r2*blog

Desktop Snapshot

r2witco — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 05:12:07 +0000

Random snap of the way an app looked overlaying the desktop image.

Blogged with Flock

Cat Talk

r2witco — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 20:03:39 +0000

Two cats acting cute and doing there best impression of a couple Furbies:

and here are the same two cats translated for those of us that don’t speak feline:

Blogged with Flock

Military Clip Art

r2witco — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 02:39:49 +0000

Just found a cool new resource for Military graphics.

Military clip art

Most of them are related to the Air Force, and quite a few of them offer a downloadable EPS file. This could be just the resource you were looking for to make more of those trendy badges you see every where.

Blogged with Flock

Going green?

r2witco — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 22:18:37 +0000

I just saw this on Yahoo!

They’ve switched out their lightbulb icon for a CFL. Does this qualify as being more green? It would help a bit more if they got rid of the energy burning white background and maybe went with a more energy efficient color scheme

Blogged with Flock

Sketches

r2witco — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 10:14:31 +0000

Found a sketch book from a couple years ago, decided to scan a few of may favorite pages.

:: More Here ::

Blogged with Flock

The Vader project at C4 and Star Wars Flickr Love

r2witco — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 02:07:01 +0000

No, I wasn’t there. In fact I had no idea it even happend until today when someone sent me a link to a Flickr gallery showing it. I really like this project, very creative. After seeing this, I’m inspired to do something similar with Stormtroopers. I think the troopers would be a fun take on this concept because there are millions of them and they all look the same (except for maybe a badge or shoulder pad showing rank). I think it’s time the troopers got a little individuality, even tho they are all just clones.

Official Star Wars Blog: The Vader Project at C4

More info here: Taking a tour of the Vader Project

Star Wars Flickr Love

Really great concept using a Stormtrooper helmet, Young Stormtroopers In Love. Nice work Red and Jonny.

The Real World: Darth Vader.

More Vader!

Last but not least, Star Wars Origami!

Blogged with Flock

Another great image editing tool (Soft Scissors)

r2witco — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 20:29:13 +0000

Just saw this and really want to get my hands on it…

Photoshops’ extractor tool has really come a long ways in the past few versions, but it still doesn’t handle odd edges (like hair and feathers) as well as Soft Scissors seems to. At this point, I can’t find any info as to where or how to get my hands on this magical piece of software. If I do, I’ll post back about it. If you know anything please leave me a comment.

Blogged with Flock

Advanced Photo Resizing

r2witco — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 16:45:05 +0000

Really amazing new technology for image resizing. May not be that appealing to all, but to pixel pushers like myself, it’s definitely worth checking out.

Blogged with Flock

Star Wars and Flock

r2witco — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 07:06:24 +0000

Once again, I’ve stumbled upon some long lost memory on YouTube - last time it was 80’s Cartoon Intros. This time I found a lost scene from Star Wars: A New Hope. This whole scene was on the Star Wars Radio Broadcast, I remember listening to the cassettes as a kid. Anyway, enjoy…

Embedded Video

In other news, I’ve switched browsers. I’m now using Flock. Not to sound like too much of a sales person, but I’m really impressed with it so far. If you’re not familiar with it, I’ll give you a brief rundown. It’s basically a different version of FireFox. It’s built off the same architecture, and has a lot more features. I’m really enjoying the Media Browser, as well as the integrated blog tools - which I used to write this post. All of the FireFox extensions I used before work great on Flock so I can use it for my design/developer purposes as well as my recreational web needs. On top of that, my buddy Tim designed the badass interface that really sets it apart from other browsers. He told me that I couldn’t combine Flock with Star Wars, guess I proved him wrong with this post.

Blogged with Flock

Typography in motion

r2witco — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 23:45:52 +0000

First of all, here’s a little background on typography for those of you who don’t know what it is.

Pulp Fiction Typography

Higher Resolution Version

Hey Ya Typography Short

Here’s a couple of links to other videos of this sort:
Oceans Eleven project
8 Rules of Fight Club

If you know of any others that fit into this category, please leave me a comment.

[edit] just saw this video and had to add it to this post:

doodles

r2witco — Sat, 19 May 2007 06:09:22 +0000

While clearing off my desk the other day, I found a couple of doodles buried in the mess. I made sure to scan them before they got tossed with the rest of junk mail, magazines, stems and endless piles of papers.

