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How To Be A Graphic Designer

You've spent some time on the internet, and have maybe noticed some of the super-cool illustrations and wallpapers out there. Now, you want to have a go at doing it your self. Here's a simple 3 part guide to doing it. Enjoy!

1). Find a nice inspirational quote about graphic design. A good place to start is Chris Coyier's excellent Quotes On Design. It's brimming with just the sort of thing you need. For this tutorial, I will be using "Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead." You can use anything though.

2). Open up photoshop. What, you don't have photoshop? *Sigh*. Right, go and get Gimp, and then come back. Got it? Cool. Open that up. Make a new document about 1680x1050 pixels. Make the background just off black (#111111 for people who don't understand hexidecimal). Select the type tool, make the font nice and big, then chose helvetica bold, and type in your quote. Make sure it's justified right, and, I can't stress this enough, make sure the font is big enough. If you are going to attribute your quote, wrap quotation marks around the quote (in a font size far bigger than your quote, but the closing quotes should be smaller) and put the name in a much small, serif, italicised font. Here's mine for comparison:


Here, I've gone for a minimalist approach. I think it looks really good because the minimalism symbolises modernism.

If you don't have helvetica, then I guess arial will do, but I'm not happy about it.

3). Nearly done now! All you have to do is upload it to the internet some how. If you're über cool, you'll be able to put it on Behance, but as it's your first time, that's not very likely. You'll probably have to settle for deviant art or flickr. I've got a bit of experience, so I'm putting mine on my own website. You can download it from here, if you want to use it (act nonchalant about wether or not people will want it, but don't worry, obviously they will. Where else will they get a wallpaper this sexy?).

Once you've done this a few times, you'll be ready to move on to adding colour. This is dangerous though. Make sure you ONLY put the MOST IMPORTANT words in colour. Try something 'out there' on your first try, like purple or orange. The bright colours should help confuse people, and make it more likely that they won't notice your total lack of ability in composition, font choice, white space and colour balance, and even your choice of the quote its self.

Enjoy!

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A secret message in pi

There is a secret message in the number pi.

If you turn the 21,115th through 21,120th digits upside down, it spells "boobs".



Thanks to SMBC for the tipoff.

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On Aliens and Faster-Than-Light Travel

Today, the MoD released the files on UFO sightings and reports.

More than 6,000 pages of reports describe people's experiences with unidentified flying objects between 1994 and 2000.

That's quite a lot of UFOs. Regardless of wether or not it's true, it certainly got me thinking about extra terrestrial life. Certainly, there is no intelligent life in our solar system (although I certainly have my fingers crossed for some unintelligent life), but what if we look a little further? Well, the closest confirmed planet not in our star system is Epsilon Eridani b, an unimaginatively named planet orbiting Epsilon Eridani. They live about 10 light years away, leaving us one of three options - aliens live for ages, they are very determined to find other life, or they have found a way to travel faster than the speed of light.

The first two are perfectly possible, I mean, we live about 32850 times as long as a dragonfly, a being that lived 32850 times as long as a human would live to be about 3,000,000 years old. No mean feat, but certainly possible. The second alternative is that they have developed a space ship capable of sustaining alien life. This is also not impossible - we have no idea what their biology is like, they might not even need food. There's this great sci-fi book called The Chameleon by Joe Haldeman (who also wrote the excellent The Forever War), which features as one of it's main characters an immortal alien that evolved into immortality through sheer necessity. It's a fantastic book, with a brilliant ending.

The third option is one of no small scholarly debate. Science fiction authors are constantly turning over the notion of faster-than-light travel, many of which involve a cool sounding name and some kind of brute force entry into the time space continuum normally through a thing called an Eintstein-Rosen Bridge. The easiest way to explain one of these is with a piece of paper.

Take a piece of paper. Got one? Right. Now, this is space as we know it. I know it's only 2D, but bear with me. Now, take this two dimensional universe, and fold it through the third dimension (fold it in half). This is essentially what our universe is - a three dimensional space folded through the fourth dimension. Now, if you take your universe (folded piece of paper) and take a pen, you'll find it's not too hard to push the pen right through the first half, and then on through the second half. Congratulations! You've just made a wormhole! Now if you unfold your universe again, you'll see that these two holes, although they appear to be very far away from each other, are right next to each other when the universe is folded up. When you fold the universe again, bam, they're touching once more. It's now obvious that when traveling from a point near one hole to a point near the other, it's much quicker to go through this convenient hole.

This is easily extrapolated into the third and fourth dimension - our three dimensional universe is folded in to the fourth dimension, a massive amount of energy punches a hole through the fourth dimension and back into the third. There aren't any wormholes near us - at the moment, they're only theoretical anyway - but with enough wumph, a sufficiently sophisticated race may be able to artificially manufacture one, and then slip through it, drastically reducing the amount of time required to make the journey.

Again, all this is purely theoretical right now, but some people far cleverer than I have already done a lot of the maths that would be involved with such objects, so really, how impossible are they?

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