Schedule willing, be sure to check back Wednesday and Friday (or next week, it being the holidays and all) for the next two comics that follow this one. We cover this topic somewhat on the next episode of The Reflex Blue Show, but I felt it warranted a little further storytelling.

Back for the first time in two weeks and …what? I drop the worst Panel One layout of all time? I apologize. I really don’t know what I was thinking. Marie has a head the size of a watermelon and it just doesn’t fit there.

I’ve been managing my Twitter space lately, relegating some friends to a more personal experience on Facebook, because let’s be honest: I don’t care where you are or what you are the mayor of, or what you think of what almost any celebrity or random twitter whore social media expert says. It’s been cathartic. I think of this process as cleaning up a messy desk that you just let get out of control. At one time you were sure you had a use for all of this crap on your desk, but now it has just become an unmanageable mess that saps the energy from you instead of delivering it to you. My newer, leaner Twitter follows make my life easier to live. If I don’t catch you there, though, there’s always Facebook, where I promise I’m totally not hiding your updates.

Now, if I may be done pissing into the wind, you may follow Conrad’s words of wisdom here.

Force Justify 2 is one of those things I am going to come back to and flesh out when and if 1PT.Rule ever gets a printed volume. I think I owe it to the people who would buy that fictional tome. Regardless of skipping a week and jumping way ahead like this, I promise you — nay, state as fact — that it was always going to end like this.

Next week we’re traveling to Denver to cover three, three, three HOW conferences and we’ll have all sorts of content every day. Mark your calendars. We’ve got, like, all kinds of mess.

Late Friday post! I wonder if anyone will see this before Monday? What can I say, I’m a working man, too. So much so, in fact, that I am struggling to find something wonderful to say at the beginning of this post and I got… nothing.

Creatively tapped out. Hopefully some Mass Effect 2 this weekend will cure it. Expect next week’s Force Justify comics to take a freak sci-fi twist if that pans out. Happy weekend, everybody!

Force Justify 2! I love drawing these strips, and composing them without panels this time around is an interesting challenge. So far I’ve been a little time crunched on each comic so they’re coming together similarly, I have high hopes of expanding on the visual storytelling here.

The writing is, of course, sooper-dooper time consuming. Graphic-design-based detective noir is a fairly specific subset of authoring, and I feel like I’m hitting the keys at the pace of a cro-magnon.

Next strip is Friday if my computer continues to hold up. So far every day begins with an adventure titled “How Many Startups Before It Stops Kernal Panicing?” It’s not a very fun game.

Back from a ten-day hiatus with perhaps the longest title ever. Just in case you’re on a small monitor, I want you to know we’ve got a lot of killer stuff under these comic posts, like the new episode of The Reflex Blue Show that launched today, too. We’re still working with WordPress and ComicPress to figure the new system out.

Force Justify first started here and ran for five strips. The sequel, as sequels must, will be a bit broader in scope. I made that logo special just for you.

This has been a hellish month for the strip. First I cut off my damn finger, which is healing very nicely into a dramatic scar. I can type with it again, but it still lacks the sensation of touch for such activities. Then, all last week, my computer experienced kernel panic after kernel panic, for five straight days. After much trial and error I determined that my Wacom driver needed to be updated. This is the current theory, even though I’ve had that thing hooked for two and half years without incident. When you’re a freelancer and your computer takes a dump, let me tell you, you start thinking about things. And stuff. And the general need for backup plans should such unfortunate events prove lasting.

If I ever come up with one I’ll be sure to let you know.

Juuuuuust right.

Newton’s communication woes continue. I believe this is known as an “overcorrection.” I also realize this makes three of my four main characters that we have now seen post-ahem, and I promise I’m not trying to maintain a trend. (And you shouldn’t hold your breath on ever seeing the fourth one.)

We’ve been talking a lot lately about how to talk to clients to get the most out of those relationships. I think we’d all love to be brutally honest, but that’s rarely the right tactic. In my youth, I once overheard a senior designer tell a client that “it would be irresponsible of me as a designer to make the changes you are suggesting.” We never heard from them again.

Leave it to me to have a comic ready to go for today that has nothing directly related to graphic design in it (you know, aside from the fallout inherent in slicing off your own finger making mockups) on a day where we were named one of HOW Magazine’s Top Ten Websites for Designers. If you like what you see, get your follow on for the latest comic updates.

