Posts filed under "featured"
The statistic I have heard was at least once in a person’s professional career, you are made redundant. I’ve been moderately immune to this over my years as an engineer at Arup, even though there were a great many rounds of redundancy over my years there, but yesterday it finally happened and the grim reaper of jobs caught up with me at my latest company.
After several months of things going downhill at the office, I was called in and got the message that things were getting worse and that unfortunately my time at PDP was going to be cut shorter than originally anticipated.
I was honestly feeling a bit held back living and working in Lebanon. Most of these reasons weren’t unexpected, it’s just anticipating a series of events is very different to living the reality and seeing how you feel or react.
There is a sense of optimism at the moment that I’ve not felt in a while. The world is all heading in all various directions and jobs are getting harder and harder to get by, however I am incredibly upbeat about the whole situation, liberated.
Now hunting for job is an incredibly frustrating ordeal that I thought I didn’t have to go through for a little while, however to be honest, I could see this coming a mile away…so much so that I had my CV completed the morning of the day I was told. I came prepared.
Sometimes it takes a good long time for the penny to drop, even if you’ve been doing it for a seriously long time. For me the way in which I take and write notes (both at work and during play) has changed on the basis of getting an iPhone, installing Notational Velocity and having a web interface with Simplenote all linked together.
The effect that I didn’t actually expect was that the above three occurrences effectively changed my general workflow and how I take notes in my moleskin, and what ultimately that moleskin is actually used for, and by doing that it’s solved one of the biggest problems I actually had with taking notes in my moleskin.
Moleskines
My favourite type of notebook to use is my moleskins. I’ve been using these for nearly 7 years by now. Definitely read the wikipedia entry about the history of the Mokeskine, it’s actually pretty interesting. The ones that I have been using exclusively are the A5 notebooks, in black hardback, no lines, with the thinner pages.
I used my moleskine for two things really. Taking notes and sketching ideas out. Most of my projects and designs start like this. Based on the way my mind works, I thought that it would be best to handwrite all of my notes and thoughts down and then later take these notes out and put them onto the computer.
What I noticed was that I would come back to my diagrams, sketches and doodles all the time, but I’d rarely come back to my long form notes, and I’d end up rehashing sometimes these notes and ideas again and again. The problem was I never actually did that, and it was pretty rare that I would go back and actually use these written notes in a meaningful way. Basically I was using the moleskine (at least when it came to notes) as a note dumping ground, with some useful sketches inbetween.
And that was fine. The new way is better.
The way I justified it was that before writing any meaningful words, I was getting them out of my system first. Ultimately the system was flawed, and rather than try and find a way to fix it, I kept using the same method. It’s always good to rethink something that you’ve been doing for a long while and actually assess whether or not that is the best way to do things.
Whitelines
Obviously before I got settled on Moleskine notebooks, I went through a vast number of notebooks, and still try out various ones from time to time. The ones that I am actually contemplating on getting are the Whitelines series of notebooks. I’ve owned one in the past, which was the wirebound A5 version. The paper is lovely to use and honestly the work does in fact pop off the page. However I think it’s definitely not the right size for the kind of work that I would use that for. I think I’ll be getting the A4 size for the sketching I envision in those notebooks and keeping my A5 moleskins for the general smaller ideas/sketches and notes that I like to take throughout the day.
The New Paradigm
I’ve now basically separated the way in which I organise my thoughts (because that’s what I’m doing). The first has most (over 90%) of my notes written within one of the three inputs I mentioned above, while the moleskines are basically used only for sketches and maybe small notes if I don’t have the facility to actually input the data electronically (because it wouldn’t be in the moment).
What this does is it basically allows me to now search all of my notes instantly. It also allows me to organise them and file them in a structured way - which definitely appeals to my filing junkie nature (I will be talking about this elsewhere in the future).
My moleskines are now effectively books filled with sketches, doodles, ideas, quick thoughts. There’s something pure about that setup. There’s something empowering. I must admit that out of habit I do go for my moleskine to start writing my list of things to do at work, and have to stop myself a bit and redirect myself to the computer to type that stuff in, but now when I look at my book, it’s just filled with sketches and diagrams and tiny notes that are so much more useful.
The single best bit of advise I can give about filing your notes is given by (of Mac Power users and macsparky fame). Here’s a couple of posts to get you going:
I basically follow the same convention and went ahead and changed all of my colons to an ‘x’ as well. This didn’t take me too long as I have only 100 notes so the pain barrier was pretty small.
But here are a couple of tips I have myself to ease things for me as well. The way I come up with the initial letters to use is basically using the first and last letter of that particular word. So wedding would be wg. When it’s two words, then it’s basically the first letter of each word, so Broken Kode would be bk. This way I don’t have to think about whether or not I’ve used this particular word or not.
Organisation
Having finally organised my written notes, it was time to organise my moleskine a bit as well. The thing that I definitely don’t like is how my book after a while becomes messy on the inside. It’s not as clear what project I’m talking about instantly, because I never used a unified header for each and every page.
