I’m not sure of the title yet. I… have some ideas. I also have a full timelapse movie in the works for this piece as well. So when I get that done and figure out the title, I’ll post ‘em up.

Technorati Tags: 2008, abstract, acrylic, art, painting, san jose, stevecooley

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Ah, finally.

Technorati Tags: abstract, acrylic, art, painting, stevecooley

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So, here’s a new piece:

I have a tryptic and another piece that I’m wrapping up for Uproar 08.. posting soon…

Technorati Tags: 2008, abstract, acrylic, painting, stevecooley

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At last: the Benefit Art Auction! You are the key to Works’ renewal!

Dear artist and friend of Works/San José:

For the first time in two years, Works, your community art and performance center, is asking for your art for the 2008 Benefit Auction! Works is right now working toward a stable home, rehiring its part time gallery coordinator, restarting music and performance nights, and accepting exhibition proposals for the new year in its current space as the guest of the property owners. This will be the most important auction ever for a south bay arts organization, and your commitment and most inspired artwork are needed now to move works into the future. Over the previous few auctions works has nearly doubled its revenue from this essential fundraising event. At this critical time, with your help, we can and must continue this trend.

PLEASE CONFIRM right away that you will contribute to this important event by sending an email to auction@workssanjose.org. Include the spelling of your name, email address, and phone number, so that we can include you in auction press releases and on our website as early as possible. Please find artist donation forms, instructions for sending a jpeg image of your work, and auction updates at: www.workssanjose.org

Please deliver art to 451 South First Street in downtown San José on one of these 3 days: Thursday, November 6, 3 to 7pm, Friday, November 7, noon to 4pm—or 8 to 10pm during South First Friday, or on Saturday, November 8, noon to 4pm. All work should be complete with frame, glass, etc. as appropriate, or otherwise ready to hang or display. You may retain a percentage of the sale of your work or donate the entire sale amount to works. As just one token of our appreciation, we offer you a free one year membership to Works/San José.

Exhibition: November 20 through December 6
Reception and Auction: December 6 starting at 5pm with auction at 7pm

We look forward to seeing both you and your work! All proceeds support exhibition, performance, and education programs at Works/San José, your nonprofit, volunteer-run, community art and performance center.

Thank you!

Sincerely,
The Board of Directors of Works/San José

P.S.: Please also pass this on to an artist whose work you would like to see in the Benefit Auction.

works/san josé is member supported, primarily funded by this single auction event and individual donations; and is also funded in part by the
city of san josé; and arts council silicon valley in partnership with the county of santa clara, and the california arts council.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THIS ANNOUNCEMENT

Technorati Tags: art, auction, san jose, San José, sanjose, works, workssanjose

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Here’s a video I made of some of the construction steps:

arduino project box construction timelapse from stevecooley on Vimeo.

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The problem is that all of my toggle switches were working backwards to my expectations. (If you’re reading this and have already learned this lesson, you know where we’re going. )

Here’s a photo of the switches I’m using (thanks to banzaieffects for having a really nice photo of this component online)

Miyama is the manufacturer…   Anyway! Here’s the deal:

I wired things up to what I thought would be a logical way. Wire this to that, just like the slide switches I’d also been using without incident.

Then I had my epiphany about how these toggle switches work. I tried to imagine cutting one in half to visualize how they worked based on the scientific research that had been forced on me. My slide switches work great, but my toggle switches are all working backwards.

Aha, so based on what would now make a lot of sense, if I wanted to have my switches indicate directionality on my panel, I would need to switch how they’re wired on the back of the panel in order to emulate the behavior I want!

And now, look at that. Switching the wires will in fact give me the results I had originally intended, even though it seems like a trick I have to pull on my brain in order to get it to do what I want. Not really, but.. without being able to actually see inside the switch, visually it looks like the opposite of what made sense.

Sooo… yeah, now I have a lot of clean up work to do on my project. Recut and strip a bunch of wires, desolder and remove a bunch of work I’ve already done… sigh… Oh well. Such is the price of Doing It Yourself. my hard lesson learned will hopefully translate into less of a mystery for you.

Technorati Tags: arduino, componentry, design, DIY, diy, electronic, howto, panel, programming, wiring

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First up is Zazzle, since they were 7 whole days faster delivering my order:

If you click through and view these photos, you’ll see that the solid red color in the “sidescroller” t-shirt is not consistently covered with the original color that was there when I got the shirt. Kind of a disappointment to me. Still not a bad looking t-shirt, but not even close to the quality you would get with silk-screening. The “tea”-shirt (haha) actually fared better, probably because it’s a continuous tone image versus the relative solid color vector image in the first shirt. These shirts are actually being shown after two washes.

And now for the Cafepress shirt:

Uh oh. Now here’s a big problem in my opinion. After ONE wash, every solid area of color is cracking. This is totally unacceptable for a product that I would sell to people. So, at this time, I really can’t recommend cafepress for black and dark color shirt printing. I’m not totally sure Zazzle has the right action going on their game, but at least their shirts (which feel nicer to me, and are tagless) are free from the cracking problem that cafepress’ shirt is doing already… I would expect this cracking to happen even in silkscreened shirts after 20-30 washings, but after only one wash seems to indicate that there’s still significant room for improvement. This cracking problem certainly isn’t going to get any better from here on out, so this really isn’t the kind of product I want to promote.

So, the 2008 print-on-demand showdown winner is: Zazzle.com

* faster order fulfillment
* customizable
* nicer shirts
* no cracking after 1 wash

Technorati Tags: cafepress, zazzle

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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

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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.

Technorati Tags: cafepress, zazzle

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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!

Technorati Tags: cafepress, zazzle

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