It’s a little rough as it came straight from a scan, but I’m proud to present to you my first ambigram (it still reads “Alec Rios” when rotated 180 degrees).

After being inspired by ambigram logos and particularly the work of John Langdon, I started sketching fragments and ideas for an ambigram of my own name. One week and several paper balls later, I came up with a rough draft to work off of. The last step was to refine it and trace it with a pen. Overall, the outcome was worth the paper cuts and dizziness from rotating the paper back and forth so much. Let me know what you think in the comments.

© 2008 Alec Rios

Ambigram of My Name - Alec Rios

© 2008 Alec Rios

Some Gorilla Photos

If you’re into carefree drawing like sketching and doodling, you might be interested in a new web service—Sketchplanet. Registration is quick and easy, which allows more freedom socially and artistically. After sketching, you can title it, add tags, and it will be displayed in your artist profile. You can also favorite and comment on other sketches from the fast growing community.

The sketchpad is simple and intuitive. Obviously, you can’t get as much control and precision as you would in real life, but there have been many impressive sketches saved by other artists. Overall, Sketchplanet is a fun site that I know I’ll find myself visiting from time to time.

© 2008 Alec Rios

Sketchplanet

Thank You

I’d like to thank everyone who has helped my blog grow. Whether you left a comment, voted or submitted an article to a social media site, emailed me feedback, sent my link, or mentioned me to a friend, it is very much appreciated. So thank you readers, commenters, and supporters, and thank you StumbleUpon, Design Float, Design Bump (my largest traffic sources), and the people behind them.

Most Popular Posts

• How to Make the Worst Website
• 50 Killer Graphic Designs
• Letter Shaped Logos
• How to Make a Website
• 10 Great Ambigram Logos
• My Abstract Drawing
• Bad Blogging 101
• How to Attract Zero Visitors
• Most Creative Blog Designs
• Does Logo Placement Matter

© 2008 Alec Rios

My 50th Post

Round 5 by Junian

Ludos by Raja Sandhu

Steers Restaurant by Fogra

JCK by Raja Sandhu

Let me know what you think about these in your comments.

© 2008 Alec Rios

More Letter Shaped Logos

I dug this up out of my junk drawer. It’s just another doodle created on the lined pages of my geography notebook. Weaved thorny vines. Looks like a tattoo design. There are lots of little stray lines and other mistakes, but all I used was pen, so I don’t feel too bad. I rarely use pencil at school so that’s all I had. Let me know what you think.

© 2008 Alec Rios

Random Doodle #5

• Inspiring - Ever see some horrible design and say to yourself, “I could do so much better?” There has been many times where I become motivated to become an actor, a painter, or anything because I feel like I could produce a better quality something than what I’ve seen before. Most people are motivated by beautiful things, but I think you can be motivated by either extreme. This may seem strange, but as long as you’re inspired, that’s all that matters.
• Discouraging - Sometimes bad art can just turn you off to a certain craft because it makes you forget what’s possible to create, as if you’re limited to the (poor) art you’ve seen. Remember that you have different talents than other people and it’s likely you might be able to create something better. Being discouraged is never good, so you should not interpret bad art this way.

How do you feel about bad art?

© 2008 Alec Rios

Two Ways to Interpret Bad Art

Doodlage is a blog all about the underrated art of doodling, based on the idea that “everybody is an artist.” They feature sketches and doodles drawn on just about anything you can think of. The creators, LeO and RaShell, liked some of my doodles that I’ve posted here on my blog, so they invited me to be a guest doodler at Doodlage. It has a great idea behind it, so I’ll be happy to post some doodles over there once in a while.

© 2008 Alec Rios

Doodlage

General Bad Blogging

Miscellaneous tips to make you a worse blogger.

• Let the publish button get dusty. Considering the whole idea behind blogging is making posts, the best way to blog badly is to not do that. You can only get readers if they have something to read, so I’d have to say that is the best way to avoid getting them.
• Be sure to hate what you’re blogging about. Passion will show up in your writing, but only if you have it.
• Be impatient. Expect to become a top blogger overnight, and get frustrated when you don’t. Underestimate the time it takes to build a reputation in your niche.
• Confidence is overrated. On the other hand, not believing in your blog may be a more important characteristic of bad bloggers.
• Have an unappealing website design. First impressions count for a lot on the internet, so what visitors see when they land on your site will affect their entire perception of your blog.
• Obsess over statistics. Checking your number of subscribers, visitors, etc every chance you get can help you blog worse, because they can distract you from actually blogging.
• Read more than you write. Since articles will write themselves, you might as well kick back and spend your day reading other blogs.
• Give up. The best method to do anything badly is to not do it.