This is something I’m still working on to be honest, and so don’t have a clear solution, but the convention I’m working on at the moment basically lays things out in the following way. Right at the top of the page I put the following three items:
- Date
- Project Name
- Function
The function is usually on of the following:
- Notes
- Calcs
- Sketches
- Site Visit
- Meeting
This is neatly lined up at the very top of the page. This convention only took me 9 years of engineering to come up with (d’oh). I guess it’s better late than never and it proves that you can always find better ways to doing something, that makes you sit up and think, well that’s much better.
Alternatives
The fact that I’ve settled and fallen in love with this setup, doesn’t mean that it’s the right setup for you. Instantly Notational Velocity and Simplenote have become my favourite productive tools in the world. They organise my thoughts and information in such a way that information relating to me is now at my finger tips (literally).
There are those that want more information. That want to put images and other things within their documents/notes, and for that sort of thing there are soo many alternatives, so I guess it’s a question of trying what works best for you, but hopefully this setup gives you an insight as to what works for me, and maybe you can pull on some of that to make it work for you.
http://www.brokenkode.com/the-art-of-organising-your-thoughts
One of the things that I typically don’t do with most of my posts is come back and edit and change. For some reason I always felt that in terms of internet etiquette that was bad form - that will change with these posts. These posts are not intended to be perfect out of the door. I will hopefully have done some meaningful reasearch for them, however they will be modified as time goes by.
The first post in a long and hopefully interesting series of posts on Cognisant Design concentrates on a small part of a much large product, specifically the key to my car. It’s honestly very rare for Google to disappoint me and not give me back some information about something I’m looking for.
One of the things that I touch a feel and fiddle with every single day is my car key and then I saw it mentioned on Objectified as well and it just struck me that this key basically encompassed a lot of what I am talking about with Cognisant Design.
Functionality
When is a key, not just a key? When it’s also the central lock as well, and the car trunk as well. Admittedly I don’t use the trunk feature much. The simple fact is that they buttons
Oh and they’re all equipped with immobiliser technologies - which basically translates to the car doesn’t move if you don’t have the key, which is a nice feature for those thieving bastards (I’m sure those same thieving bastards have found ways around it, but hey you don’t want to make it easy on them).
And then of course you’ve got the metal key itself, tightly tucked away for when you need it with the press of an incredibly inviting metal button, which brings us nicely to the next important point.
Flip Action
This is the action of the key flipping open from it’s hidden position. I guess this has been honed from millions of cards sold, but basically there is an undeniable weight to the key springing open. It clicks into place with a purposeful click. It’s like a samurai being drawn. The thing is it’s totally addictive, so you find yourself clicking it constantly.
The button that releases the key mechanism is curved at the top which again is just exactly the way it should be rather than a flat button. It’s details like this that only serve to enhance what is truly a great piece of industrial design.
Weight
This is one of the most prominent aspects I find. The weight to size ratio of a product is always something that drives home quality in a product. The current iPhone for example is very dense in weight due to the glass front and back. When compared to another smartphone from say Samsung, you get this feel of much more inherent quality due to the weight.
That same concept is in this key. While I’m sure they could have made it lighter, doing so would basically make it feel cheap, and I’m sure that was not what the original designers were aiming for here. Which brings us to part of the reason for making it heavy.
The Metal Key
The person who brought this to my attention was my brother. See he’s got a Mercedes A-Class which is the Mercedes equivalent of the Golf, small hatchback, with a bit of German design thrown in. The key on that car is this plastic thing with a few buttons at the top. Essentially it’s missing the point here, an aspect of which VW have got it so right.
Obviously the sturdiness of the key is also important to complete the overall package, and again the key is a nice metal rectangular block, that again feels weighty due to the metal base which it swivels on.
Ergonomic Design
The final part of this exploration is basically the ‘je ne sais quoi’ factor. The ergonomic design of the key is just so terrible inviting. The groove at the top, just after the buttons invite you to rub your thumb there every single time you hold the key. The curved edges allow you to quickly and addictively flip the key in your hand again and again. Even the little VW logo which is made out of soft silicone is calling you to feel and pinch and poke with your nail.
And because no proper article about something technical is really complete, here is a disassembly of the key in question so you can see what the details are like on the inside.
Lawsuit Action
in searching around for more information about the Smart Key, i stumbled on a bunch of articles, completely unrelated to the topic of the design of these keys, but thought it was interesting as it basically dealt with legal action in relation to these keys. Smart Key Litigation and this FAQ, also there’s this document directly from VW
Follow up
One of the things that I want to make sure these posts have is a certain amount of longevity. I’m not writing these posts for the sake of writing them, but rather because I want to highlight specific things in my life that are designed in the way that I want them designed, and to show some appreciation.
Unfortunately due to how the coorporate world operates, it’s sometimes very difficult to single out the team or persons responsible for a design, unless the achieve cult status in product design, in which case you end up with the question of how much they actually contributed and how much of this was their ideas.
That’s a topic for another issue. Rather than go there, I would rather like to find out more about something if i’ve not covered it here. If there are articles, links or books that describe the topic I’ve written about, I really want to hear about it. If you’re one of the people that actually worked on this and are no longer working at this company and don’t mind talking about the experience, again I would like to hear from you.
I guess in a round about way, I’m trying to put a spotlight on aspects of design that are not typically considered, or really given their due.
