Tip of the Quill: A Journal
Convergence by Design.

So next weekend is the Convergence Culture Consortium‘s fall shindig, the Futures of Entertainment Conference. I’ve just finished putting together the program for the event, which looks sort of like this:

foe_program.jpg

The aesthetic is an attempt to capitalize on what is actually a drawback: the art that C3 manager Joshua Green found for the event (which can be seen on the Futures of Entertainment site, which I also designed) doesn’t exist in anything higher than ~72 dpi at a small size, which renders it pretty much unprintable. There are plugins available that upsample art like that, but they cost too much for our present needs. Therefore, I decided to drop the photo into Adobe Illustrator CS2 (which the department is running in its lab) and use the software’s auto-trace function to produce a vectorized version, which I then blew up to a near-ridiculous size. It’s still pixelated, but the idea is to make it look pixelated on purpose.
There’s more new design work that I’ve been doing for the department which I desperately need to add to my portfolio (such as a redesigned In Medias Res, a promotional poster for the department and other such projects) but they’ll have to wait. There’s also a question in my mind as to how much I actually want to keep updating my portfolio moving forward, but that will, I suppose, hinge on how difficult it is for me to find a decently-paying gig that doesn’t require Photoshop when June rolls around. We’ll see.