Floating Beings

Our Cats ~ Orbit, Rocky and Mia

del.icio.us

r2witco — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 22:48:25 +0000

I’m still not super stoked with their interface, but I use del.icio.us everyday to bookmark stuff. In case you hadn’t noticed before, I have an RSS feed showing my latest 25 bookmarks in the right column of this blog. At some point, I plan to add a few pages to this blog. One of those will include a tag cloud of my del.icio.us links. Until then, I’ll put it here…

Pub sneaux (skate human)

r2witco — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 02:35:34 +0000

Dailymotion blogged video
Pub sneaux (skate humain)
Video sent by rikofx

I’ve seen this animation trick done a few times, and it gets me everytime. I think it’s really cool, but I still can’t figure out how you would do some of these tricks (like the rail slide) with stop motion.

If anybody out there has any idea how they do it, or better yet can link to a "making of" movie or article, I would really appreciate it.

My Timeline

r2witco — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 19:50:28 +0000

Here at work, we’ve added a new feature to the service, the Exportable Timeline Widget! You can export your timeline as a Flash widget, which you can then place on other websites and show off your stories. One of the cool features about it, is that it’s dynamic in the way that if you were to add new stories on OurStory, those new stories would show up on your timeline widget that may live on your MySpace page.

Here’s an example, showing stories from my life:

Start your own timeline at OurStory.com

And here’s one for my cat, Orbit:

Start your own timeline at OurStory.com

Social Network Overload

r2witco — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 19:30:46 +0000

Here’s a little widget you can use to consolidate most your social netowrking/web 2.0 links into one place. I’m not really sure if this was designed to show off your stuff, or just make life easier for stalkers

Here’s mine:

PS - I had to edit it to manually add the OurStory link

Beautiful Image Collection

r2witco — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 19:10:23 +0000

I’m not usually into just reposting items I find on Digg, but this is pretty cool.

Top 500 images on the Internet!

Gone Daddy Gone

r2witco — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 01:51:31 +0000

Funny video for Gnarls Barkley’s version of Gone Daddy Gone. The animation is great, they really did a nice job on the characters. On top of that, it’s a decent song and there’s a great panty shot towards the end of the video

On a different note, I really like how BrightCove has put all of the share/link/email options into the player instead of just linking back to the site like YouTube does.

Star Wars, the college years

r2witco — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 22:19:43 +0000

Stabbing at Leia’s 22nd Birthday

New features (video comments)

r2witco — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 18:13:50 +0000

I just added a new feature to the blog. If you have a webcam, you can now leave me video comments. If you go to leave me a comment or read the comments, you’ll notice a widget, from flixn.com, at the bottom that will let you interface with your webcam. After recording, it spits out a code snippet that you can then paste into the comment box and it will post your video into the comments.

Test it out, leave me a message, I’m curious hear (and see) what you have to say.

Isn’t that the truth

r2witco — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 22:44:08 +0000

How many designers out there have run into this situation before? I know I have.

This animtion has been floating around for a little while now, I decided to repost it for those who haven’t seen it yet. I’m not sure where it came from originally, props to the creator!

the big “30″

r2witco — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 19:27:08 +0000

Yep, that’s right, I can no longer be trusted.

In the spirit of getting older, I invite you all to reminisce with me a little. Here’s a collection of old videos from Sesame Street, some of you may remember the Number Painter. He was always one of my favorite characters. I wonder if he were to try and do that today if he would get arrested? I could see one of those episodes ending with him sitting in a cell, painting a mark for every day he’s been there.

Sesame Street Number Painter

and if you feel like picking something up for me, there’s always Amazon…

Return to Sender

r2witco — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 01:21:58 +0000

After researching a little on how to go about constructing an HTML email template I have come to one conclusion, “that sh*tz whack!” I thought designing things to display properly in all browsers was difficult, now I find out that most email clients are light years behind their big brother browsers when it comes to CSS support (if they support it at all).

Oh well, that’s what I get paid for - to solve problems (and if I’m lucky, make it look pretty).

Here’s a list of resources I’ve come up with to begin my research:

As I was saying, I’ve only done a little research so far. If someone out there has some better advise to offer, please leave me a comment.

For now, I’m off to that wonderful world of tables and in line styles!