The thing that I naturally permeate towards instinctively are are the things that I basically want, admire or are curious about. These are the things that I basically would like to have. These are the things that put a smile on my face, and which ultimately I like to talk about.
Cognisant: adjective [ predic. ] having knowledge or being aware of
This thinking actually can be attributed in many ways to Objectified which honestly completely changed the way I look and appreciate products and design. I guess that was the point of it all, but it seriously touched me in a profound way that no other documentary has ever done. A year and a half after I watched it I still think about things it said or tried to say. Sure there were several douche bags on there, but the message was there.
Crucially, in an in advert way it’s basically opened my eyes as to what this particular site will be about and has been building towards all these years.
While I’ve always wanted a space for my projects to live, and my art, it’s only a small part of me and there may be months before I am able to show what I’m working on a regular basis, even though I honestly am creating things on a relatively regular basis. It’s not just about what I create, it’s not just my therapy. It needed focus.
Which brings us to the here and now. Over the last couple of years I’ve been honing and observing things as I develop a sense of what I like and what I don’t like. Sometimes I used this site to achieve this. Recently I’ve been thinking that ultimately the site needed a direction, something it’s not had since it began. The focus seemed to be on design in general, then it meandered off to blogging software, which was like this loop of eating it’s own tail.
The thing that I hope to concentrate on in the future is the idea Cognisant Design.
It took a bloody long time to finally come up with this collection of words. I kept floating between ‘Considered’ and ‘Cognisant’. They are close to each other in meaning, but it’s more than thinking about something. It’s about knowing the reasons for those decisions. I’m sure I’m not the first to come up with these words together, but I hope to bring to the fore what this actually means and highlight examples of this design sense in action.
It’s not a question of minimal design. It’s not a question of functional design, it’s a question of design that is thought out completely, where things we done in a very calculated fashion, even if those calculations lead to what might be hyper detail or bright bursts of colour.
Although I’ve tried to describe it in this post, I feel that the best way to show what it is that I am talking about is to actually show rather than tell. I don’t think I can post this sort of thing on a regular basis, so the linkblogging will continue, however in addition to these quick things I will be focusing on Cognisant Design and hopefully we’ll all learn something new together.
For all those wondering what the hell is going on the ‘Kode and this larger (than normal) number of posts in such a short time, it’s basically an experiment I’m going through for the month of December. Today was a bit of an off day, on account of me being out of the country so to speak and not having the time.
Ultimately my goal is to post about 3-4 posts a day and try and break my all time record of 51 posts in a single month. Yeah I know, it’s not quantity, it’s quality, well I’m striving for both. I’m striving for something fun and random, where the signal to noise ratio is decent.
I guess the reasons is because I’m actually enjoying blogging again. Not this limited 140 character BULLSHIT. Sorry but twitter has killed off any meaningful communication on the web as I used to once know it. There are some great sites out there, but by and large there is too much short spurts of noise. I was happy to acknowledge twitter killing the blog comments. You can see it all over, but what I am generally opposed to is the lack of creativity in people’s posts. It’s like all their energy has been devoted to something less meaningful.
I don’t care people communicating in the way they way, it’s just such a shame that it’s nearly killed the way that I used to like reading. So this is my attempt to rekindle the act of blogging for the sake of blogging. Putting an idea forward, and DEVELOPING it in more detail. There is limit in these things (at least for me) and I’ve spoken about this before. 4 paragraphs or thereabouts is about the correct size.
So join me on this journey to reclaiming the blogosphere. Cluster Fuck, Twitter Fuck.
Been thinking about this for a while now. When Facebook first came about, I loved everything about it. As time has gone by however I have been moving slowly away from the service. I’ve noticed this trend with other people as well. It’s one of those things where a lot of the shine has gone from the service and now you’re bombarded with utter crap in the news feed, about farmville and other shitty game applications.
The thing is though, that FB still provides these words with a decent viewership, ie all of my closer friends that have made it into my circle of friends on Facebook, as well as the like 40 people that read this blog regularly.
Which in a round about way kind of brings us to that thing that used to be an integral part of every blog, the comments.
The annoying thing? Some of the comments about these posts remain on FB and not on this site. I guess the nice thing is that you have a series of places to share communications with, rather than a single location, but alas I am a nostalgia freak. I like what is old, and normally go back to the old on occasion to drink from that well.
Communication is now scattered. It’s all over the place, because there are a million and one places that are vying for our attention. While that is good in general for people to have options to find the thing that they like the most, it’s also makes things a lot more … spread out.
It’s not that I like living in the past, but I like to relive times that were generally fun. The time where blog comments were common place and people interacted with more than 140 characters is long gone. There are specific havens on the net where this continues, but as a blogging community that has left us I believe.
One of the reasons that I’ve had less time to spend on the net. I spend a few minutes here, and hour there, but ultimately I no longer live on the net like I used to. I tend to spend a lot of free time drawing (which is great) and I end up trying to relax from the day I’ve had.
You choose your battlegrounds, you choose your poison. I am not 100% into Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. Was never really into Delicious or Flickr. Don’t really like Tumblr all that much either.
