For your information...

I recently got hired as a graphic designer full time (yahoo yesss yayayayayay wahooooo!) to make infographics. Which I'm starting to realize, lots of people don't know what those are. So here's a few that I've done recently.

Okay okay, there's more than a few that I wanted to include, so you can see those after the jump.

Golden Hill Street Fair

Today was the Golden Hill Street Fair. Me and my hairy sidekick had fun. It was a small fair, but it had quality vendors and activities. Here's a quick look.

It was cool to see Yeller printing on the spot. The crowd was pretty into it which I found really exciting because I'm pretty into it. My dad taught me how in the garage when I was 13 and I started selling shirts with my own designs in high school. Someday I'll be a silkscreening champion again but for right now I'll just go watch other people do it.

Can we take a second to appreciate that hard side eye kapu can give? Homeboy does what he wants and judges everyone.

My first animation

Get out your memory books because this is a Lori first.

It's my first animated gif! Of course its a gator. I hand drew the four frames and then scanned the frames (well photographed and uploaded. I don't have a scanner.) Then I put the frames in Photoshop and used the animation feature. I didn't want my little albino gator to get lonely so I gave him some color and a potential girlfriend. Let's hope he doesn't screw this up.

Oh, here's the link to the tutorial I used.

Clipart: a history

Clipart will always have a place in my heart. I'm about to sound like an old fogie, but I have to explain. Back when I was a munchkin of probably 6 or 7 (already glued to the family Macintosh) I liked to design little projects using Clarisworks. This was pre-KidPix and circa Photoshop 3. Basically, Clarisworks let you combine text with images and that's about it. Without a scanner or Google image search (or Google for that matter), I was left with a single CD-ROM of clipart images. Terrible terrible clipart. Knowing the Millslagles, I'm going to assume it was the cheapest clipart package on the market.

The CD-ROM came with a booklet of all the images that you could thumb through to find the clipart that you wanted to use. I remember sitting on the floor of my dad's office with this book, tucking little scraps of paper in between pages to mark what images I wanted to use. (To clarify, my dad's "office" was really the storage room connected to my sister's room that we affectionately called Christmas Town. Aside from housing our trusty family computer, it also housed holiday decorations.)

So I had this clipart book stuffed full of bookmarks that I'd use in my rudimentary documents which had text along the lines of "LAUREN'S ROOM. KEEP OUT!!!" with a regal looking lion head below.  When I ran out of signs to make, AKA I was told to stop wasting printer ink, I would get a paper and pencil and draw from the clipart book. Again, keep in mind that this clipart was just the cheesiest, most poorly rendered and random group of images one could put together. Eventually, we got a scanner and the Internet started to evolve so I retired the clipart book before it could really damage my artistic aesthetic (thank god).

Fast forward 17 years (god, I am old) and I just made my first batch of clipart. I just started working as a graphic designer for the Carlsbad library and one of my main projects is the children's calendar. Every month there's a theme (August is Beachy) and normally the calendar is populated with dingbat images. However, now that you know my story, it's pretty obvious why I requested to make the clipart myself. Above is the result.

Kansas Street Collective

Chris and I have decided to start selling some crafty goods at the farmer's market and potentially Ray at Night. I want to be careful about branding our shop and curating what we sell so this plan has been brewing for a while. If I could even make the smallest amount of my income by selling things I make, I'll be the happiest camper. Being discerning and exercising my own taste is going to be the trick to having a shop that I'm proud of. So after lots of time and effort, I introduce the Kansas Street Collective logo:

Pretty fancy, huh?

Holla at a Balla

So after my show at UC Riverside's Spring Splash, I was in a bit of a rut art-wise. I went from racing to get my magazine sloths finished in a van headed for campus to twiddling my thumbs in my messy studio. Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego sent me an email (no, not personally, but as part of their mailing list) about a showcase of artists under 25. I figured this was up my alley because I am an artist and under 25 (duh). I also figured strategically speaking I had a good shot at placing since I make large scale sculptures that tend to make a big statement even if they are kinda shoddy. Not that I intended to make a shoddy sculpture, but a large clumsy sculpture will be more interesting to look at than a 2-D clumsy drawing. (Not that I intended to make a clumsy sculpture.) I'm really not getting myself anywhere, am I?

Flyer for the Greedy Organ Contest

So the theme of the contest was "The Greedy Organ", which according to MCASD is our eye. Being Lori, I decided to make a cute, but creepy character out of garbage and call it good. Here's my entry in action at the showcase.

So I left out a major part of this story - Eeerrrrr REWIND. In order to be one of the final finalists, I needed to be in the top three as determined by voting on Facebook. I'm not one to ask people to do things for me. I'm not one to really like talking about my art (it makes me sweaty). My name on Facebook certainly isn't my real name to minimize how many bozos I'm friends with. You get the drift, voting on FB wasn't really up my alley, but when you want something, you want something. I campaigned via FB, text, email, twitter and in person arm twisting. I campaigned like a fiend. I got my mom involved and she got her MK ladies involved. I have to say, I actually can't believe how much support I got. I really can't. It was overwhelming how hard everyone rooted for me and I don't even know how to properly say thank you. So if you're reading this- thank you. For reals and from the bottom of my heart, thank you.

With the help from everyone I am within four degrees of knowing, I made it to the top three finalists. From there, a panel within MCASD placed the final three. And holla at a balla because I was named the

Spring Splashed