However, if the above is not your cup of tea, we did just put the finishing touches on our second episode of the third season of The Reflex Blue Show, upon which Donovan toils next to me. It should be available shortly.

The recovery from Finger Gate is proceeding, though slowly, and I must apologize for the near week-long absence of the comic. If you are bothered by it, I encourage you to accidentally lacerate yourself in the most useful part of the most useful finger of your most useful hand. No, actually, don’t do that.

Obviously though, if you did, and you had some Super 77 hanging around, well, it just starts to make sense, doesn’t it?

So this comic took a little extra doing. Actually, it took the normal amount of doing, just with the added benefit of a right hand index finger plagued by seven stitches and a formerly gaping slice.

I took a chunk of a finger off a few years ago at my first job making a mockup under pressure, and I once had to drive a student to the emergency room when she did the same thing only way worse. This injury way less heroic where putting your life on the line for your job is concerned. After years of cutting everything I could get my hands on with a super-sharp exacto-knife, I cut the living crap out of myself… washing a steak-knife in my sink.

Seven stitches and still rocking the comic. Booya.

A friendly 36 Point reminder: Let’s all be good to each other out there.

Sometimes I’ll do a comic and not really have anything to say.  This one doesn’t need a lot of commentary I don’t think. Nice to see more sides of Marie, though.

Do check out The Reflex Blue Show Season 3 Premier where we cover the crap out of Adobe CS5, available now with super-hot in-browser player!! It’s been an awesome week here on 36 Point and we’ve got lots more planned. See you soon —

I missed about… 90% of the Adobe launch video this morning. I did see Mig‘s beautiful face pop up near the end though, so I guess that was worth it. Nope, the part I caught was some guy going on and on about some Flash-driven application something geared towards tablets. The strip practically wrote itself.

I livestreamed the creation of today’s comic on my Ustream Channel because I’m working from HQ today. So it’s not something I’ll be able to do all the time, but I had so much fun chatting it up with people during the creation of the comic I promise to do it again as soon as possible!

The CS5 web launch (is it really a launch if you can’t buy it that day? Isn’t it an “announcement?”) is Monday, and I’m sure I’ll be watching because… well at this point I’m kind of committed. Gotta follow through.

I wrote off the iPad the instant Steve Jobs showed it on stage and it was just a big iPod Touch. I said “really?!” and walked away. Last night, I had some time to kill and stopped by a Best Buy, the greatest of all places for a man to kill time. After stumbling around looking at Transformers mega dvd sets and limited edition xboxes I wandered over to play on some macbooks at their little Apple kiosk area. Low and behold, there were four iPads just sitting around to play with and no-one playing with them.

I am past the point of getting excited about Adobe CS5, though they are doing their darndest to get me that way. Yes, there are cool features being added in. No, I will likely never use them with any regularity. It’s the things I do use regularly (the snowflake upon the tip of the iceberg touched on in today’s strip, for instance) that have been bothering me since the turn of the century that they stubbornly refuse to fix. I say “stubbornly” because when we interviewed Von Glitschka back when CS4 came out, he told us that was exactly the way they behaved in the face of his feedback. One imagines some dickhead in front of a team of young programmers stating emphatically that “we don’t need to change the way our software works, you need to change the way you work with our software.”

One imagines, anyway.

But the usability differences between similar programs have become too small and too stupid not to simply become fixed through less effort than it takes to devise a way for Photoshop to invent a photo for you. The spacing between a page and the edge of a window should be no different in Illustrator than it is in InDesign, for instance, and in InDesign it is a comfortable amount of pixels. In Illustrator it smacks up against the side like a 14-year-old at a junior high dance. When you turn on rulers, the page in the window should adjust for the encroachment upon the available space. In some programs this happens, again, comfortably. In Illustrator it does not care what you turn on or off, or how you resize the page in the window, or what zoom you are putting to it. For crying out loud, it doesn’t even recenter the window in a resized window if you have the bloody page centered in the window to begin with! Photoshop and InDesign do this. As the original family of software, there is really no excuse for this kind of shoddy craftsmanship.

I understand that Flash and Dreamweaver are their own animals and require very different interfaces to achieve the goals of each program. I get that. Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator are so similar in use and function however, that a unified approach to usability is demanded.

Adobe’s options in this matter are to either fix these problems straight out, or explain to me in a rational fashion why default rotation in Photoshop is clockwise and default rotation in Illustrator is counter-clockwise. There have pretty smart people over there. I’m sure someone has noticed by now.