I know that’s where all the kids are these days, but I feel that I am happy with this unique little part of cyberspace. It’s all mine, I control it’s destiny, it’s in my hands to build it or break it or change it. It’s not a competition, it’s a manner of expression, and after all that’s why we’re all here right?
Earlier on in my sabbatical, my parents decided to sort out the house down in Lebanon, where I was going to be doing my creative drawing and writing. However, I did a couple of side projects as well. A couple of logos and decided to do my first large scale art project, a door of stained glass.
This was to fill a hole the size of a door into the living room in the house in Lebanon. The reason for filling it in is mainly to do with layout, but needless to say we’re not using that door so having something that represents the family is more than a welcome addition.
To understand what this image means you have to know a little bit about my family history. My parents and I were born in Lebanon. We all migrated to Greece shortly after I was born, and five years later my brother was born in Athens.
This history is represented by the cedar tree (Lebanon) at the bottom and the three fish swimming up towards an olive tree (Greece) where a little fish is waiting.
So once the guys got it, they printed out and then began carving it out.
And here is the finally finished stained glass family portrait installed:
And here are some details:
So what do I feel about the final product? I think the carving process was superb, second to none. I think however that the colouring could have been done in a better fashion. There are mistakes and the final colours were not exactly as I had imagined, or chosen. The thing is that no matter these minor quibbles, it’s nothing compared to the sheer joy I get when I look at it changing colours throughout the day, you forget everything else.
Sometime in February, my cousin asked me to sort out the logo for his jewellery business. I was obviously happy to oblige, and actually had some spare capacity to sort it out for him. The thing is, I sqaundarded most of that time, so he rings me on a Saturday to ask me how the logo was going….uh oh spagettio. Rushed to the only coffee place worth a shit in Saida and started sketching furiously. Pretty quickly I had my idea. In fact, the crazy thing is that by the end of the night I had created his logo and sent it out to him.
I played around with the colours (although his only request was to have the colour scheme be burgundy and grey). I thought it couldn’t hurt for them to see what it would look like in different colours.
So after a couple of colour tweaks he asked for I sent it through. The reason he was anxious for the logo to be sorted out quickly was because he had an exhibition in Kuwait and had a stand. A few weeks later he was in Lebanon and he showed me pictures of the stand.
If you’re subscribed to the site, then you’ve no doubt been bombarded this last day with 15 or so ‘new’ posts. These are all part of the illustration section which I’ve been putting together. Regulars of the site for a while will recognise a lot of these images, however there are several new ones and others that have never been shown in this way.
I kept thinking about the best way to put this section together, as there is a lot of stuff I’ve got on my harddisc that’s not seen the soft glow of the internet in years. Hopefully because of the general ease with which this section is maintained, I’ll be constantly uploading images to this section, because I’ve always believed that all art needs to be shown, because it gives you perspective on where you where artistically before and how much you’ve improved in the time passed.
Looking forward to 2010 - A good start of graphic novels that are coming out in 2010. The ones that are interesting to me are:
January
Hiroaki Samura - Blade of the Immortal: Footsteps (Dark Horse)
Hiroaki Samura - Blade of the Immortal: Legend of the Sword Demon (Dark Horse Press)
J.Torres - Lola HC (Oni Press)
February
Jock - Hellblazer: Pandemonium (Vertigo)
Jason - Almost Silent (Fantagraphics)
April
Jim Woodring - Weathercraft (Fantagraphics)
Joe Quesada - The Art of Joe Quesada HC (Marvel)
Cowboy Ninja Viking TPB (Image)
May
Various - Wednesday Comics (DC Comics)
Immonen - Moving Pictures (Fantagraphics)
June
Greg Rucka/J.H. Williams III - Batwoman: Elegy (DC)
Hiroaki Samura - The Art of Blade of the Immortal (Dark Horse)
Adam Hughes - Cover Run: The DC Comics Art of Adam Hughes (DC)
July
Matt Kindt - Revolver (Vertigo)
Jason - Werewolves of Montpellier (Fantagraphics)
October
Alan Moore/Kevin O’Neill - The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century vol. 2 (Top Shelf)
December
Pat Mills/Kevin O’Neill - The Marshal Law Omnibus (Top Shelf)
Alan Moore/Steve Parkhouse: The Collected Bojeffries Saga (Top Shelf)
Update: I’ll be adding more graphic novels as I see them coming, with links to where I’ve read/heard about them.
So I finally got internet connection today, and this is my first post in Lebanon in over 5 years. So what do I think of the place so far? I’m not going to complain because honestly if I wanted to complain, this list would be absolutely massive. Instead I’m going to focus on somethings that I’ve noticed so far, and over the course of the time I spend here I’ll sniper attack dumbfuck assholes that annoy me (trust me living here for 2 weeks has made me encountered my fair share of supreme idiots).
Weather
One of the things that I honestly was looking forward to is the Lebanese winter instead of the dark and dingy British winter. We used to come here years ago during December, and it was always warmer and dryer than Greece, so I thought I’d be getting much of the same. Not so. If you’re in Lebanon in the winter, bear this in mind, it rains. It rains a fucking lot. Tropical rain. During the night. Honestly it CHUCKS it down. But then yo get some sunshine in the same day while it is raining. When this happens, people say:
Lucifer is washing his wife.
