Luc Latulippe

A few months ago, I was twittering with Chris Coyier of CSS-Tricks and he asked if I could make him a little Twitter bird which he could use on his blog to link to his Twitter account (up till this point he’d been borrowing the Twitterrific icon). I said yes, because I thought it would be fun. Next thing I knew, I went a little overboard and designed a whole flock of them. Twenty-four to be exact (click here to see the full collection). There are six different styles, each done in four different colours: Twitter blue, Cardinal Red, Robin Black, and Canary Yellow. Now here they all are, free, for your downloading pleasure. (I’m releasing them under this Creative Commons license.)

The ZIP file below contains four five files:

• an unflattened vector version
• a flattened vector version
• a large PNG version
• NEW! A flattened EPS file, saved down to Illustrator 8
• and a “read me” file

Download: Latulippe_Twitter_Birds_archive.zip

You can edit them to your heart’s content, just send a friendly linky-link back to my site to spread the word (preferably to this post’s URL). When redistributing, whether you modify them or not, all I ask is the following:

• Please do not remove the copyright notice
• Please do not try to pass them off as your own
• Please do not sell them, individually or as a set
• Please do not transfer them onto merchandise or any products which you intend to sell, for example:
  • printing them onto t-shirts you’re selling online: NO
  • printing one onto a t-shirt or sticker for personal use: YES!
  • using them as a logo or as part of a product branding: NO
  • using them on your blog: YES!
  • using them as avatars on services other than Twitter: YES!
  • using them in a book that is about social media: YES!

Essentially, this means they’re for personal use, not commercial use.

Whatever you end up doing with them, please post a link to it below in the comments; I’d really love to see them in action, as well as see what sweet new bird you turned them into.

Author Liz Gilbert at the recent TED Conference, giving a lovely talk about how we perceive artists’ inspiration. I hope most of you enjoy it as much as I did.

via John Hogman’s blog.

If you know me, you know I think one of the biggest rip-offs in our field is that of paid online portfolios. You may have read my past posts about theispot. Well, here comes another.

Let me share an email I just wrote to the people who run Folioplanet. It’s in response to a promotional mailing they sent out to illustrators listed on their site (I have a free “link listing” there, not a portfolio), offering a test drive of their $449/year portfolio service. The offer is $99 for 3 months, with an option to pay $100/quarter after that if you like it. Thus, $399 at the end of the year. Considering they’re in the business of selling basically nothing, the 9% savings means nothing too.

Here’s what I had to say.

FolioPlanet people:

Shame on you. Your message below just makes me furious.

The first time I can remember ever receiving an email from you guys, and it’s to ask me to spend $400 during the worst recession we’ve had in over a hundred years?? Seriously? THIS is your plan for weathering the economic storm ahead?? Asking dirt-poor illustrators—who barely worked last year and can’t make their rent—to cough up $400 so you guys can stay afloat?

That’s like me taking money away from a pan-handler so I can go buy myself a Frappucino, because I can’t quite afford it myself right now but that handful of loose change is just what I need! I believe the expression is “What the fuck?”

Your current business model may have been “cutting edge” 15 years ago, but you’ve done squat to keep current so you’re already an internet dinosaur. Your website uses antiquated, unvalidated HTML code, offers no RSS feeds, leverages absolutely nothing in terms of advanced web technologies, nothing to even give me the impression you WANT this business to work for us, and yet you have the nerve to come to us NOW asking money!? Again: “What the fuck?”

Your single revenue stream is a closed loop, wherein YOU are the only winner. You sell an annual invisible promise to illustrators of “maybe getting some work.” These illustrators——your only customers——then sit around waiting for magical jobs, which may or may not ever come. Usually, they don’t. The following year, they decide to buy another invisible promise. Rinse, lather, repeat. We lose, you win. WE PAY TO KEEP YOU GUYS IN BUSINESS, SO THAT YOU CAN CONTINUE SELLING US ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.

Do you even make efforts to attract art buyers to the site? None of my clients even know you exist. Do you do anything at all to make their experience on your site meaningful? Enjoyable? Profitable?

