james polits

I’m not really thrilled with the type treatment, but I needed to be done for the night. My goal was to start with something simple and go from there. The mark started with three straight lines. It took me a while to figure out what to do with them. The first attempt was this braided thing, but I couldn’t get the proportions of the thing right. Next time, I’ll try to save a shot of my missteps for you to see.

P.S. Here is an update of the video that I did posted last week. For video, I figure one per week equals is about the equivalent of one design a day.

Today, I got a little lesson of thinking outside the box. On vector.tuts, there was a tutorial about using a typeface for all the shapes of a character. I never think of using a typeface for anything other than words. My brain just never goes there.

Using Helvetica, I set out to create a little monster in a similar fashion to the one in the tutorial.

Well, just a week in and I already missed a day. Just one. Day 7 was not worth posting because of how ugly it was. And day 8 fell by the wayside because of a rather large work project.

I guess it’s about moving forward and getting better, not checking something off the list. If you are wondering what this is all about, check our my project for 2010.

Day 9: Presentation Background

I had to do a presentation on day 10, so creating a background became the project. I gotta say, I did not come up with it on my own. I recreated one template that I saw for sale at graphicriver.net.

Day 10: Not Nemo

The caption totally explains how I felt about this one. However, I just started drawing and this is what I ended up with. I reiterate—it’s about working on being creative and stuff… Ok, I know, I’m just making excuses for not spending more time to grow and get better.

Not much to say about this one. I saw balloons today. And I had to hurry and do something before church. The balloons needed something, so they got a fortune cookie… kinda.

Okay, I’m not really proud of today’s design. On the bus ride home from work, I found myself staring at the surveillance camera near the driver. So I decided to try to create an icon version of that camera. After 30-45 minutes of frustration, I gave up on the icon idea and finished with what you see below.

On a scale of proudness, this would be about at 2-3 out of 10.

Are you surprised I am back with another design? I am. Two days in a row, woot!

I was hoping to try to work on something during lunch, but due to a broken copier (I handle most of the IT stuff too), 8:00 PM came around and I had designed absolutely nothing. And because tonight was the season primary of The Bachelor: On The Wings of Love, we have a plane theme.

A disclaimer: one of my wife’s good friends is on this season and so this will be my Monday nights for the next couple months.

I’ve always heard people talk about how you need to constantly be doing that which you want to get better at. It makes sense, right? That’s why people use the adage “practice makes perfect” all the time, I guess.

Smashing Magazine recently posted an article challenging designers to design something every day for 365 days. I blew this off at first because—let’s be honest—I’m not really a designer. But the more I thought about it, the more I knew I had to do this.

So, I’m going to be sharing this journey with you. Every couple days, I’ll post some of the things that I’ve created. Don’t get your hopes up, though. Most of the stuff that I create will probably be junk. But, I’ll learn from it. That’s my goal and my promise to you as well. I will get better (designing stuff following tutorials will help, too).

As a sign of good faith that I will actually keep up this project, here is what I created today (using a vector.tuts+ tutorial).