Not sure where this comes from to be honest with you…these Lebanese say some fucked up shit. Hopefully the rainy season is over and I can except dry and sunny weather for a few weeks.
Driving
Honestly this is the biggest issue right now. At first I would get a headache every time I used the car. Everyone has their own set of rules that they drive to. The deviations that always make me want to get out and give them some PROPER road rage is when they decide to drive in the opposite direction of traffic. Yeah you heard right, the opposite direction. You’re travelling at 80km/h on a ‘highway’ and suddenly you see some dumbfuck driving towards you playing chicken.
There are specific rules for roundabouts here as well. He who comes from outside the roundabout has way. You can also use the entrance of the roundabout if you wish to do a quick U-turn. This saves you the time going around the roundabout. Where’s the police? They’re eating falafels. Seriously. The stereotype of the big fat American cop eating donuts can be seen here as the not so fat, idiot cop eating his falafel. I don’t blame him, they taste AMAZING.
Food
Which kind of brings me onto the food. All the above is made tolerable because of the food. It’s a miracle that most Lebanese aren’t completely obese considering the amount of amazing food and sweets and delicacies we have over here. Honestly you’d be hard pressed to find a more original and inventive food culture anywhere in the world. I’ll be going over these in detail over the next couple of weeks/months/whenever because I honestly think that they deserve proper mentioning.
So far it’s been interesting, but hopefully tonight I also get to spend some time in the house and start drawing and writing again and from tomorrow we can start seeing other parts of this country and getting an understanding of what it all has to offer. Stay tuned.
I can finally start talking about my sabbatical, as last night was the first time I felt slightly restless, which basically means that I’m calm and my brain isn’t being bombarded with work related thoughts. Until 2 weeks into my ‘sabbatical’ I was still having the most boring work dreams you can imagine. I’d wake up with a bit of a smile on my face since I didn’t need to do anything with that dream and my reality was the opposite, for once.
Now I’m back to not remembering my dreams, which means we can hunker down to get some work done. Maybe that’s why I’ve woken up at 5:30, because my body is telling me:
Get up you fool, we’ve got work to do. You’ve been sleeping till 9 for too long you lazy bum.
The sabbatical effectively starts today (at least in my mind). There are a couple of things that I’m hoping to achieve in this short period of time that I have in front of me and 6:30 in the morning is a good time to start as any.
Well the results are out for the 2009 Comica/Jonathan Cape/Observer ‘Graphic Short Story’ competition. For those of us who dreamed about winning, yesterday morning brought with it the sharp taste of a dream lost (to most of us).
So I did what every person who’s had 3 months of creating, stressing and waiting do, I met up with Mike and Sam (who also had entered the competition) and had a day of comics, food, arguing, frustration, beer and ultimately consolation. We understood the frustration of having put soo much effort into something that was only ever going to be read by a select few number of people.
So after sleeping on it and updating this website with a new section dedicated for comics I’ve created (the first of course is ‘Coffee Beans’), I had another bright idea. If there are over 240 entries (because that was last year, and apparently there were more entries this year than any other year), then maybe 100 of these entrants are online somewhere; maybe they’re also considering where to go next. So maybe it would be a nice idea to try and self-publish an anthology with these 4 page stories. This could then be something we show various publishers or can share with family etc.
Well the point is that the dream would start all over again for most of us.
So a call to all those who entered the competition but were also unsuccessful, drop me a line on twitter or via the email (khaled.aboualfa at gmail.com) or post a comment below.
Update: All those wondering how we can do this, there are a plethora of self-publishing options available through print on demand services (PODs). I’ve got a bit of experience with a few of them, most notably this: http://www.lulu.com/content/222930
http://www.brokenkode.com/2009-comica-jonathan-cape-observer-competition
Although not an immense milestone by most blogs estimation (especially the professional blogs which pay you by the post), I think 1300 posts on ‘Kode is a significant achievement to sit back and take stock of. 1300 posts is roughly 216 posts per year, which is a little over 1 post every two days for the past six years. Truth is, there have been some pretty busy days and some very quiet days (nay months) over the years but overall there has been a consistent output of ideas, thoughts, critism and links over the years.
Changes
Even with the rise of twitter, I’ve still managed to keep this website alive. The truth is using it as an extended bookmarking tool has kept it fresh and alive in my mind and effectively kept the site relevant. See many of my recent posts (in the past year or so) could have easily been covered as tweets. The thing is I love my site. I like using it as a tool to communicate my ideas.
However the biggest change I’ve made here this year is removed comments. Comments were really sporadic in general, and the only thing I could count on was bloody spam. Getting rid of the spam has been great, but of course it’s also meant that if in fact I wanted to have a discussion with anyone then it’d have to come from an email, or on twitter.
Design
On the design aspect of things, I’ve never been more happy with the general look of the website than I am now. It’s like 5 years of experimentation have brought me to this site. In many respects it’s as minimal as the very first iteration of the site. The truth is the site doesn’t have any wow factors, no drawings, no clever javascript, nothing of the sort. What it lacks in those bells and whistles, I feel it makes up in form and function. Refined design.
