Mawgablog

It’s been a long time coming, but I’ve got my online portfolio up on Mawgablog. It’s in the Published Articles section. It’s been a bit of a palaver for one simple reason. Choice.

Previously, I’d been blogging away happily on MySpace, enjoying a bit of pseudo privacy, and being as candid as I liked. I’d get some people viewing and commenting, and that was all fair enough. Furthermore, it was quite easy to choose a layout for the MySpace blog; just leave as is, to avoid having one of those freakish, garish, vomit-fests that often blight pages on that site, turning them into near unusable scrolls of junk.

Enter WordPress. You can choose from an array of templates until you get one that’s right. The trouble was that I couldn’t find one that I really felt comfortable with. They were either insipid, overly intense, or simply, just not right. I seem to have found a happy medium with Neutica, which is clean, simple and light, but without the blandness of so many simple templates.

So I’m feeling better about blogging again. Thus, I have updated my portfolio, as I said earlier.

Cover of Rian Hughes illustration for Iron Man series "Tony Stark Disassembled". Iron Man copyright Marvel Comics

I got to think back on a few of the quotes I’ve been offered but unable to use, mostly for reasons of space. When I interviewed Rian Hughes for Digital Arts Discover the Brand New Retro feature, he was talking about the general navel-gazing that can afflict graphic design discussions, particular publicly held ones.

He said: “It’s simple. Graphic design is graphic and graphic is like graphic violence or graphic sex. It just means explicit, it means direct. And design, which is to organise things in a functional fashion, to organise things in terms of some logical scheme. So that’s all graphic design is. It’s just an organisation of things in a visual manner.”

Milton Glaser - direct answer to a direct question

Or feeling a bit of a dipstick when asking the inevitable question, “What are you going to do next?” when interviewing the very experienced Milton Glaser, to have him respond: “Good Lord! I’m heading straight for the grave. I’m 80 years old, for God’s sake! You cannot anticipate an endless career. I just come in here and try to do a good day’s work enthusiastically, and not think about where I’m going.”

Anyway. The section is up. I shall add more to it at some point, both from new work (hopefully) and material from my archives.

And on we go.