Draconaei’s Blog

What’s this?  Two postings in a row??

Some might say, “We are not fooled, this still does not make up for you posting hardly anything this past month!” and to you I say “shhh!” and point to the shiny – er, I mean, the new design below.

So, what have we here?  I collect shot glasses from (almost) every place I travel, but currently lack any way to display them.  Hence, the desired outcome: shelving that displays a variety of single and double shot glasses, uses only a couple materials, is easy to cut/prepare, and straightforward to assemble.

My method: modular design with only three types of components, because repeating a few basic forms is often the foundation for a good design.  Also, for assembling, the simpler the better.  These components are shelving (acrylic rectangles), vertical supports (threaded rods), and attachments (nuts.)

Notice that all the acrylic pieces are the same.  Shifting them is both for aesthetic purposes – I’m fond of asymmetry – and a practical purpose, which is providing space for double-height shot glasses.  The simplified side view on the left shows the general structure.

Both shelves on the top row will be hung on support screws protruding from the wall, and will carry the distributed weight of the remaining shelves.  Material preparation seems simple, only involving repeated straight cuts through the acrylic and rod-sized holes drilled at regular intervals.  Assembly is easy- slide threaded rods through the acrylic, adjust nut heights as desired.  Now to find this ever-elusive “free time”!

Last summer I moved into a new apartment; it would be my first time living alone, and I had no furniture of my own.  While scouring Craigslist to furnish my new place on the cheap, one of my friends noticed an ad for a wooden drafting table, free to anyone who could pick it up.  Another good friend – also involved in the searching – owns a pickup truck, so the three of us drove over to check it out.  This is what we found:

This was one hefty drafting table, and a solid piece of craft, but had obviously been sitting in the barn for years.  The wood had greyed, the handles had rusted over, and the wood polish was all but entirely removed.  Scuffs and marks covered each surface.  It seemed sturdy and useful enough to be a worthwhile challenge, so there the work began.

With much help from a number of friends, I sanded each surface down to fresh wood, removing all the grime and markings, and priming the wood for staining.  Here you can see sanded and cleaned wood on the left, and the dirty untouched wood on the right:

Next was the most drastic step: staining the wood.  I chose a deep, dark red stain, which transformed the appearance of the wood beautifully.

Once the stain had dried, I sanded the wood again and re-applied the stain to deepen the color.  Once the second coat was dry, it was ready for the wood polish.  I repeated the sequence of sand, polish, and let dry several times to build up many thin layers of polish.  This kept the polish a uniform thickness and will continue to protect the table’s surface.

My friend removed the rust from the drawer handles, and I attached a couple of desk lamps.  Here is the newly cleaned desk, finished and beautiful, sitting in my apartment:

This project – diagrammed in an earlier post – evolved over two different projects in my Borrowing Light class.  I’ll summarize both in this post.

The first followed the diagram of the last post.  In summary, I broke open a series of glow sticks, and drained the glowing liquid into a hollow glass imitation of a compact fluorescent light bulb.  I suspended the bulb with clear fishing line, and slowly leaked glow liquid from the bulb via a syringe down to a pyrex pie plate.  An early time and late time photograph of the setup are below (as well as a link to a stop-motion video.)

[watch the video here]

The glass is easily recognizable as a light bulb, and the light dripping from within has some interesting symbolism: the depletion of energy that often goes unseen, but is highlighted by the path of light contained in a liquid.  Unfortunately there were quality issues with the documentation here, such as the doorknob and visible floor/wall corners in the photograph.  The next evolution addressed this quality issue, replaced the pyrex pie plate with a circular glass dish (cut by a glassblower so it doesn’t scream “cooking ware”) and addressed the requirement of a “screen.”

The screen is made of white museum board with a series of randomly placed holes of varying sizes.  Light em

inating from the glow liquid in the bowl above passes through the holes and creates colored spots of light on the ground.  The rest of the light is reflected off of the white surface, creating a gradient of color.

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Catching the dripping glow liquid is a clear glass bowl full of water placed on top of the museum board screen.  The glow liquid and water do not mix, so the glow liquid congeals into separate clumps that move throughout the water, eventually settling on the bottom.  The water also splashes with each drop of glow liquid, causing a slight rippling effect in the emitted light.