Future
Obviously no idea what the future will hold, but it’ll involve a lot more art coming onto the site. I’ve been drawing more this year than I have,….well ever. Obviously my biggest concern is finding a solution that actually works for me as well as Asaph and Habari have this year.
A little over a year ago I wrote this, which basically explained what I wanted to do over the year that passed. What’s funny is that I completely forgot that I wrote that (having a blog for as many years as I do, does make events/posts blend into each other). Anyway 1 year later, I can report that I have definitely been moving in the right direction. The first thing I did was go to an art class at Central St.Martins. While the actual lessons taught me sweet fuck all, I learnt soo much from some of the peeps in the class (ok mainly from Mike) but most importantly I remembered what it was like to feel excited about making comics.
A couple of days ago I finally completed my first full comic book story. It’s a four pager for the Observer competition and it’s basically 2 months of my life. Is two months a lot of time to complete 4 pages? Well I was doing other things inbetween, like working, holidays (where I couldn’t take my art with me) etc. Also bearing in mind that some of the things that I did, I’ve either not done, or not done in a while.
This little experience taught me a lot about how difficult making comics can be, but also how amazing the feeling is when you’ve completed the story that was just a thought in your mind, as you built it, cultivated it, nurtured it, watered it, fed it and then ultimately moulded it.
I did need to take a few shortcuts to achieve the deadline. So I ended up computer colouring and lettering; even though I wanted to do both of these things by hand.
With this project firmly under my belt, it’s time to shift focus to actually start drawing more. However there has to be a deadline. A year deadline is not good enough. It’s too far away. It has to be broken down into smaller chunks. Where I do burn the midnight oil to achieve that goal. Could be 5-10 pages per month? Fully pencilled and inked. That’s a little over a page a week.
The thing is I also want to try my hand at some sci-fi as well. The only way I can think of is, to simply write and draw a panel to this other story every day. 1 small panel. The nice thing about that is that I will end up getting speed and it’ll help me try new styles and new ways of doing something different without it affecting a much larger project. It’s all building towards me having my own distinct voice and style and breaking away from influences.
Either way, it’s all exciting times, especially considering I go on sabbatical for 6 months so I have the chance to pursue all the above.
So on Saturday Mike and I attempted to do 24 hour comic book day. We failed. Well actually failed is not the right word. We didn’t finish it off to the letter of the ‘law’. Basically we made it to the 17th hour and then we gave up. I couldn’t draw a straight line, and Mike was drawing shit to get a page done, regardless of what was actually on the page (a far cry from the great pages he was churning out for the hours the came before).
The good news was that it taught me a number of things. Don’t attempt to do it, unless you’re completely creatively blocked and you need something to kick start your creative juices flowing. No amount of coffee will actually get me to draw. It’ll keep me awake, but not enough to draw.
Instead what I did learn was that the exercise was extremely useful for a total of 12 hours. If you concentrate on 1 page an hour, after 12 hours, you really do have the start of 12 pages that, although very rough, at least get you going where before they were just ideas in your head. For someone that can look at a blank piece of paper for an hour without drawing a line, this is actually a massive breakthrough. So I propose 12 Hour Comic Book Day, for those with an idea, that’s taking too long to actually draw and get onto paper.
It’s been nearly 4 1/2 years since comments were officially not part of this site. Back then it was because I couldn’t actually host them on my own site, until of course I moved to WordPress and during the blogging revolution of the early naughties. So what’s changed? Twitter and Facebook. Both of which have brought the internet to the world that hid themselves from it, but they’ve practically killed the blogosphere, or at least how it used to operate.
The funny thing is turning them off was on the cards for a while now. I’ve noticed this downturn for about a year now (probably a few months before I even moved to Habari as my blogging engine of choice).
Does it upset me? I guess it’s a different kind of change. While sometimes I like twitter, there’s too much noise for me on there. Also the fact that everyone only speaks in soundbytes does annoy me. I can’t read people’s thoughts about things because they’re limited and effectively people’s voices on the internet are silenced.
In the meantime I’ll be here writing more than 140 characters and hopefully sharing some good links from around the net. If you want to comment on something, drop me an email or you know…send me reply on twitter (maybe I’ll even integrate that twitter reply thing that Michael is attempting at the moment).
100 Bullets Wilt - The last in the seminal 100 Bullets graphic novel series is released next week. I started reading this comic from around issue number 5 back when I was in University in Nottingham. Nearly 10 years later it’s finally complete and I’m going to have to reread ALL the previous volumes (which I actually have here in London). One of the best comic book series ever made.
24 Hour Comics Day 2009 has been confirmed - for Saturday, 3rd of October. Depending on how my current comic book work goes, I might contribute in this (I know Mike would be well up for this). I think I’d need to develop a completely different style, because my current detailed way of working would just not do.
That’s what I want to be surrounded by right now. Creative brains drawing, sculpting, moulding, painting, etching whatever. Over the years I have definitely understood that your enthusiasm and energy is boosted by those around you. You gravitate to people with positive energy because they make you want to actually get on with life as well. Your surroundings play such an incredible part in this.
For years I have been lamenting the fact that I’ve not been able to get creative with my art. I’ve not been able to nurture the graphic novel that I’ve been writing for nigh on 5 years now. The truth the story is all the better for this incubation time because although the idea was sound (the very basic idea) the execution was lacking.
