multiple media… seriously!
Archive for the ‘Steve’ Category.
here’s a sneak peek at a font I hope to release later this year. it’s a block letter wildstyle. I’ve been wanting to do this kind of typeface for a long time, and fontstruct seems to be one way to get it done. It’s a little stiffer than I’d prefer it be, but I’ll see it through and maybe take another stab at it later in life.
Technorati Tags: fonts, fontstruct
So after receiving my order from Zazzle and from Cafepress I came to some very inconclusive conclusions. The chart above outlines my findings. Overall, both services have their plusses and minuses. Next time I need to design a black or other dark colored shirt, I’d probably make a decision based on the graphics, and the number of shirts i was going to purchase, and if they needed customization at all, and what my budget was, and possibly time of the year the shirts would be worn primarily.
zazzle has a pretty nice interface, lots of customization options. They were definitely was faster… 7 whole days faster. Zazzle’s print quality didn’t suck, it just wasn’t “awesome”. They offer customization options and a wide array of garments to print onto. They give you tools to help promote the products you’ve designed, but they were more expensive.
cafepress’ print quality is bordering on awesome, crisp and clean. But the overall color coverage seemed to be less dense. You can set your own prices at cafepress, and the thoughtfully sent washing instructions. If price is a concern when doing a print on demand black t-shirt, cafe press wins here.
Overall, I’m not terribly confident on the longevity of these shirts from either vendor. I think they’re both fine, but they’re probably best as a prototyping device. If you have a client that you want to demo a shirt design to, either service might work fine, I just probably wouldn’t bet my branding budget on these as a final product.
In part 4, I’ll wrap up with a comparison of post-washing results from both services.
Well, fully 7 days after my zazzle.com order arrived, my cafepress order finally showed up. 
Now I have something to compare and contrast to the first order.
So my first reaction was to the relative thinness of the shirt relative to Zazzle’s black shirts. It really does feel like a lighter weight shirt. As my wife rightly pointed out, “if you’re layering, that should be ok.” The second thing that I noticed was how much nicer the quality of the print is versus Zazzle’s output. It looks like a very similar process where they take the alpha value from the png file and print a white ink first, then do a CMYK inkjet print over the top of that… and presumably do some kind of heat treatment to set the inks. I’d have to go back and check my source files for resolution, but its *extremely* unlikely that I would send low res files off to zazzle and really high res files off to cafepress, even on accident. I just don’t roll that way. It’s high res all the time for me. So when I see the nicer quality print from cafepress, it really makes it hard to declare either one of these services as “the winner”.
So on to cafepress’ commission policy. They let you set your commission to any value you want, even to set it to $0… which can reduce the price of the item to a more palatable number. I’ll be honest, zazzle’s prices are kind of a shock considering you’re buying a t-shirt. cafepress isn’t much better, but at least I can optionally set the price for my customer if I want. Cafepress wins here, imo.
In part 3 I will outline a chart of some of the pros and cons of each service.
One note about cafepress’ print on demand for thing like this bib… they’re using a heat transfer process that does not use transparency data in your graphics… so the first time something like this bib gets dirty and you send it through the wash, the un-printed-on portion of the transfer absorbs some color and it becomes apparent that it’s a heat transfer… which sucks. I think they’re using a newer process to print directly onto light/white shirts that doesn’t employ this technique… which is good. This old method really blows. Cute design, though! Baby’s first turntable!
Back in 2007, I did a painting I ended up titling “balance/imbalance”. I also photographed myself painting it at 1 frame per second as I painted. Here now, in full vimeo glory, is the video I’ve been sitting on for over a year.
timelapse of me painting balance/imbalance from stevecooley on Vimeo.
The general rhythm is “mask, mask, mask, mask, mask, mask, paint” over and over and over.
Technorati Tags: painting, stevecooley, timelapse
I have a small show called “through the prism of San Jose” in the windows of Works/San Jose while it is preparing for an upcoming members show. Check it out!
Check out higher res photos and more of my artwork on flickr.
Technorati Tags: stevecooley, works, Works/San José, workssanjose
map() – similar to the processing.org function
interrupts() and noInterrupts()
degrees() and radians() (do not exist yet)
Support for uploading sketch using a programmer
Technorati Tags: arduino
Check out my new Creative Commons licensed font titled “pew! pew! pew!” at fontstruct.
[kml_flashembed fversion="9" movie="http://fontstruct.fontshop.com/widget.swf" width="570" height="90" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" fvars="d=dD0wJmFtcDtmPTU5ODc2"/]
hackzine.com just posted a note about fontstruct, and that pretty much was my night last night. It’s an easy to use flash interface for building typefaces. I’ve completed a new font called “netlabel”, and it’s available for free download here:
[kml_flashembed fversion="9" movie="http://fontstruct.fontshop.com/widget.swf" width="570" height="90" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" fvars="d=dD0wJmFtcDtmPTUwNjQ5"/]
Creative Commons licensed, no less! Oh yes, fontstruct… I like you a lot.
I did this painting at this month’s First Friday live painting event at Works/San Jose. I’d be happy to sell it to you.
And then I’m into all kinds of new new new new stuff thanks to my training at Techshop. Here’s some acrylic test pieces. I’m over the moon on the cut quality on these. I have some fairly big ideas that I’m going to try out on this front.
Here are some larger hardboard abstracts that I’ll be sealing and painting. I’m so excited to be able to get this level of precision into my build quality. Once I paint them, I think that will be a nice combination of machine precision and human imprecision :
And then we’re working on a mobile for our coming addition to our family. Here’s the first pass at the cast of characters. I output these at 100% of the design spec, but we both agree that I can redo these and bump up the size. A lot. Although, I’m totally shocked at the fidelity to the design that the combination of the laser cutter working on the 1/4″ hardboard can reproduce. I probably just got lucky with where I put the holes and how much space I added around them.
check out the detail:
Note the circles at the white arrows. No problem at all. Every one of the holes I put into the pieces produced a clean 1/4″ thick hardboard peg. I love this machine. It’s freakin’ awesome.
