May 23, 2005 by Collin
Happy Monday. Hah.
Do you like dragons? Do you looovvvveeeee dragons? If so then run (or click rather quickly) over here to purchase my latest, and possibly greatest* take on the “support” ribbons! Or just admire it below.
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*although I still like the “Grim Ribbon” best.
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May 23, 2005 by Collin
If you haven’t seen the movie yet, you may want to skip this. I won’t give away too much, but still. If you are thinking, “What movie?” Go ahead and read it.
Apologies in advance to my Heather for the nits that I am picking here. Overall I did enjoy the movie and felt there were several parts that were quite cool. But…
Post continues below the “v”s
Being a Jedi is very bad for your hands.
Darth Vader is vacuum sealed for freshness.
If you have managed to lop three of the limbs off of what could be the greatest enemy to humankind EVER it doesn’t hurt to go the extra bit and nudge him with your toe into the lava.
Blue lightning makes you ugly. Avoid the blue lightning.
Being a hermit in the deserts of Tatooine for less than 20 years will seriously age a guy.
Yoda is green and yellow.
Children are actually “younglings” even though my spell checker says “no, no, no.”
It’s never too cliche to strike a pose with your fists in the air and yell, “Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!”
If everyone in the world already knows how your story is going to end, there’s no reason whatsoever to be overly creative in how you get there.
Don’t turn your back on a mob of clones with guns.
Commercials lie.
“This is not the prequel you seek.”
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May 19, 2005 by Collin
I’ve added four more CliparToons to the shop,
Me-You-Boo stuff:
A Matrix inspired Neo Ribbon:
And an evolution of that into The Grim Ribbon:
Just look at me go.
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May 19, 2005 by Collin
I realized this morning as I was heading off to work that I hadn’t made a new CliparToon yet this week, so here it is. The toon may be weak, but the BEER; she is STRONG!
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May 17, 2005 by Collin
Somehow they infected the muffins.
But the good news is the zombie muffins have pushed the clowns that much closer to the archive.
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May 16, 2005 by Collin
I upgraded my CafePress shop over the weekend and now I’m trying to stock it with stuff that people might actually want to buy. You will still be able to find the same old things that were there before, with the addition of the new “My Ribbon Can Beat Up Your Ribbon” stickers and shirts created from a design suggested to me by my Heather and the beginnings of the rapidly growing CliparToon Collection.
Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be adding an evolved “Support Evolution” ribbon, another ribbon idea that has been kicking around in my head for awhile now, many more CliparToons and a “Zombie Gear” section that will include the Cucumber Zombie and whatever future zombie stuff that dribbles forth from me.
My goal is to use whatever I can make from the shop to pay off my student loans, however the reality is more likely that I might make enough to offset the rising price of gas for a week or two. Time will tell. Who knows? Maybe I’ll come up with the next “hot new design” that will sweep the nation, nay, the WORLD and will make me so much money that I’ll be able to afford to become a Republican. Ha ha.
My normal style of posting should resume tomorrow.
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May 13, 2005 by Collin
Okay, I recreated their ad so that it doesn’t look as crappy. At least I don’t think it looks as crappy. You be the judge.:
So, other than the fact that it’s still a stupid clown, what do you think? The state spots aren’t noticeably smaller (and I’m PRETTY sure that it doesn’t matter what state you click on anyway, it’ll still just take you to the main site), the color is more balanced, he no longer looks like a clown/pickle hybrid, the company logo is 4x it’s original size AND the text isn’t cropped off. I wish I knew how much the original designer was paid. If it was more than nothing it was too much.
Now, unless I find another example of really bad banner ads from these people, I mean worse than I’ve already posted, or unless I’m contacted by their attorneys, this post is the last I can imagine having to say about this subject. I’ll be back next week with more of the usual.
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May 13, 2005 by Collin
Heather, in her comment on the snake mortgage ad post, mentioned seeing a scary pickle clown ad. We have found that ad. Here it is:
Art geek rant follows, read and be prepared to be bored.
Okay… WHY?! WhywhyWHYwhywhy?! It’s ugly, stupid looking, badly designed, the eyes look like they were added on as an afterthought since they aren’t in the same style as the rest of the thing… I swear, this looks like someone, an “artist” of some sort (bullshit artist, probably), found any clipart that was vertical to fit his space – damn the subject, as long as it FITS! – tossed on google eyes to be “cute”, then squeezed in buttons for each of the states to suit the client’s needs.
I looks to me like there was a surface that the “artist” cleared away because right above Alaska there is a thin break of light green through the dark green. It doesn’t belong. There were probably a few more large white spots in the original clipart like the one that “Bad Credit OK” resides in and on the arms. Obviously the surface was cleared away to allow for the state buttons. That makes sense. This is what doesn’t make sense. The spot left for “credit” is in a stupid position. It looks like a sloppy afterthought rather than an actual design choice. Honestly, WHY HAVE IT IN THE SPOT AT ALL?! It stands out in an ugly way! Dumb! I’m in a business where we use “Bad Credit OK” all the time and I know what it really means: “Your credit is ass? No problem! We’ll just load you up with a higher interest rate!”