Yesterday I went and saw a collection of student movies (this isn’t a review of the work that was presented, but more of an observation, when you have no budget, the story has to work cleverly within these constraints - which i don’t feel was captured). The one thing i took from the evening however was the collection of minds in the room and how they all fed off each other.
So I’ve decided (and I don’t know why I didn’t think of this earlier) to try and find a studio to share with a bunch of artists. Now if it was up to me I’d round up the crazy Danes, maybe a couple of Americans get a big warehouse in London on the waterfront and have us create awesome stuff, pushing each other creatively…something which clearly cannot happen.
I’ll be sure to post the results of my research in my hunt for a design studio to get creative in.
Owen touched up on something about the length of blog posts. As I read his 3 paragraphs I think he’s definitely correct about the length of post that I enjoy to read. It’s on very rare occasions that I will actually properly read a long indepth blog post, unless of course it’s about a topic I thoroughly enjoy, but truthfully that’s the exception rather than the norm.
Our attention is spread across copious amounts of information, that we process on a regular basis. Information overload isn’t a new thing; limiting yourself to 3 paragraphs for a blog post to get your point across seems to me like an incredibly succinct way to communicate in a more fulfilling manner than the 140 character limit on twitter.
Self editing is a difficult thing, especially when posts are cheap. Beginning, middle and end. Three paragraphs. Communicate your thoughts clearly.
The problem is that 2008 lacked focus for these areas, so it’s time to provide them with a slight bit of structure. I doubt I’ll be able to meet these deadlines, although I might try and attempt to do something about it, the harsh reality is that life will no doubt get in the way; however it’s better to have some structure than none at all.
Japan Photo Album
Compile my Japan photos into a book. I’ve been meaning to do this for over a year. I can’t imagine this taking much of my time, except now that I’ve said that it’s bound to take a great deal of time.
Finish the script
This blasted thing has been waiting to be finished for months. In order to do anything I need to get some discipline. Therefore once a day for 1 hour (be it early in the morning or late at night), I will write for 1 hour. No internet breaks. Coffee break is at the beginning. Nothing but writing.
Clemency
This is the working title for a little book that myself and Stathi will be working on this year. It’s a very fringe project but I think it could be extremely good fun as we’ve been talking about this for years.
Character Designs
This is something that I hope to get into, although probably the toughest thing to do really, as I’ve not drawn anything properly for nearly a year. Hopefully I won’t suck too much at the beginning to discourage me. The creative process for me is something that is sorely lacking in my life right now. While I don’t want to put something like a number of sketches/drawings per month or per week, I do hope that I surpass last year’s tally, which came to a grand total of zero.
Broken Kode
Continued development of the ‘Kode goes without saying. The building blocks for version 8 have been established. I don’t intend to change anything in this design, except enhance it. Add more pages and consolidate the sheer amount of images and work I’ve created these past 6 years. It’s a tall order, but again not really in a rush, as I’ve got loads of other things to keep me occupied. However it’s important to make sure that i don’t let the work here eat into other projects time. Therefore the amount of time I’m allowed to tinker with the site, will again be limited to 1 hour maximum a day. This includes blogging/tweeting time.
5 years ago today, I sat in my room and decided to start blogging, and what an amazing 5 years it’s been - here’s to many more years of online presence.
Where the hell did a year go? The general consensus I’ve established from people close to me and others not so close to me is that this year has been a bit of a mixed bag in terms of whether I would consider it a classic year or one to put to bed and try and forget as soon as humanly possible.
Work
2008 started on a bit of a high professionally. I was coming off my largest project (and probably my favourite project) but the future looked equally fun and challenging. What I considered a complete dream team of engineers started work on a pretty prestigious project in early January. Unfortunately the project didn’t continue. As they say when one door closes another opens. I had my fair share of these this year. One lead me to Dubai, another lead me to Abu Dhabi, others kept me in London.
Ultimately however my absolute biggest achievement was finally getting chartered (which funnily enough had a lot to do with that project at the start of the year). The whole process took me around 8 months to get done and another 2 months to get a certificate from the Engineering Council. So a tip to all your prospective chartered engineers out there, it takes the better part of at least half a year to get this stuff sorted out.
Inbetween all of this I was able to actually continue teaching (and learning from) the younger generation of engineer working up through the ranks, which is something I’ve always enjoyed, especially with those that I can see the changes happen.
Pop Culture
The year can only be described as the year of the 1hour drama, or more accurately, it is the year I discovered HBO and everything was right with the world. For the first time in a really long while, I can probably count the number of movies I was genuinely excited about watching in the Cinema. Obviously the ‘Dark Knight’, ‘Wall-E’ and ‘Iron Man’ come high on this list, but in addition you had a Lebanese movie ‘Caramel’ and the excellent ‘Persepolis’. I found ‘Juno’ incredibly well put together and enjoyed it immensely. In terms of anime, there really wasn’t much new going on for me to get excited about. And of course my surprise movie of the year, SuperBad. It should be just that, super shit, but it ended up being extremely good fun to watch. The only anime movie I watched this year was ‘Origin’, but that movie doesn’t come close to ‘Paprika’ from last year.
