The Blog of Bert Jones

This morning I was awake a little after 6 a.m. (It didn’t help that I slept until 5 p.m. the day before and then went back to bed around midnight.)

But I didn’t want to get outta bed. The rest of the house wasn’t awake (Amy and the girls were out at Girl Scout Camp). So I would be bored with no activity going on in the house.

So, I decided to watch a movie in bed, but I wasn’t sure what. I had fallen asleep to Jeff Dunham’s “Arguing with Myself” movie, so I fired that up and fin­ished what I missed. But, that only killed about 20 min­utes. So I decided to watch a Doc­u­men­tary that I hadn’t gotten around to watch: “Helvetica”.

Yes, you heard me…Helvetica. A doc­u­men­tary about a Typo­graphic legend.

I was very glad I watched it.

I was so glad, that I even posted on Face­book, com­ments about it:

You know your a Design geek when your actu­ally watching a doc­u­men­tary about a font at 7am.

Being a “fontie”, I guess I’m not sur­prised that I am just engrossed in this movie called “Helvetica”

Ha! They pegged me! One guy just said: “my girl­friend remem­bers a place by what it’s near, I remember a place by the font it used or how it has bad letter spacing” (I do that to Amy all the time: “ewww their using comic sans”)

Ha! The designer who made one of the font I use for my free­lance busi­ness was in the movie…I like him! I picked a good type­face!! (Note: it was the designer of the font ITC Officina, one of my favorites)

Who knew there were such argu­ments for and against Helvetica…

When I first became a designer, I didn’t care for Hel­vetica. At that time (around the late 90’s), I was used to Apple having the default system font “Hel­vetica” and Microsoft having its badly done knock-off “Arial”. (You see their dif­fer­ences here)

As I grew as a designer a little, I learned that many designers over the years have used Hel­vetica for so many things that it was per­va­sive in our society. So why would I want to use it in my own cre­ative flair? It also wasn’t “my” type of font. Most sans serif fonts weren’t my cup of tea.

(Even now, I see both sides of the argu­ment for and against Hel­vetica. Its been used so much that society is so used to it, but it is such a per­fectly designed font, that its hard to create some­thing better.)

But it wasn’t until I worked at Alpha­Graphics with my distant-brother-in-law Aaron (a great designer) and later my best-friend Kellie (another great designer, writer, illus­trator and pho­tog­ra­pher!) that I really started to appre­ciate the sim­plicity and read­ability of Hel­vetica and other Sans Serif fonts.

You see, we had so much work coming through that print shop, from so many dif­ferent “cough” designers, (a.k.a., sec­re­taries) that I was exposed to so many “bad” dime-a-dozen fonts out there. When a design piece that came in that was designed by a “real” designer, or a client let Aaron or Kellie “go to town” for a print job, that was when I got to expe­ri­ence real Typog­raphy. And it was beautiful.

I trea­sure the time I was able to spend with Aaron and Kellie learning the craft. I like to think of it as my own appren­tice­ship. That time cemented my deci­sion to become a designer.

Years later here I am in school doing just that. Cementing myself with a full on degree saying I know what I already know.

But watching this movie not only made me realize what a great font hel­vetica is, but I real­ized some­thing else…I still have a lot to learn.

I see these other designers, and their talk of mod­ernism and futurism, and even thought I just studied those last year. I couldn’t tell you a damn thing about them and can recall only smidges of how they affected the art world.

I look at some of these designers (and other designers/photographers I know; like Aaron, Kellie, Jim, Saundra, Brett and so many others) and I think to myself, “Will I ever be that good?” “Where do I start to gain skills like that?” “How would I ever come up with such a fan­tastic design like that!?”

For the ease of online classes (I wouldn’t be able to really go to col­lege without doing them 100% online), I start to wonder if I am really ben­e­fiting from them. Classes are only 5.5 weeks long, instead of an entire semester. Am I really learning what I need to know in that short time?

I’m thankful that I decided to not sell back my school books, so that I can go back and re-read what I missed, but is that enough? Should I be doing more, and if so, where do I start? I can think of Net­working with more designers, reading more, exposing myself to more cul­ture (I don’t get nearly as much as I should)…but what else?

I look back and I look for­ward and I still have a lot to learn, and a long, long way to go. But I am ready to learn, and I look for­ward to it.

Tonight at work we got to go on a field trip!

We’re moving to the next building over, next month, and we finally got to go over and see where we will be sit­ting and stuff.

I asked my man­ager if she thought it felt like she was the teacher of a bunch of Kinder­gard­ners. We were exploring, joking and just having a fun time.

We’re the only ones that will be there on 3^rd shift in the whole building, so some parts were dark. So it was fun trying to not get lost in the dark areas (I used my iPhone as a flashlight).