Useless Account

r2witco — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 19:49:32 +0000

Today’s web is crazy. Open ID is a pipe dream. Every direction you turn you’re forced to create yet another account. Most of the time it’s for one of those throw-away web startups created 10 times a day, but occasionaly it’s worth the effort. It might be to purchase some fancy threads, order a pizza or see how fat the Cool Kids from high school have become. When it’s that important, you can’t afford to drop the ball. With a useless account you can practice without fear. So when it comes to the crunch, you’re ready!

That’s my kind of cooking

r2witco — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 02:13:30 +0000

This guy takes a heaping scoop of beat boxing talent, tosses in a dash of good humor and comes up with a tasty little ditty.

superbowl quote

r2witco — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 01:18:32 +0000

Somewhere David Grohl is jerking off, screaming “Prince is covering me!”

~josh

Runaway Runaway!

r2witco — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 07:32:24 +0000

I still can’t get over how ridiculous that whole Boston scare was.
I guess it’s true, I guess the terrorists have won.

I’m not gonna go on about this, the media has already done that. I’ll just leave you with a couple of the articles I enjoyed from all of this.

I now know where I want my ashes spread

r2witco — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 00:44:07 +0000

This is just a sample of the basement soyburger has built for themselves.

Check out the entire gallery here

Forget it, I don’t want to wait till I’m dead to visit that place, I want to live there now!

OurStory at DEMO ‘07

r2witco — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 00:30:51 +0000

Yesterday, the company I work for OurStory finally shed its BETA tag and unveiled our product to the world at DEMO ‘07. From what I have heard, our presentation went really well. I’m not that surprised, we have a great product and our founder, Andy Halliday, is a great speaker and is very passionate about our product.

Here’s a video of our presentation:

Here’s a few links to press we’ve been getting since the event:

DemoBlog Raves about OurStory
Exceptional OurStory feedback from DemoBlog. Quote from Keith Shaw “I ’m a big fan of the OurStory team ….. I’m rooting for this one.”
OurStory.com at DEMO ‘07
Andy halliday and OurStory.com’s presentation and product release at DEMO ‘07 in Palm Springs
Demo 07: Looking for the Next YouTube
OurStory.com lets you collaborate with others to add photos, videos, and text to tell the story of a person or an event, and then capture it in books or on a DVD.
OurStory tells your story with a little help from your friends
OurStory lets users collect and organize photos, videos, and blogs chronologically.
Demo 07 OurStory.com shows some utility
Standards Higher than Usual. One final DEMO attendee that actually shows some utility is OurStory, which allows families to plot stories, photos and videos on a timeline to share with others.
More here on my Digg page…
I should have just posted that link

A mid week pick me up

r2witco — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 00:55:36 +0000

This little ditty helped to pick my spirits up and energize me for the rest of the week (or at least the end of the day).

here’s a few other things I’ve stumbled across recently:

…last but not least, here’s a great article that I found to be helpful for work/fun: 53 CSS-Techniques You Couldn’t Live Without - all of their articles are really good, I’m a subscriber!

I want one!

r2witco — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 01:04:32 +0000

My birthday is coming up soon. You wouldn’t be able to get one in time for that, but you could maybe preorder one for me and then just give me a nice card telling me what will be arriving on my doorstep in April…

What am I talking about you ask? The ModBook, that’s what! Axiotron is taking the latest model of the MacBook and modding them into the first Mac Tablets. It’s cool because you can add what ever bells and whistles you want and then they custum build your machine for you. Sure it’s a little pricey, but what really cool toys/tools aren’t.

Audio Test

r2witco — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 01:37:46 +0000

Testing out a new WP plug-in that will allow me to play mp3’s in my posts. It’s made by 1pixelout.net.

“Hip Trop” by r2witco created with Garage Band

Multiple Spaces and Wasting Time

r2witco — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 01:45:26 +0000

Here’s a couple of cool new things I found:

VirtueDesktops - this handy little app lets you set up different desktops that run at the same time. I use it at work and have set up desktops for Working, Playing, and Corresponding.
MochiAds - contains a whole bunch of sample Flash games. I’ve only played with a couple so far, but I’m already pretty fond of just floating around in Fly Guy, the music they chose for it is very relaxing.