However what I wasn’t ready for was this attack of truly inspired 1hour dramas from HBO. To kick it all off I started watching ‘The Wire’ The problem with starting on ths series is that everything else doesn’t come close to it’s perfection, it’s character development and it’s overall 5 year story. I could go on and on about the Wire but it would take too long. Shortly after that I followed it with ‘The Sopranos’. Now this was a series that I had started watching when it first came out, but the Greek television networks fucked it up and I lost interest. Finished this series as well and while most got annoyed by the ending, i thought it was masterful.
Following on from ‘The Sopranos’ was ‘Entourage’ and ‘Oz’. I’d never seen any of these series before, and they all blew me completely away.
The writer’s strike did one thing, and that’s give me the chance to actually discover previous gems from HBO. In my search to fill the void that Battlestar Galactica, Lost, Prison Break, Heroes had left I discovered the best television series ever made.
Speaking of Battlestar Galactica, only a couple of weeks to go before the start of the new series, and that is something I’m seriously looking forward to for the start of 2009…thankfully not a moment too soon, because I think I’ve run out of good HBO series to watch.
Sports
This year saw me quit basketball. This was a tough decision to make and I actually went back in September only to remember the reason why I quit in the first place. It’s about the people now not only the sport. I have to make a great deal of effort to play (compared to Greece or Uni) and the problem is I can’t bring myself to keep going in week after week for a sloppy game with stupid egos and arguments. Maybe (like a Phoenix) I’ll grab some games this year, but I’m not very hopeful.
Family
I was meant to go down to Lebanon for my cousin’s wedding. However due to complications with the groom’s health the timing never came about and I didn’t end up going, which is a shame. However in a weird way I was able to see several of my cousins that i hadn’t seen in years (some bordering on 10 years). I also lost a grandfather figure in my life and my grandmother suffered from a stroke. Thankfully I didn’t have too many health issues, except my ongoing saga with my teeth, which I should be sorting out in the new year when I get my wisdom teeth taken out.
Internet
Without a doubt this has been the worst year for the ‘Kode. For some reason I couldn’t get around sorting out a design for the bloody place and that had a serious effect on the place in general. I had a huge amount of work done on Habari in the opening months of this year, and then I moved on to other things as I continued work on the ‘script’ (more on that in a while). I don’t intend to increase my exposure on the net, but rather i intend to consolidate all my efforts for the past 5 years. I want to make sure
Artwork - Sadly this was probably the one area of my life that really took a serious hit this year. I don’t actually know if I actually got around to drawing anything significant in 2008. A couple of sketches here and there, but nothing of any significance - easily the most disappointing aspect of the year for me. Here’s hoping 2009 can be completely different.
Story
There is a threshold. For me to write anything, I really need to disassociate myself completely from my daily life for me to create. My brain just cannot handle the onslaught of information. I need to time. This year I had the opportunity to do this in Greece a couple of times, however the first script is not done yet but at least some decent progress has been made from the year before and the general building blocks are apparent.
So was it a classic year? From a creative, productive pov, no it wasn’t. This was the year that I burnt out, or at least felt like I was close to burning out. I think I achieved some goals professionally that I’ve been working towards for the past 6 years, which I feel great about, and getting citizenship will change my life completely.
I view 2009 as a year for regrouping and a year for consolidating my thoughts, efforts and creativity into one goal, and I view it as a year for focus.
My focus in the last couple of months has shifted. This is probably the longest I’ve not been creative in the traditional sense of how I would describe being creative. I’ve not been drawing, not been designing (graphics at least), not been creating. Which to me is something really painful. I’ve stripped by involvement online down to an absolute minimum and all of this in the persuit of one thing. Finishing off my script.
This thing has been brewing for YEARS now and has taken more turns than I can imagine, but thankfully the last couple of months have been very productive. I’ve got the first half of the book mapped out and written. The thing is that creating a whole world is extremely hard. Every single character is new, every single setting needs to be described and every word of dialogue is analysed.
In order to help me get into the whole script writing, I’ve had to really emmerse myself in the comic production side of things. I’ve been reading scripts that are within the comic books that I read, I’ve been hunting online for various resources and the one thing that I’ve found is that the actual method is completely unique to every single person. I’m sure there are creators that have got the same method of working as I do, however I’ve not really read anyone’s account of this yet. Mainly I guess because the people that I’ve been reading that write and draw their own stuff have reached that level of craft where they can cut corners.
I’m still learning the track, so there is no corner cutting for me. The great thing about this experience however is that I can see the fruits of my labour slowly evolve. I started off with one page which was incredibly difficult to write (how do you start off your epic after all) before finishing off the first arc. It’s a slow process but ultimately once I’ve got the script in my hand I can then concentrate on the next task of drawing the thing. The plan and I will do EVERYTHING in my power to achieve, is to have my first graphic novel completed by the time I hit my 30th birthday (I turn 29 next week). It doesn’t have to be published, but it definitely has to be completed as one package which I can then start shopping around to see if anyone is interested (I have only two companies that I would consider publishing to, otherwise I think I’ll go down the self publishing route).
My creative energies for the next year are going to be fully dedicated to the story.