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Dripping glow stick liquid, while interesting, is a bit too abstract for me I think.  Documentation of the second project is below – again an early time photograph, a late time photograph, and a link to a stop-motion video.  Let me know what you think.  =)

[watch the second video here]

(cross-posted in my Borrowing Light class blog.)

After a few failed attempts, I found out that making “glow liquid” out of Mountain Dew is a hoax.  It’s disappointing, but makes me feel a little better about the ingredients in Mountain Dew.

There is a way to make glow liquid yourself, but the chemicals are expensive, so I caved in and ordered larger glow sticks with more liquid in them.

In the meantime, I’ve been thinking about the core of my glow stick project.  I’m fascinated with embodying light in a liquid, and the surreal quality of actually experiencing it as a liquid no longer trapped within a container.  This has led to countless broken glow sticks in my apartment.  Here’s a video of me pouring “liquid light” into a glass:

Dripping Light

This sparked the train of thought that led me to where I am now:

Fascination with glow sticks –> ordering a lot of bendy glow bracelets online –> twisting glow sticks into different shapes –> realizing these bracelets could be twisted to look like compact fluorescent light bulbs –> realizing that actually, they didn’t look anything like light bulbs after all.  sadness.  –> decided to create a hollow light bulb, fill it with glow liquid, and drain it –> acquired a hollow light bulb look-alike from a glassblower –> fill, drain, record the change over time… but what happens after it leaves the light bulb?

This can challenge the way we view light- it starts as a familiar form (the light bulb) and over time the bulb is drained, and the light only exists in splatters on the floor.  It also embodies the energy we use, oddly quantifying the light by its escape over time.  It thinking of how to push the project further, I’m currently pondering a setup like this:

The light still runs and gathers, and the form on which it drips is very simple (basically a half-sphere, with raised edges so the liquid doesn’t run all over the floor) but the patterns the liquid will form won’t be simple.  They won’t be predictable either.  It’s controlled in some ways, but random enough that I won’t actually know what the final product will look like until it’s happening.  As soon as my larger glow sticks arrive in the mail, I can start experimenting.

Here’s the explanation for anyone that was curious about the process… and, I’ll admit, so I can show the level of detail in these images, which can’t be captured at monitor or website size. It was a great deal of fun to work on, but also a much more extensive time commitment than I’d estimated.

I began with a series of photos I took while in Jordan. I remained stationary and rotated the camera across my view from left to right, overlapping each picture slightly with the next. Once home, I used autostitch to combine the separate photos into this original panorama:

I can’t decide if autostitch is cheating, or merely using an available tool. Either way, the program is free online (and even legal!) so I highly recommend it to anyone needing to stitch images together. It’s not perfect, but overall it does a great job.

After making a copy of the image file, I opened the file in Photoshop, and began deleting everything except the ruins. I sometimes used the magic wand tool (which selects everything in the area matching the selected color range.) Unfortunately it tended to miss edges, or select an entire section of stone when the plants were blurry or too similar in color, so I ended up manually tracing out most details with the lasso tool anyway. See the work in progress:

This was, by far, the most painstaking and thorough step. Once completed, the rest was simple. With the ruins isolated, I created two new image files. In the first, I converted the ruins to greyscale and slightly upped the contrast, and then pasted this layer on top of the original panorama. In the second, I converted the entire original panorama to greyscale, upped the contrast, and then pasted the isolated ruins into a higher layer. In both cases, the isolated ruins obscured the unedited ruins below, but being from the same original image, the lines are only distinct by color difference.

There you have it! Some have asked for copies of the image files. If you want them, let me know! All I ask is credit for having created them.

This story begins with the most random of meetings.

A friend of a brother of a friend, at the party where we first met, offhandedly mentioned wanting a new tattoo. Despite being only a small step removed from strangers at the time, I offered to design one for her, and she actually took me up on it!

The request: design a tattoo representing, but not having the literal appearance of, a phoenix. Include the symbol in this painting on the right, titled “Phoenix,” following the same color scheme (red, yellow, and green.) Add a pair of wings in the same style.

Adobe Illustrator is my program of choice here. Vector graphics make for quick, easy scaling and tweaking. That being said, this is a good time to explain how I work with digital media. In a nutshell: many, many, many iterations.