How to Write Posts Everyone Will Hate

Considering the royalty of content, this is a very important aspect of bad blogging.

• Remember that grammar is your enemy. Punctuation marks are just for decoration, caps lock doesn’t convey anger, apostrophes are an unnecessary stretch for your pinky, and correct spelling is just another guideline for the English language, right?
• Don’t write about what your blog was intended for. Let off-topic posts completely dominate your archives and maybe even change your blog’s niche once in a while to keep things interesting.
• Prevent people from scanning your content. Don’t use any paragraphs, bullets, numbers, or any kind of text formatting that can serve as “landmarks” for people to keep their place while reading on your blog.
• Forget structure completely. There’s no more intimidating piece of literature than one that’s composed in one giant paragraph without any subtitles or anything that can break it up into more manageable reading material.
• Make post titles as vague as you can. Give no clue whatsoever as to the contents of each post. You might even want to go one step further and create misleading titles that have absolutely nothing to do with the actual post.
• Make post content as verbose as you can. The opposite of above. Do not ever get to the point or purpose of the article. Ramble on about irrelevant subjects until you feel the reader’s unnecessary suspense has continued far enough.

How to Maintain a Lonely Environment on Your Blog

Tips taken from my previous post, “How to Attract Zero Visitors.”

• Steer clear of other bloggers in your niche. Make no contact whatsoever with anyone who could link to you, write for you, work with you, etc. In the long run they’ll just end up sending you traffic and what not.
• Keep your forums signatures link-free. Communities of like-minded people are infested with potential clickers of your links. Prevent any pageviews by making sure you don’t put links to your website in your signature space, especially if you’re an active contributor to the discussions. As a general rule, don’t place links to your site anywhere on the internet. They’ll just be followed.
• Forget everything you’ve ever learned about SEO. Who wants Google crawling all over their website? If you don’t know anything about Search Engine Optimization, consider yourself ahead of the game. If you’ve already spent countless hours reading up on it, clear your mental-cache immediately while you still can. Forget everything. Now, open up your website files and misuse h1 tags, erase keywords, and rewrite your URL structure.
• Stay away from social bookmarking and such. Prevent the potential floods of traffic by keeping your distance from Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, and all those guys. This means don’t submit your links, and pray that your readers (if you have any) don’t submit them either.
• Don’t speak of your website. When your friends and family ask why you’ve been slaving away over a hot keyboard all day, just make up an excuse. Or if you’re a terrible liar, just remember you have the right to remain silent. Word of mouth can be a powerful marketing technique, so it’s best to keep the conversations non-internet related.
• Have a horrible website design. The only thing that’ll come out of a good design is praise. You’ll be published in galleries, you’ll be talked about, you’re links will be passed around like a bowl of potato chips. Play it safe and shoot for a bad website design. (see: How to Make the Worst Website Ever)
• Write terrible articles. The worse the content, the less you’ll be linked to. It helps to ignore grammar rules, ramble on about irrelevant subjects, and most importantly: write about things that nobody cares about.

There you have it. (As always, if you want to be a good blogger, do the opposite.)

© 2008 Alec Rios

Bad Blogging 101

1. Inspiring - This is exactly how you should interpret good art. When you see an amazing drawing or listen to some incredible music, you should be inspired by it. That should then motivate you to work harder to create art at the level of your inspiration.

2. Discouraging - Sometimes when we see good art we become discouraged from practicing our own craft instead of becoming inspired. I know there were times when I wanted to give up because I didn’t think I’d ever be at a certain level of skill. This just isn’t healthy. Good art is supposed to remind us of the possibilities and our potential, not demean our current talent. And sometimes - being a perfectionist - I forget that inspiring/discouraging artists have usually been doing whatever they do longer than I have.

How do you feel about good art?

© 2008 Alec Rios

Two Ways to Interpret Good Art