Continued from last week.

Following my stint of epic-and-epicly-unexpected freelance busy-ness, I of course succumbed to an illness that wound its leathery fingers around my very soul. This beast did not loosen it’s icy grip for several days, during which more projects were coming due and yet more were starting up. It occurred to me how much pre-planning and thought an independent designer would need to put into creating such a thing as “paid sick days,” and what a rarity those must be in our profession. It’s a shame, really, but we persevere.

Here we are, still …here, I guess? We broke a lot of stuff on the site Monday. I’m just saying. If you see today’s comic, and I hope you do, I cannot guarantee you will be able to see any of the 175 others. Of course, as with any good home improvement project, we’re breaking it all so we can make it better. Wildly, haphazardly breaking it. But ho! Forward we march into the wild blue yonder here at 36 Point.

Verily, I have no time to chat this morning aside from to say this happened to me this week while judging the ADDYs of Spokane, Washington. There is, in fact, a category of online games, and this was an area I found their community to show strength in. Perhaps if I had gotten a high score, they, too, would have found high scores?

Naw, that’s not really how I did it.

Or was it?

Naw. It wasn’t.

OR WAS IT?!?!?

It wasn’t.

If you’re wondering where we were last week, we were doing the same thing Conrad was doing. Sorry for the unannounced sabbatical, but since the site wasn’t burned down in my absence, and we did put out a pretty rocking podcast, I assume all is well.

You may be asking why this strip has a certain pink-and-magenta-based holiday at its core, and I will tell you. If you are doing a Valentine’s self promotion for your design business, now is the time of making. Not that I’m going to, necessarily. No, my efforts are being put into this contest for the Nebraska AIGA chapter. They do this sort of thing from time to time as a creative exercise and a fundraiser (free to enter, though). Since there’s absolutely no rule stating that you must be a Nebraska resident to enter, I highly suggest rocking something out and entering it. I expect my entries to be full of … character?

That is all. Voss Out.

I submit today’s strip as the new litmus test of what true bad design can bring upon the world. So no more bitching about Papyrus or Comic Sans. Even spec-work doesn’t unleash demon spawn from a non-hell.

I admit though, I am very turned-on by the idea of developing a typeface of my own at this point. Something to replace Anime Ace here on the comic would be good. I’m not guaranteeing anything here, but it’s something Jeff Smith did for Bone a decade ago and it worked wonders for the lettering-to-art juxtaposition in his work. And based on what Newton’s face looks like these days you can bet just about anything that man does is something I want to do.

I just want to say that the most important thing to take away from all of this is that Conrad has switched to black pants, and that’s a major step for me. I actually looked at Marie’s very first character sketch in an old sketchbook and she originally had a lot more black to her look as well, so look for that in the future. Some things didn’t transition as smoothly to black-and-white and I had thought, and others were apparently built for it, I just forgot. For, you know, a year.

Also: Designing your own typeface. Done it?

Last week’s blog comic set up, in my mind at least, the return of the Wandering Design Ninja, last seen (no joke) almost a year ago. It’s still one of my favorites, despite the terrible hack-job logo I shat out for it. At least we got some red up in here, though.

This one goes out to a friend from whom I pulled the initial client quote, which I think we’ve all heard at one point or another. I call it the kiss of death, generally with “projects” and “success” as the victims. There could be other interpretations, I suppose.

Hey everyone, it’s yesterday’s strip, today! Happy new year. That is all — see you next week!

W00t! Daily comics this week! Yesterday’s went up at like, almost 5:00, so if you missed it, see how this ball gets a rollin’. If not, you know… here. Admittedly this storyline is only tangently related to graphic design, but I think I’m just about done making excuses for going off-topic like this, it happens so often lately. Be sure to tune in tomorrow morning and then Merry Christmas!

Oh, and if you haven’t been around long enough to get the reference for the last panel, it comes from the 17th 1PT.Rule comic back last year. I am hesitant to link to it as it clearly marks the low-water mark of the quality of artwork present on this strip. It literally pains me to give this link to you, so consider yourself warned and protect your eyeballs.

Also Donovan posted our triumphant storming of the main stage at AIGA Make/Think in Memphis last October. We’re at the start of the video, though be sure you stick around for the other presentations — there’s some amazing stuff in there.

Here’s a little late-in-the-day comic action for you office types this week. This is actually so late in the day (unless you’re left-coasting it or something) it almost counts as Wednesday’s strip, but nay! Wednesday has its own strip. I will draw it Wednesday, as I wrote it last week. We are G-2-G in this situation people.

