Listen Up: The Art Scene Podcast

Hosted by Louis Vargas, The Art Scene  focuses of on-depth conversations with up and coming artists, gallery owners, museum professionals and anybody else with an art background that have gone on to take non-traditional paths in life after an art degree. The Art Scene doesn't just cover an artist's work but also an artist's life. He also gives a lot of insight into the California art scene.

You can follow along via The (art)Scene website, on iTunes via iOS or on soundcloud.

Listen Up is an ongoing series devoted to shining a spotlight on podcasts by diverse creators. You can check out all the podcasts previously featured here. If you have a podcast you'd like to recommend, post it in the comments or email me at shawnstruck at gmail dot com.

Listen Up: Revision Path

Revision Path is one of the best web and graphic design podcasts out there. It was named the Most Inspiring Design Podcast in the very first Creative Market Awards two years ago. Not content to rest on his laurels, web design superstar Maurice Cherry interviews someone in web design every week and also showcases some of the world's best Black web designers, graphic designers, web developers, and more!

Follow along via the Revision Path website or on iTunes via iOS.

Listen Up is an ongoing series devoted to shining a spotlight on podcasts by diverse creators. You can check out all the podcasts previously featured here. If you have a podcast you'd like to recommend, post it in the comments or email me at shawnstruck at gmail dot com.

Retro Video: Classic DOS-era Art Step By Step

For your morning retro-game pleasure, I humbly present to you the following: A video from the wonderful channel "DOS Nostalgia"containing time-lapses of all of the background art from a Sierra On-Line classic "The Colonel's Bequest". Until the widespread adoption of VGA color modes in computer monitors, the designers at Sierra stored background art for their games in a special vector format.

One especially neat thing about this format (at least if you're a behind the scenes graphic design nerd like I am) is that the background screen art can be displayed and drawn in a sort of step by step fashion-- essentially letting you see just how it was imagined, laid out and created by the game's artists. All in all, it's a fascinating peek at the artistic process in an otherwise long-lost game format.

Please enjoy this gorgeous, dark, and detailed art set to the beautiful MT-32 music from the game below.

Pushing Pixels: How Shovel Knight Was Inspired By 8-Bit Limits

A before and after look at the original and then simplified look of the King Knight

Released last year by indie developer Yacht Club Games to critical and fan acclaim, Shovel Knight was an action platformer that paid homage to the design sensibilities of the 8-bit era in general and the NES in particular, staying close to the limited color palette of the console. But what limitations did the design team have to work with? With the power of the PC and modern console at their command, what did limitations did they choose to keep and what did they choose to discard?

David D'Angelo, a programmer for Yacht Club Games, answers those questions and more in a recent blog post on Gamasutra entitled "Breaking The NES For Shovel Knight". The image above is accompanied by an explanation on how limiting sprite detail wasn't just slavish devotion to NES hardware limits but a deliberate design choice:

A character with too many colors stuck out like a sore thumb. We worked back and forth with detail levels and colors until we found a combo that looked great, [because] a sprite too detailed is also really hard to animate! In this example, you can see the original King Knight design. While the left sprite has only 5 colors (as was our stated limitation), it was too detailed and almost felt closer to a 16 bit sprite. After taking a few passes to simplify the shapes for readability and simplicity, we ended up with the sprite that you see in game!

The entire post is a really interesting look into the design choices that were made in the goal for capturing a gaming aesthetic, so if you want to know more, check it out!

Have A Nice Resolution: Mick Foley Shows How

The original "Cheap Pop" design

Mickey Foley is has been a professional wrestler, a best-selling author, a children's book writer, a noted Christmas enthusiast, a documentary producer, a travelling stand-up comedian and storyteller, an advocate for RAINN... and when dealing with one t-shirt designer, was also a bit of an unethical dick. As the reddit thread by a designer who did work for him outlined:

So we designed the Mick Foley's Cheap Pop shirt. He loved it. He wanted to sell them on his comedy tour, specifically a couple of big shows he was doing overseas at the time...We also planned to sell them on our website and broached the idea that Mick would plug the shirt for us on Twitter and we would donate a portion of the profits to RAINN...

He was cool with that initially and agreed.Then he changed his mind and asked if we would be okay with letting him sell them exclusively for awhile before we started selling them on our site... we agreed to hold off for 2 months while he sold them on his tour.In the meantime, he sold the shirts. He wore it in a photoshoot and even Nolle was rocking one.The 2 months passed and he wanted to extend the exclusivity. Eh, sure. Then he wanted to extend it a third time... We wanted to sell it. So we told him we we really wanted to start selling. He seemed cool with that and promised to plug us on Twitter and mention us in an online radio show interview he was doing. 

He never did either.

We sold a limited run of the shirts online... We knew we were shutting down and Mick still seemed interested in selling the shirts, so I emailed him and asked him if he was interested in buying the artwork from us. That way, he'd own it and could manufacture as many as he wanted without having to use us as the middleman.He was interested so we started negotiating price. We offered him a VERY reasonable price and he said it was too high. Against better judgement... we went even lower. Again, he balked and said it just wasn't affordable. We couldn't go any lower.That was the last email I ever got from him, despite sending a follow-up email a few weeks later to see if he was still interested or if there was anything else could do. So at that point, we figured, ah well, lost cause. It was fun while it lasted.

However a while later, the designer was at a Ring of Honor show when he saw an attendee wearing a autographed "Cheap Pop" design shirt that was clearly inspired by his design...

... and as it turned out, Foley was selling the above design at his stand-up shows!

I'm a graphic designer-- I've even done design & shirt work for a professional wrestler, and it is always saddening to see a fellow creative worker get ripped off. Especially because designs and pro wrestler face a lot of the same creative and financial struggles. Pro wrestler Jervis Cottonbelly has spoken before on how important it is for wrestlers to adequate compensate and respect those who are designing there merchandise so the attitude isn't unknown to pro wrestlers at large.

After the designer went public with his story, and one small twitter firestorm later... Mick Foley had this to say:

"I have realized over the course of several civil DM's with you that making a legally acceptable move, and a morally correct move are not always the same thing. In recognition of this distinction, I apologize for not informing you of my decision to pursue an alternate version of your concept and I will donate the remaining #CheapPop shirts in my possession to people in need on Long Island. Maybe we can re-issue the shirt later this year as a fund-raiser for RAINN. It is my sincere hope that you will not be the recipient of any unpleasant social-media interactions because of this issue."

Mick Foley also posted a slightly longer version on his facebook page, conceding that he could understand just "...why the creator of the original #CheapPop t-shirt may have dared use the "D word" in reference to my decision to change artists and artwork on a similar project, without letting him know about it first... I could have handled the situation with more respect to the original artist..."

See? It's not hard to make amends. When you mess up, you own your mistake, you accept responsibility for it, you acknowldge why what you did was wrong, and you sincerely apologize to the wronged party. Both designer and designee have worked out an amicable solution, and hopefully a lesson was learned.