Non-Zero Days

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A commenter in a thread on reddit once posted some advice on how to keep motivated and strive towards your goal. One of the main points in his post (which was full of value) was that if nothing else, every day should be a non-zero day. By that, he meant that even if you only take one step towards your goal on any given day, make sure that you take at least that one step. Even if it’s the smallest thing you can do to get yourself to where you want to be, it means that your day is not a failure. The advice stuck with me, so I made a piece around it.

Make Every Day a Non Zero Day

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been focusing on producing pieces with a focus on detail and intricacy, and while that is my style, and not something I want to abandon, I felt like making something a bit bolder. To achieve this, I chose to have the piece contained in a circle, and for the letters to be white on a strong black background. To keep things stylistically simple, I stuck with only two styles: copperplate inspired brush pen script and traditional Roman letters.

With this week’s project, I also wanted to design a piece that I would like to see on some merchandise, such as mugs or posters. It would be exciting to have some things to sell with pieces printed on them, so I thinking of starting to build up some pieces that would work well in that medium. This will be the first of “poster suitable” pieces, which would be something easily printable by a letterpress. As you can imagine, I’m sure, some of my other pieces would be too detailed to be printed easily on a reasonably sized poster, and you would need a very large mug indeed to accommodate them!

In other news, I have a new camera, so all the old photos of my work are likely to be replaced soon enough. I’ll wait until a nice sunny day (which is all the time!) and take some nice photos in the sunlight. That may include this one, as I unfortunately left it a little (very) late to catch the sun for the photo today.

New Logo

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This week, I’m a day early. That’s not because I’m some kind of motivation machine, as I’m sure you were all thinking, but because I’m going to be away tomorrow, so I pushed my deadline forward a little. Anyway, to business! I have some new branding that I’m going to be putting up in the coming weeks. First, I have a new logo for myself in the form of a monogram.

MonogramL

This is part of a lettering piece that’s going to replace the header I currently have for the website, which was an old piece that I did for Thing a Day. Seeing as it was part of Thing a Day, it was a piece that I planned and executed all in one day, so I decided that it was time to think a bit more deeply about my personal branding. I wanted a piece that could be broken down into several parts so that it could fit into different spaces, e.g. business cards, social media, website banners etc. What I came up with is something that you’ll have to stick around to see, as it’s not going up this week. What I am doing, though, is taking the social media element of it, and putting it out there already, seeing as it’s finished. What you see is a vectorised version of part of the lettering piece.

So what’s the deal? Well, it’s a monogram, meaning that it’s my initials combined into an interlinked shape. In the final piece, the letters overlap, and run on top of each other in different places, but I wanted to preserve simplicity for the social media icons. Being shrunk down to a small size hurts! Or at least, it hurts pictures, especially if they’re detailed. With this digital version, I made sure to keep it simple, but added in some details like a smattering of vector textures and a roughened edge atop a gradient background. All that so it looks a bit more interesting when it’s big, as you see it above. However, usually it’s only about this size:

MonogramTW

That’s twitter size, which I’m reliably informed is 73×73 pixels. Why that size, I don’t know, however, it’s only big enough for a certain amount, so simplicity (at least compared to what I usually go for) was pretty important.

 

A riddle

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Today, I have a riddle for you. Take a look and see if you can figure it out.

Dad

The riddle, then, is who is “this man”?

Recently, I started out on a foray into the world of brush pens, and found myself going back to what had originally got me into lettering in the first place: copperplate. Copperplate is a kind of calligraphy that uses a thin flexible nib to create varying thickness in the letter strokes by applying pressure and spreading the tines, setting it apart from broad nib calligraphy like Gothic. Once I had bought a brush pen a few weeks ago, I found myself trying to recreate the elegance of copperplate without the hassle of having to use dip nibs and an ink well, and the messiness that goes along with it. However, I had the wrong pen, and it was terrible. Then, I bought a couple of Tombow Fudenosuke pens, and after an agonizing 2 week wait as they were shipped from Japan, they got here. I really can’t recommend them enough.

I’ve been practising with them for a week or two now, and I’m getting to grips with how they work. At the same time, I’ve been exploring using a bit of photo wizardry to transfer the lettering to sit on top of photographs, as you can see above. Regarding the riddle, seeing as it’s a family matter, I chose a photo of my father, taken by my mother. That’s not a hint though! You’ll have to figure out the answer on your own. If you’re really stuck, a quick google will tell you the answer, but it’s a fun piece of mental gymnastics to go through to figure out the answer, much like phrases such as “I couldn’t fail to disagree with you less” and those sentences with the same word over and over again that still make grammatical sense.

Take a look at the unadulterated version of the lettering below to get more of an insight into what the original looks like:

Brothers, Sisters Riddle