Others have already figured out how to do what you’re doing, but better, and for free. They leverage revenue generated by targeted ads to cover their operating costs and offer free portfolios with amazing upload tools. Most also integrate job listings, which also generates revenue, again helping defer the costs of free portfolios. They make the effort to bring all the right people together——creators, buyers, and advertisers——and gives all of them a good reason to participate.
- http://krop.com/creativedatabase/ *
- http://behance.net/
- http://coroflot.com/

Please feel free to delete my listing from site. I would do it myself, but you don’t offer even that simplest of capabilities from your web panel.

Good luck this year.

Luc Latulippe

I know I’m being harsh, but I think they opened themselves up to critical public scrutiny the moment they sent this email. Consider the whole situation:

• they’re asking for money from illustrators who haven’t seen a decent job in over a year, during a recession so severe millions of Americans are losing their homes as you read this;
• they can’t provide the least bit of a guarantee or proof that this is money well-spent;
• they haven’t updated their site in years, yet are offering the same old product at essentially the same old price.

As always, I welcome your comments, arguments, and rebuttals.

* I’ve since signed up with Krop, Coroflot, and Behance out of curiosity (see the links in the footer, under “Here Too”). I’ll reserve judgement for now till things develop there.

So, I have this gargantuan task ahead of me which I’ve been putting off ever since I started running low on CD-Rs: that of re-organizing over 1000 old illustrations, tagging them all with proper IPTC and EXIF metadata, and storing them all in a secure place. Sounds about as much fun as doing eight years of back-taxes while sick with the flu.

The result would be a fully searchable database of my old work, with the main goal being to facilitate reselling them as stock. Yes, it’s entirely motivated by greed. Go capitalism!

I have some ideas on what direction I want to go regarding all this, but I’d really love your feedback too. I put a poll together below, and my own answers are pretty embarrassing:

STORAGE: My files are all backed up onto a stack of CD-ROMs
STORAGE: My files are all backed up onto an external hard-drive
LABELLING: My file-naming system is just OK
ORGANIZING: I have no system for organizing my files
ORGANIZING: I have shoeboxes full of old CD-ROMs and ZIP disks

There’s more to read below the poll, but go ahead and check some boxes first. Remember you can add comments in the “Other” field, and please share your thoughts down in the comments too. Thanks!

So here’s where I’m at. As I mentioned, I want to organize my old work into a fully searchable database, both for my own needs, and from my website so I can re-market them as stock. As you can see above, I currently have absolutely no system in place, other than files saved on several dozen CD-Rs, all crammed into a drawer in my office. Worse, one of the oldest disks has already degraded and caused old images to be permanently lost.

I’ve already decided on Amazon’s super cheap and very dependable Amazon S3 service for storing old files. Go compare prices, you’ll see they really are by far the cheapest. Plus, I can just dump everything there via FTP. 

But what about organizing all these files? I need to settle on a system that makes sense, and one which is scalable. My current “system” isn’t great, but it does allow me to find a file easily enough (as long as I know which disk it’s on). Here’s how it works: Let’s say I did an illustration for The Wall Street Journal, and the subject was about annoying cell phone users, my file would end up named like this:

WSJ_annoying_cell_user.eps

Pretty simple and basic, but not very flexible or useful. No metadata (like embedded copyright info, no tags or keywords, etc…), so I have no system at all, really. It’s barely useful to me, let alone anyone else.

Fellow illustrator Brian Biggs recently pointed me to Adobe Lightroom as a possible solution to this. I downloaded a 30-day trial version yesterday, and it definitely looks like a great way to add metadata quickly, to both single files or in batches. Biggs is using a combination of Lightroom and Adobe Bridge to tag and organize his image database, plus Zenphoto to power the back end of this catalog on his website. I’ll be giving Zenphoto a second look based on his recommendation; I remember it didn’t impress me much when I stumbled upon it over a year ago. I can see now that they’ve made quite a few improvements. A plug-in for Expression Engine would make me want to marry it.

So, what about you? Tell us about your tattered shoebox full of floppy disks, my friend. Don’t be ashamed. We can all learn from each others’ mistakes and share solutions here. Thanks in advance!