and knowledgeable audience must have a thick skin and be able to not take things too personally.
• I must harden my websites against a Social Tsunami, just in case.
• Humans are tying these networks together with copy&paste faster than the pipes can grow.

I don't know if Cyan has enough experience.

This is the iconic letter from a certain presidential campaign, we have seen it around somewhere…mO’cain? Maybe.

This is a beautiful example of Illustrator generated logo, with only gradients for colorization. It is a simple execution, but looks remarkably interesting for basically 3 colors in 2 gradients. First a Blueprint. Lets start with a letter O, not from a font, but just 2 ellipses. Using Phi, we can make a guess where the inside and outside ratio may lie.

Using the Golden Section as a starting point.

With little doubt this is intentional. The internal circle is perfectly between the two variations in the ratio. Either the designer(my bet) or the typographer made a conscious decision to split the difference. When we look at the form again for the foreground shape, it would be a shame not to notice how beautiful and complex the statement is. Using the flag stripes as a field metaphor in front of a sunrise/sunset in blue is as elegant a metaphor as I have ever seen for any presidential campaign. It is light and airy, without being too aloof, it is grounded in the foreground.

To recreate the foreground we will use circles of slightly different sizes to create the stripes, not worrying about the white under them, which we will fix with the gradient.

Fields of Ellipses

With the colors sampled from the image, we can make an educated guess about the gradient structure. Looking at the blue, there appears to be a light blue band that is between the dark blue at the top and the white. With the red, the color appears to start at a light red-orange and spread a bit out to a medium red then on to the dark.

Gradients in the logo, I hope.

And here are the gradient pallet settings for each.

Gradient palette settings for the colors.

Now we set an initial gradient for the pieces and see how close we are.

Initial look of applied gradients

Not to shabby, the feeling is there. Now I am going to show you a not-well-documented trick with the gradient tool. If you use the gradient tool as you normally should, you would be clicking and dragging a line that represents the beginning and the end of the gradient used as a fill. For instance, here we have the blues and reds in the gradient from left to right, and when you click and drag, you are setting the endpoints of the grad. OK, you knew all that, but how about this, when you click AFTER you set your start and end points, you pull a radial gradient center toward your click point. Thus moving a typical radial grad and creating something more like a blend or (god forbid) a gradient mesh. So here we go, click, drag, click.

Just the blue gradient.

Great, now if you notice the bottom is all white, so the red field is over white just like in the original. The top is dark and the pull click has forced the gradient closer at the top, creating the sunrise effect. Next the red field.

Just the red.

Pretty straight forward, drag past the bottom from close to the top to make the right and left dark, while keeping the bottom lighter, and with the click we hide the focal point of the gradient. This creates a soft light grad on the bottom with more rounding on the edges, implying a third dimension.

First Pass Comparison

When reassembled, it is a pretty good match, but we can still do some tweaking…

I hope Catchphrase doesn't win again, go Logo.

OK, with the darkening of the top blue and a readjustment of the grads a bit, I call this close enough for educational purposes.

Now that we have seen what it takes in Illustrator to recreate this logo, lets stop for a moment and remember that the original idea was a lot more work. Good design requires study and understanding, deliberation, inspiration, determination and what else Cajun man? Communica-SHON. This logo was originally designed by Sender, LLC. and you have to imagine that there are many sketch pad pages dedicated to “O’s” which I think are now suitable for framing, and may be worth more after November. Good ideas occur everywhere and at anytime, sometimes you just have to steep yourself in the problem and let you mind work our a solution.

There are many ways of displaying information, as the info aesthetics blog shows, some are just lovely. Well, in that spirit, I decided to update my résumé with a different perspective on the typical time-line theme. This is just concept art, as there are almost no real metrics represented except for time. There is no energy expenditure unit of measure, nor tics to delineate percentage or otherwise. In the fun multi-variable intake / output chart, there should be unique units per each (and a few are almost unquantifiable).

Finally in the ring chart (that’s what I am calling it) there are 2 dissimilar axes representing professional deployment vs. % personal development time. This is by far my favorite chart, but I feel that it does a disservice to the myriad software packages and input/output operations in which I have at least a reasonable skill level. Not to boast, but a comprehensive list would take a bit more space.

At least this is a more visible and obvious way of displaying information, even if it is just a concept piece, I invested a good deal of time in plotting my energy expenditure, and I feel it is at least relative and accurately for a month-to-month average. I may revisit this piece and try to give some basic units sometime in the future, but for now, I like it just the way it is.

This is a One-Sheet / Poster to quickly convey the concept of the documentary “Shades of Gray,” directed by Bob Wilkinson. Allegheny Image Factory brought me in to visually represent the doc. and create a sense of consistency between the movie titles, credits and the printed matter.

When considering the many ways you could stress the 1950’s UFO conspiracy theme, Bob Tinnell also wanted something a bit Saul Bass like in the titles. The evolution of these concepts lead us to the frantic mash of documents, photos, pamphlets and clipping that convey the energy of discovery and defy organization and labeling. There is no small amount of photocopied punk-rock poster in this layout, with a tip-o-the-hat to the collage art of the dadaists.

As much as I like working on the poster, I am going to enjoy the movie more.

The ubiquity of silver in most forms of commercial design makes it a great second color for logos, promotional designs, etc. and with this in mind, we will be venturing through my imagination as I remember and illustrate a few good silver ideas. Note: as most monitors can’t display silver, I will be representing it with the gray from illustrators 877c swatch in the Pantone Coated Library. Additionally, all of these designs are vector as Raster Metallic effects will be covered in another article.

No. 1

This illustrates the use of silver in a background texture, in this case a fishnet like texture that will pick up light when the card is moved. To further the illusion of the fishnets, one may vary the frequency of the intersections making them closer at the ends to imply a roundedness beyond the gradient.

No. 2

Using Magenta, Black and Silver this card moves to the edge of taste. The type and flower imply serenity, while the colors including the silver(Background texture) make it memorable.

No. 3

Using 877c in real world objects is an excellent way to show purpose. I was so taken with the fence company signs, looking like an engineer had designed them, that I mimicked this in the card. The next step in this construction is to drop in a blurry background of a person’s yard or part of a house to complete the sense of fence-ness. The silver is in the fence and the gray lettering, an allusion to the metal.

No.4

Using solarized photos came into vogue in the late ’70s for some applications, and later resurged in the ’90s a bit. I at first didn’t like solarized photos at first, but there are really good examples. This is a concept that I was working with as an employee at a print shop, which through lack of resources I never printed. The silver should serve as both bright and medium gray counter-point to the rest of the photo. This will be revisited in the Duotone silver article later.

No. 5

This is a printed circuit board design that is both techie and aesthetic without being over-processed. The background is the first pass and would be lightened, with an ideal printing being on vellum with a translucent green. Then the silver would reflect and the green would transmit light.

No. 6

This card has the most potential of almost any of the designs. The gray will be 887c and in a perfect world, the outside (bottle) will be UV coated with the inside being matte. Furthering the impression of a bottle and a label. The outline/shadow of the lettering is also silver. This might also be a good candidate for foil stamping, embossing and/or textured paper.

No. 7

This is a high-concept card with many alternative processes, including: Spot UV on the plate and on the textured wallpaper. Silver ink for the silverware and some type. Emboss the plate down while leaving the silverware up. Use puff ink or a type of thermographic for the background texture instead of the Spot UV.

Silver is an excellent way to add value to a print job, logo or other investment without breaking the bank. It is best to talk to your printer or find one that specializes in printing silver (877c) or another ink called first down that is mixable with other printing inks. We will cover that in the next silver article.