Things

Online news headlines improved

thumb — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 23:26:17 +0000

All quote marks to be substituted withair quotesgifs.

Bring that back

thumb — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 16:41:40 +0000

The security of emergency medical coverage

thumb — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 23:00:40 +0000

Excerpt from a 2008 pitch animation. Jono always liked this bit, I think it’s the oddly realistic slumping.

How to make a decent drawing tablet

thumb — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 17:55:45 +0000

This is a nice idea: drawing straight onto a portable computer display, with the intuitiveness of pencil on paper, but with helpful computer features like Undo and Save-as and Transform.*
Seems like the ipad isn’t too far away, so let’s have a look at what they need to add:

The Pretty Good model

fine-tipped pressure sensitive stylus
pixel-level stylus position recognition
high ppi screen
thinnest possible gap between tablet surface and actual pixels (esp. if there is no on-screen cursor, so with thick glass you end up drawing in a slightly different position than you meant to)

The Best model

no distance between tablet surface and pixels (like Kindle e-ink screen)
really really high ppi screen
can somehow reproduce the feel of lots of different drawing surfaces and implements. The hardness of the implement, the tip shape and the resistance of the surface all influence visual style. (E.g. drawing on a glass Cintiq with a hard plastic stylus feels too smooth and thus imprecise.)**
tablet is large and light (and cheap!)

Alright Steve Jobs, let’s get on with it. I’m wasting precious years of my artistic life using sub-optimal equipment.

*The Wacom Cintiq is the closest device currently, but it is expensive, unwieldy, too lo-res, and the glass is thick. However I will be surprised if Wacom updates it. It will probably puddle along, secure as market leader, until a tablet-computer-with-proper-stylus comes along and makes it obsolete.

**Kim told me that someone told her that writing on a banana skin with ballpoint pen feels great. They were right. That should definitely be a setting on the Best model.

Update: Hmm, this Windows slate is getting closer. Doesn’t have the specs for making artwork yet but perhaps in a version or two?

Pooploop

thumb — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 00:32:31 +0000

Bored

thumb — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 23:01:04 +0000

Let fly and channel

thumb — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 23:01:22 +0000

Here is a poster for Ruby’s music/dance collective, Red Aveline.
Will you be in Naples on the 11th of October? Ok great!, go along.

Small man is running down the stairs

thumb — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 23:01:07 +0000

It’s flash sorry. I was going to make it an animated gif but it was 5MB.

:-)

thumb — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 16:34:44 +0000

(Flash) Oh bother, no emoticons for you.

Here are some of Skype’s new-and-improved chat emoticons. Designed by Jon Hicks and animated by me.

They’re an update of the original set, with a few new ones, a range of sizes for different screens, and more realistic puke.

If that sounds like your thing you can see the rest in Skype 5.5 for Windows.

Additional credits: Skype Design Director Steve Pearce; original emoticons by Priidu Zilmer; Lord of the (dance) Mark Lacroce.

Stop that man

thumb — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 09:01:41 +0000