Yesterday we had a fun little thing on twitter. See, I’ve made these toys called Paper Dummies which you can pick up on our downloads page, print out and assemble of out the paper of your choice. We have the entire cast of 1PT.Rule available, with the exception of our stylish ladies man Steve Jordan (about whom the previous week’s worth of comics centered around). Well I took the opportunity of having a story line centered around Steve to finally kick out his Paper Dummy and then sent the thing over to site mega-friend Steve Gordon to do a custom-”paint” of the figure over the weekend. He turned out some hotness in record time and we sent it to everyone who re-tweeted the comic yesterday (almost everyone, I’m still missing a few e-mail addresses). That was the entirety of the window of opportunity there, folks. It was brief and fun.

The Regular Edition Steve Jordan Paper Dummy will be available next week.

Does Steve Jordan’s cool know no limits? I’m not sure of that anymore. I also wanted to use this strip to throw a little bit of doubt on the misdeeds of one Mr. Conrad Thompson. Is it all happening in his head? We can hope.

If you missed the first two parts (Rules 1 thru 6) you can find them here and here, and while you’re at it you might as well get some actual tips from the man himself, Steve J- er, Gordon, by checking out our interview with him from this time last year, and checking out his terrific book filled with actual advice for freelancers, 100 Habits of Successful Freelance Designers, available from those fine fine Rockport people. 

Do you follow me on twitter? You should, because not we’re offering something pretty cool over there today for fans of the strip. It’s also the best place to hear when the new comics launch and my thoughts on things like… I dunno… toast? It’s twitter.

And I almost forgot to say there’s new comics everday this week (well, every day this week that isn’t Christmas) for my peeps that are at their offices before the holiday! Check back tomorrow for some Secret-Santa action.

–nv–

I always tend to meet people who read the strip for the first time on weeks where I fail to manage a full three strips. This throws me off my game and I forget to act like an aloof rock star. That happened yesterday and I wanted to be all like “oh, you read it? That’s cool, I guess.” and instead involved an embarrassing display of fist pumping, high fives, and 80′s breakdancing moves.

Maybe Steve has a guide for that, too.

There will be comics next week! The current plan is Monday thru Thursday, to wrap up Steve Jordan’s Guide 2 Freelance Design and see how the office Secret Santa plays out with the rest of our cast.

That’s the plan, anyway. Happy almost holidays!

I have a bunch of these. I was going to put today’s up with a special bonus, the long-awaited Steve Jordan Paper Dummy, but it’s taking a little longer than expected and, frankly, I’ve got other ways I need to spend my afternoon. But don’t fear! It is on the way this week–along with some special bonus for the people who follow me on Twitter. Late –

I’m on the job hunt, currently, which occasionally feels more like a scavenge, and I will from time to time get a heads up for Craigslist. I don’t frequent it. The reason for this is that every time I do, every post I see looks exactly like the one above. It starts with an insult to an unnamed foe, continues with the promise of a world-changing idea, and reaches its climax on several notes that make a vague commitment to something resembling, but never confirming, compensation. I have a friend or two — in larger markets — who swear by it, but I can hold no feelings of legitimacy for those who post their jobs on it.

Though I heard that’s where Pentagram gets their partners. Maybe?

I’m short-winded today; as Mondays go, today’s been a little rough. Not the least of which for that damn new AOL, er, Aol. logo that the snakes at Wolff Olins cooked up (check the amazing write-up by friend-of-the-site Alyssa Walker over n Fast Company). “My company’s logo is confusingly-lowercased letters over stock photos!” is the cheer that I’m sure went up to the employees at AOL who didn’t just lose their jobs. Expect a more thorough examination of that situation later.

Also, I’m taking votes as to whether or not to do a comic this Friday. If a lot of you read this are working that day, then yes, but you’ve got to sound off in the comments. If you’re not working, cut me some slack and let me know, and I’ll cook up magic for you first thing Monday morning.

Smiles — nv–

How many Citizen Kane jokes are too many Citizen Kane jokes? I don’t know the answer to that question.