I love exploring a million subtle alterations in design, and taking a project in a variety of different directions. This is perfect for the computer, where duplicating an image is as easy as ctrl+c and I can compare each modification side-by-side in an instant. I’m also reluctant to quickly commit to any given change; I like leaving copies of old design iterations around to refer to later, so I end up with files that look like this:

Cluttered as it may be, it allows me to see my own design process, and I can return from a less successful design to a previous idea without any trouble.

After several meetings and many designs garnered from the process above, we settled on this as the final tattoo design:

Stay tuned for descriptions of the tattooing process and photos of the finished body art!

Exploring Good Logo Design.

A necessary disclaimer: I love scientists.  I work with some of the most brilliant minds in the field of high-energy-density laboratory astrophysics (say that ten times fast!)  In fact, I would like to think of myself as well-rounded, and being both a scientist and an artist.  That being said, let’s use this opportunity to explore good logo design through some oft-made mistakes, as highlighted by my experience designing a logo for CRASH.

C.R.A.S.H. is the Center for Radiative Shock Hydrodynamics.  This team of scientists focuses on developing a code to accurately simulate radiative shocks: energy moving significantly faster than the speed of sound, which simultaneously releases energy in the form of radiation.  The professor who runs my lab also heads the CRASH team, and knowing I dabble in graphic design, he asked me to design their logo.   There the learning experience began.

Mistake #1: Not understanding what a logo really is.

A logo is a simple, clean image whose design should be unique, appealing, and meaningfully represent an idea- but it should be just that.  A representation.  Problems arise when a logo is either taken too literally, or has no real connection to what it represents.

• When presenting a potential logo with a radiative shock facing to the left, an exasperated scientist spoke up.  “But our simulations display shocks moving to the right!  If we chose this logo, we would have to flip ALL of our data to match it!”
• Another design included a data point with error bars, and received a similar response: “REAL data includes at least three data points, presumably improving over time.  We recommend three circles, each with an error bar, decreasing in size from left to right.”

Mistake #2: Understanding concepts, but not how they graphically translate.

Logo designs should be simple, and scale down to small sizes without losing their overall effect; because of this, they can’t include too much information, but should still include enough to be recognizable.  This requires knowing very specifically what information you want to include, and filtering out irrelevant or overtly complicated concepts.

• After some discussion, the CRASH team agreed that the logo should best represent “uncertainty quantification, ” otherwise stated as, the study of accurately measuring potential error from specific experimental parameters.  I challenge ANY of you to do this.
• The above request was followed by, “We would prefer the design to be very simple.”

Mistake #3: Overloading a design with “cool” effects- i.e. gradients, shadows, and reflections.

Designers and non-designers alike can be gripped with the temptation to follow the latest design trends, which often include extraneous fancy graphic effects.  A good logo design could use these elements, but should never depend on them for effectiveness.  The design should work well even when reduced to stencil or greyscale format.

Assuming you agree with the above, the following suggestions should speak for themselves:

• In reference to a maize and blue color scheme:
  • “Add maroon!”
  • “The shock does not look radiative enough.  Please make it red.”
  • “You should add several more colors.  There are more colors in the rainbow, you know.”

Another way to say this is, if the logo doesn’t look good already, special effects won’t fix it.

Mistake #4: Trying to incorporate every persons’ ideas and suggestions into a single logo design.

Including everyone’s ideas is a noble cause, but in the end, not everyone can get the design they want, especially if the group is especially disagreeable.  The important thing is satisfy the group’s basic needs, with a design that will retain its effectiveness over time.

• After 50+ design iterations, I emailed the CRASH team a selection of 11 logos, and asked everyone to vote.  The response was an almost perfectly even distribution; if I had sensed conflicting interests within the group previously, I now had solid confirmation.
• At the very least, it would be impossible to realistically include all three of the following ideas in a single logo, each idea being suggested by a different member:
  • “Design a shockwave moving through the word CRASH.”
  • “Why don’t we just take a snapshot of our data and add text to it?”
  • “You should include a car.”

This concludes our discussion on logo design!  So as not to leave a cliffhanger, here is the design that was chosen in the end- a slightly stylized graphic representation of simulation output.