Made it back into Manhattan this week and — not surprisingly — quickly found a bunch of new street art. The colors on this piece caught my eye. The spray paint is a bit fun as it roves within and outside the lines. But I found the dots to be a bit derivative of Damien Hirst who always leaves a bitter exploitative taste in my mouth these days. Luckily, this artist — Mo Riza — is more than dots and I actually like the rest of his work better than this piece.
Manhattan, New York
Work long enough with computers and you’re bound to lose some data. This project is a bit about reclaiming a lost set of illustrations as well as a chance to design and develop another custom web project.
The original illustrations were drawn back in San Francisco about 20 years ago. There somewhat generative and they’re somewhat true to the folded inkblot process of the original Rorschach test with near perfect symmetry. As I recall, I was just playing around with some of the features in Adobe Illustrator allowing the application to spit out a shape based on my transformation inputs and then copying, flipping and combining the two halves. There was no commercial project or business goal. It was just for creative experimentation and learning. Once I created one, I really liked the final effect and went about creating some more to see what the partially random process would produce. There was something intriguing in the shapes and spiked angles that I really enjoyed. So I dropped them onto a large art board and printed them out on a sheet of 12″ x 18″ white paper.
The Illustrator file was dropped into some folder on a hard drive, never to be seen again. The page sat in a giant pile of test prints for twenty years.
Flash forward through the decades and although I had kept the pile of test prints, they had been relegated to a box in storage. After buying a house, I finally had a chance to set up an office and studio which led to pulling out and digging through all sorts of ephemera from my design career — most notably for this story — a box of test prints.
Seeing the print of these illustrations once again brought back the original joy and inspiration. I quickly set off on a digital forensic search of various hard drives, ZIP archives, CDs and DVDs to look for the source file. Alas, as you may have gathered from the introduction, the file was not to be found. It may still exist, but I can’t find it and my patience for searching has been exhausted. There comes a point where you have to call off the search for the sake of moving ahead. Perhaps someday, an archivist (or intern) will meticulously sort and catalog all of the nonsense I’ve created.
With only a print and no digital file — and with the desire to do something with the illustrations — I went about the task of reviving them. I scanned them all at high resolution, converted them from raster to vector and then individually edited the paths to try to get as close the originals as I could. Now of course, there’s probably going to be some differences and some loss of detail in the translation process. It’s unfortunate, but not unexpected and overall, I’m happy with the results. Better to have a file I can work with.
But what to do with the illustrations now that they were back in digital form?
Conceptually, they had always reminded me of inkblots from a Rorschach test, so that was really my frame of reference for presenting them on the web. I considered animating them all in a series, morphing them from one into another, but that approach, while attractive as a technical challenge, didn’t feel emotionally true to the inspiration.
A bit of luck and a bit of research really got the art direction and design for the page started. The luck came in the form of some type samples from the Letterform archive that came across my feed. The research led to the realization that the Rorschach test and the Bauhaus were occurring at the same time — the 1920s. No self respecting designer can go through their career without a bit of study (and possibly reverence) for the Bauhaus, so it was a natural place to start in terms of the typography for this project. I love vintage paper and tons of texture and the faded red and black ink in the old print samples is just fantastic. The historical relationship between the two just made sense in terms of the design direction.
The first step was to capture those faded colors into a web palette. A bit of sampling along with some trial and error and I had a good set of colors to work with. I set them as custom properties (variables) in the CSS to make them easier to work with during the initial design phase.
--wheat: hsla(39, 67%, 82%, 1);
--gold-crayola: hsla(36, 58%, 74%, 1);
--light-french-beige: hsla(35, 38%, 62%, 1);
--copper-red: hsla(18, 48%, 57%, 1);
--fire-opal: hsla(6, 74%, 63%, 1);
--cafe-noir: hsla(28, 38%, 21%, 1);
--blk: rgba(51,54,47,1);(I have no idea about the color names themselves. I think they were generated by the tool I was using and don’t really correlate to actual CSS color names. I left them in place out of laziness, but normally, I would have come up with my own, shorter names. The last color, “blk” is an example of how I would normally name color variables. As to why I used HSLA for some color values and RGBA for the last, again laziness. I should have cleaned it up, but…better to ship it out. And yes, I probably don’t need the alpha “A” in there for modern browsers, but I haven’t mentally made the switch as I write.)
For the typography, I wanted to go true vintage and see what actual Bauhaus type I could find. I stumbled upon Breite Grotesk from the Schelter & Giesecke type foundry which was an influence on the Bauhaus movement and thankfully, there was a remake from Nick Curtis that looked really great on the page.