Conrad’s mad goal of becoming the AIGA Director of Chairs (?!?) for fun and profit continues unabated this day. There’s a point there, which, when reading up on the AIGA page, throws the concept of being on that board into sharp relief. You are required to give or raise $10,000, and that does not include sponsorships. So, outside of asking your dad for some serious scratch or sending your kids door-to-door selling M&M’s for $1 ten-thousand times, I’m not sure what options you have for not just writing them a check for some cold, hard cash. This is a barrier for entry, no doubt, the responsibilities of which are surely not lost on the organization. It gets you an upper-crust of designer leader, or at least some scam-artists who are good at price-jacking clients (I have no information that the latter has ever occurred).

But to me, it sounds an awful lot like that WK12 “internship” that students and young designers go batshit for. It’s an internship, and it costs you unknown thousands of dollars. That’s if they accept you. Now, I’ve actually known two people from my town that have gone through that internship, and they are not doing poorly — not by a stretch — as a result. But still. Not the highest road.

AIGA was kind enough to send me an electronic letter the other day, which suggested I might nominate myself (or someone I know) to their national board. Of course someone sprang immediately to mind, and the wheels were set in motion.

I never really see a lot of this process, though there’s a handy webpage to introduce you to it, and it all seems unintentionally secretive. No-one really campaigns to be on the board of directors, it all just sort-of happens. You don’t see posters or viral ads, campaigns spitting bile back and forth at one-another. It’s all rather boring, I think, and that’s why we never see it. Debbie Millman’s President of the AIGA now, and that just sort of makes sense. But did anyone run against her? Was there a smear campaign and a debate? Perhaps a spunky, back-water running mate? Obviously this process has a long way to go.

To help it along, show your support for AIGA’s next National Director of Chairs, Conrad H. Thompson, by downloading this extreme-election wallpaper to your computer or iphone:

I’m not even sure how I got this comic done today, really. Between designing websites, updating online portfolios and job hunting, plus, well Modern Warfare 2 on my Xbox, it’s almost a miracle. So, that being said — here! Enjoy!

I really wasn’t happy with Conrad’s exclamation in Monday’s strip — the bold type today nails it a lot better I think. 

I am not “Oscar Mike”

Ahoy!

Looks like we’re going to get a Saturday, proper Halloween episode after all! Be sure to tune in tomorrow — SATURDAY — for the exciting conclusion!

Boo!

Big delay but we’re still rolling on this tomb… er, tome. Whichever.

The Meat Puppets poster by the good fellows at Aesthetic Apparatus has long been a source of the feelings of both love and hate within my peer group. Basically it’s a poster-child (no pun intended!) for meaningless, clip-art driven design, and yet you can’t deny the thing is a beauty, and it kinda looks like the mask is made out of hamburger. So that’s hot. So for me I have days that go one way and days that go another, but I’ll bet you never knew what he looked like beneath that mask. As the piece that I can most directly tie to the resurgence of the gig poster as an art form, I have no trouble putting it along side the other works in this story, that’s for sure.

And here we have come to the meat of it… prepare yourselves for sheer, unadulterated terror!

Of some sort, I think.

Be sure to tune back in tomorrow, yes that’s right I said tomorrow, for the next chapter!

I hesitated from posting this strip when the event, depicted as accurately as possible in the strip, originally occurred. I told people about it, to be sure, but things posted online seem to have a way of being found. I’m over it. Imagine, if you will, not just your standard I-cannot-pay-you new client meeting scenario, but one in which your absolute dream project, perhaps the very thing you have wanted to build since childhood, is dangled in front of you for an hour of your life. And that, at the end of this hour, you have received assurances that this is a legit deal, they are a legit business, and they want only you for this.

And then they say, “But of course we can’t afford to pay you yet.”

For those not in design, try the following exercise in order to relate: Find an adorable 4-year-old girl. Give her a puppy. Let her name it; let her pet it and hug it. Then take the puppy and throw it off a cliff. The girl’s face is my face. That was the analogy. Your mind is blown.

I hope everyone is enjoying the Hobo experience here on 36Hobo now. What will these little rascals get themselves into next? $5 logos on iStock? That sure would buy a lotta soup!

Quest for cool continues. Today I pick a fight with designers who have Golden Tee. I hate you. I hate you so hard. Not really. But anyone who thinks there’s a difference between Golden Tee and the crappy touch-screen video-strip poker that’s always up at the bar; or worse yet anyone who thinks there’s no difference between Golden Tee and Street Fighter, can go straight to hell.

I plan to keep the hot designer-blood-boiling conversation topics coming at this pace. Buckle up for Friday’s take on Netflix. OOOOOOOOOOOOh!