It was so much fun to just get out and not do “work” for a little bit.

I must admit that I work with a great group of people that get along well with each other.

I may be taking a hiatus from Project 365.

I was sick a few weeks ago, and it made it hard to keep up with, since I wasn’t going any­where or doing anything.

And since then, I have had  a lot going on.

The other part is that I really want to use my big camera. But with my odd hours, its hard to really take that thing every­where, so I end up using my phone, and that wasn’t really the ini­tial point of this project.

I may start where I left of in the near future, if things calm down and I can figure out a better way to use my big camera.

Turtle Mocha

I knew it was going to be a LOOOONG night, so since I was going to work ear­lier, I thought I would stop and get me a pick-me-up to make sure I could stay awake!

I ordered my usual turtle Mocha, without nuts; but, when I got to work…sure enough…there was nuts in it…the night just got worse after that.

Grey Screen of death

Today’s photo is from my com­puter at work. They are only 4 years old (we think), but they run con­stantly 24-hours a day. So they get a work out. Mine’s fan will turn on and it sounds like its going tot ake off!

But this screen is espe­cially fun. You basi­cally lose all your work, unless you recently saved.

Dominic, Riley, Mikayla, Courtney (Easter 2010)

Today’s photo involves an entire photo shoot!

Every Easter and Christmas (and some­times Back to School) I get our family together for a photo shoot. It helps keep me in practice.

So this photo is a sneak peak of what is in the works (lots of color cor­recting to do, to make it just right!)

(p.s. I apol­o­gize, but please don’t ask for a dig­ital copy, none will be made avail­able, but I will post once the set is com­plete and uploaded onto smugmug, then you can pur­chase your own prints.)

My photo–painted!

Today’s photo doesn’t prob­ably count as a photo I took (well, I took it, just not today). Instead it is some­thing I made.

Since I couldn’t sleep the other night, cause of aller­gies, I worked on this painting tech­nique I just learned in Pho­to­shop. I can take any photo and make it look like its been painted.

Its not all that time con­suming, but its kinda fun…I did it while catching up on Dancing with the Stars (Is it true what I am hearing that Kate Goesslin wants Tony Devolony fired?!)

My messy desk.

Today’s photo is the state of my desk…RIGHT NOW!

I am working on some free­lance work, some Cre­ative Mem­o­ries stuff for Amy and other stuff. all while lis­tening to Lady GaGa, Prabhu Deva, Lissie, Cher, Susan Tedeschi and of course, RuPaul!

You’ll notice…I’m all out of Moun­tain Dew too.…

Working third shift is a pain. You get tired real easy, the nights can seem to drag on forever…

But it helps when you have great co-workers that can make you laugh, and I mean laugh HARD!

Tonight for instance.

Our project scheduler’s (a.k.a. COPS) printer was down. So they had to one that is by me, that I use.

So I had just printed some­thing out, and so did our one COPS. I go over to col­lect my print outs and I notice all this white blank paper get­ting printed out. I ask her if she intended on printing out blank white paper…she was all like, “ummm…no…”, so I cancel the print job from the printer (not noticing it is asking for con­fir­ma­tion to cancel, as I walk away)

She come over and we see that along one margin of all the sheets is junk text. So obvi­ously an error is going on.

I go over to look at her machine to make sure the printer was setup cor­rectly. (It was for the most part) and print a test sheet.

Well, I walk over and notice nothing is printing. I look at the screen, con­firm the cancel order and more of her orig­inal job prints out, but cor­rectly. No Junk text.

I holler over to her, “Hey, maybe its working now, the rest of your job is printing. I don’t know what all that white stuff was…”

I then stop dead in my  tracks and go, “Wow…that sounded really bad.” (I had mean all that white paper)

She starts laughing, and then states, “Its a good thing you caught that first, cause I was about to say ‘maybe it’s your white stuff’…” (meaning my print job).

We were laughing so hard, my cheeks hurt.

Thanks Amy for a funny night.

(I know, ironic that she shares the same name as my wife. Funny Story: Its been known to give me com­pli­cated jobs or rush jobs at work, and usu­ally Amy hands them to me. I’m kinda her “bitch”, in that sense. I’ve told her in the past that I have just learned, to keep things simple, to do what­ever any woman named Amy tells me to…)

Click to view Video

Some people have asked me how I cre­ated some fire ropes in this image for school.

Well, the orig­inal tuto­rial is gone. It was found here.

So, I cre­ated a video tuto­rial to follow along with.

I hope you enjoy, make sure you check out my other tuto­rials under the cat­e­gory “Tuto­rials” or on my Media page.