I just posted my 100th Prom Night Fist Fight entry. For whatever reasons, our western culture often places added emphasis on events occuring at intervals of 100, thus, a celebratory post.
What began as a digital sketchbook way back on 03/04/2006 has become one of my more favored artistic outlets (much to the dismay of other outlets that are getting very little love right now. I’m looking at you Notes to Self.) I’ve learned a few things along the way and have hopefully grown as a craftsman through my posting there. When I started PNFF (as the cool kids call it):
I was just making the transition from using Corel Draw (I know, right? No, YOU shut up) to attempting to learn to use Adobe Illustrator. Wicked learning curve, but now I use Illustrator for approximately 85% of my work day and it’s my go-to app for creating just about anything digital.
I had limited interaction with more thoroughly-thought-through typography or grid systems for content layout. While I’m still very much a beginner with both (a quick perusal of Grid Systems: Principles of Organizing Type and other resources keeps me humble and hungry to learn) I feel like the explorations on PNFF keep those principles at the forefront of my mind.
I got to see one of my main typographic and design mentors, Mike Cina, begin using Revolver (the image rotation script developed specifically to make PNFF easily-update-able) on his site True is True. It still makes me smile.
With the help of a dotcomrade, I learned a little more Javascript and finally figured out how to get the old show-and-hide trick working smoothly on the web. It’s the little things. And with the help of the fine folks at Tubatomic Studio during my time in-house with them, I got to learn some more PHP (which is quickly becoming an extremely nerdy obsession) and develop the multi-use Revolver.
Not bad lessons to be gleaned from one ridiculously-monikered domain name and some free time during my lunch breaks to visually flesh out a few of the odd creative sparks that float around in my head. Thanks for playing. Here’s to 100 more fist fights.