And WHY color code the buttons like that? This might be something that runs through all of their banner ads, but for certain designs it makes more sense to do away with it. I, as a potential customer, have no idea why Colorado is a red button and Texas is purple. It appears to have been decided alphabetically. Or perhaps the “designer” thought it added a pretty rainbow effect. A BETTER idea would have been to mix the colors up a bit, you know, kinda like the spots on an actual clown’s clothing would be. And don’t use red or green on a green background. Instead use yellow, orange and blue. Or purple. Keep it to three colors though. No reason for four.
And this bit is particularly offensive to my design sense. See that “Click Your State & Refi”? Yes, that’s how it ACTUALLY was. The “designer” left off the rest of the sentence! Kind of a big deal, I would imagine. And the stupid clown was trimmed on the right edge as well. His pinkie’s in some guy’s custard pie!
Making him fit all the way would have caused him to shrink in height about the same amount as the height of the footer (the bit I’ve blurred at the bottom) which would have been a HORRIBLE setback to the overall design unless the person doing it was actually a designer. Or at least somewhat spatially aware.
Here are some solutions that wouldn’t involve disfiguring Bozo by trimming off his sticking out bits. First, he could have filled in the extra blank space by fixing the header. Add in all the missing text and, if you need to, make “Mortgage Rates Hit Record Lows!” all the same font size. The footer could have been expanded as well. The firm’s logo could have been edge to edge with the extra text that was on the side beneath it instead. Another less acceptable fix would have been to stretch him to fill up the space. He’s a drawing of a clown, not an actual photograph nor another familiar object where it would be noticeable to alter the dimensions unevenly.
Time allowing I just may recreate this stupid ad and post the result. It’ll still be ugly because, face it, it’s a dumb idea, but I should be able to manage to make it somewhat less ugly and more cohesive a design than it is now.
That sure ran long. Sorry. In case I don’t post again today, have a great weekend!
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May 12, 2005 by Collin
I found the link to this site from another site that I recently added to my links list. The first post I saw there was titled “Zombie Cucumbers”. Anyone who knows me will know the word “zombie” will catch my attention faster than almost anything. In his post this fellow, Drew, came to the conclusion that pickles are basically zombie cucumbers. As these things tend to do, that brought an image to my mind that I just had to make a reality. So I did. Here it is. Blame him , not me.
Clicker to make bigger.
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May 12, 2005 by Collin
I was over at a news site today, checking out a particularly awful picture of former child star Macaulay Culkin that one of my coworkers was talking about. He looked like he either just woke up or perhaps the judge ruffled his hair, because honestly, how often can a judge say he did that? Not nearly often enough.
Here, see for yourself:
CW1: “You should see this picture of Macaulay! He looks messed up.”
CW2: “What happened? He used to be cute as a kid, but now he just looks weird.”
Me: “To be honest, he looked weird as a kid too.”
CW2: “Yeah. But in a cute way.”
Right beneath this photo was an advertisement for (I’m pretty sure) the same company I mentioned I-don’t-know-how-long-ago about the vertical ad involving the “frosted” gingerbread man resting in the tall, phallic glass of suspicious, thick white fluid. Let’s call it “milk,” wink-wink.
Well, apparently they are still making “fun” ads. Let’s look at this one, shall we?
What the…?
Okay, let’s look at the imagery presented here. We have a snake. Snakes aren’t so bad. I like them. But I know a lot of people don’t like them, so that makes it an odd choice for an image to draw the greatest number of click-through traffic to your site. May as well use spiders and clowns for a regular triptych of terror. How can this be remedied?
I know! Make the snake red! People love red snakes. Red is the international color of trust, after all. It has been proven in test after test that one of the first things a person thinks of when seeing red is “trust”… if we discount, “danger,” “blood,” “fire,” “pain,” “Satan,” “Santa Claus,” “apples,” and probably a few dozen other things. “Trust” is right up there. And it’s so soothing as well. Out of all the colors in the rainbow it is certainly one of them.
Okay! A red snake it is then! Still not quite doing it though. Not feeling the “urge to click.”
I’ve got it! Make it a freakin’ red RATTLE snake! With it’s fangs hanging out! And make it so it’s looking right at the customer as if to say, “poke at me for a good time” like real rattle snakes do all the time! They’ll HAVE to click on it! They’ll have no choice!
For their next ad I wouldn’t be surprised to see a reclining leper with the tag line, “High Mortgage rates causing you to fall apart?”
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