Thomas E. Smith, Jr.

SALVADOR DALI PAINTING OR PRETENTIOUS BAND NAME? I was complaining to Chelsea about how all these new band names are just sentence fragments (i.e.: We Came as Romans, Every Avenue). She then analogized it to the long titles that Salvador Dali gave to his paintings. Later that evening, we sat at her parents house for a while and talked over how the site might work. We did a little research, some data entry, a little PHP, and by the time we left Salvador Dali Painting or Pretentious Band Name was up and running with about 50 entries to randomize. A week later we got it up to 200, and we’re added new ones all the time.

“THOMAS SMITH LIKES THIS” RUBBER STAMP. I had an idea for a rubber stamp: Why not bring everyone’s favorite virtual approval method of “liking” in to the physical world? I Google’d around and found that I was clearly not the first person to have this idea. Novelty Facebook “like” and “thumbs up” rubber stamps had been around for about a year - But they weren’t very personal. So I took it to the next level by adding my name to the stamp die.

A rubber stamp die has to be designed in a kind of binary style. There are no “shades” when designing a stamp die; It’s either going to be area that touches the ink pad, or area that doesn’t. Even a method to emulate shading with one color, like half-toning, doesn’t work on stamps because there are limitations to how small a single point can be on a stamp die. So I spent a couple minutes in Photoshop making a vector shape of the thumbs up icon, plotting points over a photograph of the thumbs up icon used on the sign in front of the new Facebook offices. Then I took some time adjusting it to look acceptable when displayed in just one color. For instance, without the luxury of using multiple colors to shade them, the folded-in fingers looked strange sticking out as far as they di. I had to move the knuckles in a good distance toward the cuff. Then I double checked which font family was used on a Facebook page (in Chrome, on a Mac) and found that even though the CSS calls for Lucida Grande, I found that Lucida Sans looked better for this purpose.

I then simply eye’d how the size of the icon in relation to the “like text” near it and did my best to match that. I ended up leaving the icon a little bigger than the actual proportion though. Since Facebook does not use a link underline for the names that link to profiles but instead just a link color to provide the visual queue, I had to use an alternate method of making the name stand out among the other words in the sentence. I tried underlining the name and that looked really hokey for some reason, so I decided on just bolding it. I’ve never respected the Lucida family much until I played around with them. 

For about the cost of a blue ink pad, production of a custom stamp die, and a wooden stamp with the cool wooden palm handle (about $16 shipped), I could have gotten a slick self-inking stamp that automatically flips the die up on to an internal ink pad when not in use, but I have a bit of a “classic” sensibility and I just kind of dig the notion of hitting a stamp with some ink and smashing it down on paper.

YOU AREN’T HERE. I had 250 of these stickers printed up. A 1 inch by 1 inch existential twist on the common mall map icon. Simple black Arial on yellow. This is one of those times I had an idea and had to execute it the same day. These stickers obviously look great on mall directory maps, but could really be placed on any public information maps.

I CAN HAZ HEAVIN? Our cat Gracie had to be put down. I had an emotional response to this that somehow produced 250 of these stickers. Gracie the cat, in traditional meme fashion: Asking if she can haz something we all want, in heavily-stroked bold Impact.

EQUITAS INVESTMENTS. A tiny little website I built. I’m a coder. I very rarely design the front-end of a website. But occasionally, someone talks me in to it, and this is how they end up looking.

BREE SALON. Here’s a tiny site I built. I don’t know why people ask me to do design.

FUTURE GRAPHICS IMAGING. It started with the art department’s clean PSDs, and turned in to something big.

THE SUN’S HERE. I DON’T HAVE TO HIDE. A very special friend of ours died, so we put together a tribute show and a compilation of his rare recordings. I was responsible for the site’s front end design, XHTML, CSS, jQuery, copy writing, the CD packaging art and the on-disc art.