For the page design, this was really a giant exploration of blend modes, masking, gradients and backgrounds albeit mostly without success.
Since the original ink blots were each on their own card, I wanted to try to replicate that experience. Adding a vertical scroll snap to the page allows for each to stand on it’s own.
scroll-snap-type: y mandatory;For the page background itself, I wanted to try to mimic that old newspaper print seen in the Bauhaus examples. I started by setting a base background color and a large box shadow to darken the edges. I then included two background images — a vintage paper and a gritty texture — and set the blend mode for them to multiply which creates the effect. It’s not quite what I wanted (is it ever?), but it’s close enough.
background-color: var(--wheat);
background-image: url("../img/whitegrit.webp"),url("../img/paper1.webp");
background-blend-mode: multiply;
box-shadow: inset 0 0 48px 36px hsla(35,38%,62%,.7);It’s worth noting that the backgrounds stay fixed to the page and then the content then scrolls. It kind of ruins the effect, but it does help maintain a smooth experience. It’s a trade off. You get the same background for each card, but each card stands on it’s own — and without a break when you scroll. I didn’t want a new background to scroll into place with each card. Beyond the performance hit of loading 15 separate backgrounds, the hard line/difference between each background just bothered me.
For the large <h1> title, I wanted to try to add more texture within the characters. It’s an effect I’ve seen elsewhere and wanted to try out. Again, it was to fit with the art direction and the vintage feel of the old Bauhaus prints. Turns out it takes a bunch of techniques to create the effect.
At the base level, we’re setting the color of the text to transparent, using texture as a background, clipping the background to only the characters, applying a blend mode and then reducing the opacity just a tiny bit to try to match that vintage red print color. I know, I know. It’s sounds like a lot. But we’re not done!
At this point we’ve got a textured background that’s slightly see through, inside characters that have no color. The text itself is normal HTML. You can select it, but it’s not very visible. It’s does have texture though.
color: transparent;
overflow-wrap: break-word;
background: url(../img/texture1.webp);
background-clip: text;
mix-blend-mode: multiply;
opacity: .8;So…how do we get the color into the text? We use a pseudo class! We set the ::after property to contain the text — via a data attribute — and the color. Then add a bit of a blend mode and position it correctly and we’re all set.
content: attr(data-text);
position: absolute;
left: 0;
top: 0;
color: var(--fire-opal);
mix-blend-mode: multiply;Yeah, I know. It all sounds a bit much. Or a bit confusing. Or both. Please don’t get discouraged if you’re just starting out. It’s all about experimentation and tweaking little things to see how it works.
A few other tidbits in the design to explain, mostly about the exact thing I mention above — trial and error. For each of the inkblots I initially wanted to add a different background texture to make them appear more inky or watery. Sounded easy at first glance, but there were definitely tech challenges. The main idea was to use each inkblot SVG file as a mask for the watercolor texture file. This worked initially, but the SVG’s themselves were way more complex and often had multiple separate paths — meaning the code size exploded as I was essentially dropping the SVG code into the CSS as well as including it as a link on the page. I tried just using one of the SVG paths as the mask, but this looked odd as only one part of the inkblot had the texture and the others did not. So…I just paired back the opacity of each and added a tiny bit of blur via a CSS filter to give them the more vintage look.
I did take one little typographic liberty at the start. I wanted to use some sort of arrow to indicate visitors should scroll. But since the typeface didn’t have an arrow glyph, I repurposed a dagger glyph. It’s certainly not what the glyph was intended for, but it’s kind of neat and animating it wasn’t too hard. Again, I used a ::pseudo class to drop it into place and animated with CSS keyframes.
span {
mix-blend-mode: overlay;
transition: all .3s ease;
animation-name: fadedown;
animation-delay: 0s;
animation-duration: 2s;
animation-iteration-count: infinite;
}
@keyframes fadedown{
0% {
opacity: 0;
transform: translateY(-1rem);
}
90% {
opacity: .7;
transform: translateY(0);
}
100% {
opacity: 0;
}
}
span::after {
content: '\2020';
color: var(--fire-opal);
}There’s more to the full CSS, but I’ve omitted the stuff that just handles things like margin or font choice.
Overall, it was good to get these illustrations to some sort of final resting place and to connect them, in some small way, with their inspiration. I’m a big fan of adding texture, so I’m sure I’ll revisit many of these techniques on other projects and continue to follow along as methods change and improve.
Also worth noting that these are just illustrations and should not be used for psychiatry. 🙂
There’s a lot to unpack in this piece — loose brushwork, layer upon layer, a frantic somewhat anxious details and an unusual color palette. There’s a pulsing radiating energy to the brain and even the whole piece. I’m not even sure it’s by a single artist or just a various people adding to the mix. I snapped this photo In December, so perhaps it’s serving as a metaphor for the last year representing our collective dread. Let’s hope we can shake it off and regain a bit of our self health in 2023.
