calaboration (no really, that’s how it’s spelled) and other stuff
I’ve been looking for a Mac application that does this exact thing for about a year now. Calaboration is a little application that (sort of) syncs Google Calendar stuff with iCal, which is super handy since I tend to jump between several computers several times a day and being able to access all that at any time helps.
It’s the end of the semester and I’ve been doing a bunch of work for that lately, among other projects. One big one is a series of illustrations for a children’s book in Spanish called “Chico el Lagartijito,” which may or may not be in print someday.
chico el lagartijito
For whatever reason I’ve been learning a lot about Illustrator lately, which is odd, since I’ve used it for years and have always felt that I had a pretty good grip on it. Mostly it’s been the realization that a lot of tricks that work in Photoshop also work in Illustrator, like sketching on a layer and locking it so I can vector on top of it. Why this never occurred to me sooner, I’ll never know.
One image from a series I worked on several years ago has seen a lot of interesting action lately.
net neutrality poster by ~bugbyte on deviantART
The poster from my net neutrality campaign has been making the rounds of the internet, turning up on various blogs from all over the world if you google it. I get more comments and notes about that design than anything else. (Granted, most of the stuff I put up on deviantart is sketchy and just for fun anyway.) But most excitingly, I got an email a little over a month ago from a publisher who wanted to use it in a couple of college textbooks, specifically in a chapter about internet law. That’s neat in and of itself, but it feels good to know that I made something that is in some way socially and culturally relevant.
The semester is ending shortly, and I’m already diving headfirst into getting application stuff together for grad school. It was around this time last year that I started to seriously outline all my plans for all this. And a year or so before that that I actually decided to go through with this. It hardly seems like it’s been that long at all.