Chinatown, New York
Found this little sticker outside the market and the lettering caught my eye. Definitely a practiced hand at work here — which makes sense if you’re going to go through all the expense of printing stickers. Practice, practice, practice before you print. I do wish the color wasn’t so faded. I bet the original blue was much more vibrant.
Westchester, New York
This is a follow up post to the original blog post. Go read it to learn the inspiration for the project.
View the new project page here.
Over the last few years, there’s been a lot of discussion in the web and design community about “owning your content.” Partly a backlash to the corporate platform takeover, partly a desire to actually create something unique. There’s a definite nostalgia for the early days of the internet when websites were a beautiful haphazard journey around the world into someone’s domain.
Platforms are great for ease of use, but little did we know about the harvesting and selling of our data. Not to mention the straight up fuckery around monetizing hatred and sowing discord. Don’t get me wrong, I’m as guilty as the rest of you in creating accounts on the big platforms. When they first came online, it was a arms race of FOMO as I tried to secure my preferred user name and join the communities where I thought I needed to be seen. I think this all happened in a gray area between where browsers, dial-up, web hosting, HTML, CSS and Javascript were all a little stagnant and confusing. Somewhere between the pages filled with purple visited links and the shiny perfect user interfaces provided by gated communities. Of course, Adobe Flash filled the void for those more design or technically minded, but it was still difficult, expensive and therefore beyond the average user. So the platforms flourished and we all flocked leaving our sites stagnant.
Now it seems we’re all remembering what we left behind. Or at least, dusting off our blogs and creating projects just because we can. Just because we want to. I’ve never gone so far as to ignore this blog despite my post volume fluctuating with the ups and downs of life (this is my 300th post!), but I certainly left behind the creation of pages and sites that were simply fun exercises. I think I got stuck in the delusion that every project, every idea needed a unique domain name when in reality, it just needed a folder on my hard drive, a directory on my web server. Not every idea needs to be a financial success nor a financial burden. Frankly, it’s been liberating to remember that time when I was creating and putting all manner of weird and wonderful web pages online. I’ll probably have to dig through old hard drives to find some of those ideas, if only to reminisce.
I’m not sure I was actively considering all the above when I started with my latest projects. I think it may have been that they didn’t fit into a traditional “blog post” nor did they fit into a “work portfolio”. Projects like creating a set of CSS colors based on a science fiction movie are hard to place. Same goes for creating a virtual bookcase. They’re really just for me, just for fun and no less valid than any other project! As an artist, it’s sometimes hard to remember the latter.
I came across this beautiful typography project by another designer (hosted on one of those corporate platforms) which was also inspired by the Destiny video game. This got me a bit nostalgic and I started looking back at all the symbols I had previously drawn. What I realized was that, despite the blog post about the project and even including a video of the symbols in the post, the entire thing was hosted on my Instagram account. And by virtue of the nature of the platform, the individual pieces were now buried in the feed. You’re not really able to see them all as a whole. (Not to mention the issues of copyright with Instagram and surveillance capitalism in general.)
Feeling a bit re-inspired, I’ve gone back, grabbed all (or most) of the original drawings, prepped them and built out a single page with the project. In terms of development, it’s all fairly basic HTML and CSS using the <figure> element to hold each image saved as an SVG file. I added a bit of flair by including the Destiny logo and a game background image for the hero. There’s CSS grid for the responsive layout and a little return to top button via a bit of Javascript (which I think I need to update to perform better). The hardest part of the whole thing was probably writing ALT text for each image — both from a volume perspective (118 images) as well as from a content perspective (it’s hard to describe a symbol from a science fiction story).
The project is now available to view as a complete set with the bonus of not having the UI distractions nor the advertising of Instagram. All in all, I think it’s a much better experience and I’m happy to have it all in one, self hosted place.
Still mining the archives as the pandemic keeps on going. Here’s a large piece from somewhere in Brooklyn. There’s some nice shading under the eye sockets. The attempt to add a devil lock of hair doesn’t quite work in terms of the perspective, but I still like it. This particular shade of blue isn’t one you see very often either.
Brooklyn, New York
More unseen gems from the archive. This morning a bit of positivity with your typography. I can only imagine that it’s quite difficult to freehand write cursive this large — and to do it with a bit of style. Check the little serif connector on the letter “y”. Gorgeous. I also remember a bit of photographer’s conceit as I tried to line up the construction light with the exclamation point.
Manhattan, NYC