Save ‘em for a rainy day (or a long flight to Thailand)

r2witco — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 20:13:54 +0000

Just in case anybody was wondering how to save a movie from YouTube and watch them later on your computer, here:

*if anybody comes across a better flv player for the Mac, would you let me know - thanks

gradients and colors without photoshop

r2witco — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 03:46:14 +0000

When in the heat of a deadline and you’re expected to throw together a layout, you don’t really want to be bothered with opening up unnecessary programs that just might slow down the whole process…

Here’s a couple of ways you can avoid opening photoshop just to add a gradient or get a color for your CSS file.

A List Apart has a way to create a gradient of any color or size with a .png or two.
(don’t worry, they have a way to get it to work for IE6)
Super-Easy Blendy Backgrounds
For you OSX users out there, here’s a widget that will give you a quick and easy way of converting Hex values to RGB, CMYK or HSV.
(or the other way around of course -don’t worry, it appears to offer a Windows alternative)ColourMod

What I read

r2witco — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 22:14:27 +0000

Someone at work asked what design sites I check out on a regular basis. After writing them back I thought the content was something I might share with those of you who who actually read this blog. So, here is my quick list of what I think you should check out on the web as far as design (and other junk) goes:

Here are the top 3 that I read on a regular basis:

alistapart.com - it doesn’t get much better than this. Some of the industries top designers/engineers giving top notch advice (for free!)
thinkvitamin.com - again, top notch advice from those ones who wrote the books and make it happen
wisdump.com - very simple look and feel, very in depth advice

If you are ever bored, feel free to poke around my del.icio.us bookmarks or my bloglines.

and of course, there’s always my outdated website - r2witco.net

enjoy

found my moleskin book

r2witco — Sun, 04 Jun 2006 08:03:04 +0000

I found my moleskin sketchpad that Steph got for me last summer. It had a couple of doodles in it I thought I would share.

Valentine

r2witco — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 18:40:27 +0000

Well, it’s been ages since I last posted something here, so I’d better add something.
Here’s what I made Steph for Valentines day.

Don’t worry, I had it done on Valentines day, I only lagged in sharing with everyone else.

Here’s a link to a bigger version of the finished product - a being valentine

Desktop

r2witco — Sat, 05 Nov 2005 10:00:28 +0000

This may be the best desktop picture I have had in a while. Staring at it reminds me of some of my favorite times, chilling at the Pharm lookin’ for inspiration. Too bad there is usually a mess of windows (or in this case, icons) in the way to enjoy it properly.

Icons

r2witco — Sat, 05 Nov 2005 04:40:56 +0000

“the Cowardly Lion”
~ hand illustration - colored in Photoshop ~

“the Medusa Geisha”
~ hand illustration - colored in Photoshop ~

the plants have eyes…

r2witco — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 02:48:06 +0000

If you like the idea of “living” plants, this is worth checking out.

1st-ave-machine.com

Firebird

r2witco — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 01:05:41 +0000

Firebird
~ collaged images ~

put a cork in it

r2witco — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 22:13:44 +0000

It seems that I have earned a reputation now for taking the wire top and cork from a bottle of chamange and making a chair and character from them. Here is a picture of my latest and greatest creation…

~ the cork ninja ~thanks for the pic John

tracer doodle

r2witco — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 21:54:06 +0000

Occasionally I find myself with no inspiration (gasp, does this sort of thing really happen to creative peeps). When this happens, I have found a little exercise that helps to pass the time, keep my hand moving, and work on composition. I like to call these little exercises “tracer doodles”. The point of these is not to make a well polished piece of art, but more or less just get ideas flowing. I try not to spend anymore time than it takes to find and trace the images.

Last night, was one of those uninspired times. Bored, while waiting for my fiance to get out of class, I pulled out my pad of tracing paper and grabbed the closest form of media, an asian newspaper.

a different take on a doodle

r2witco — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 08:32:45 +0000

ciabatta!

r2witco — Sun, 23 Oct 2005 09:22:44 +0000

Coffee shop art

r2witco — Sun, 23 Oct 2005 00:15:48 +0000

No, I don’t have any of my artwork up in a coffee shop (yet), but I am displaying some of my artwork in a coffee shop.

How am I doing that, you might ask? Simple, I decorated my fiance’s aprons that she wears for work, in a coffee shop.

Keyboard shortcuts in OS X

r2witco — Fri, 14 Oct 2005 02:12:23 +0000

This is a very handy list of keyboard shortcuts for OSX. Keyboard shortcuts in OS X | creativebits

My favorites have to be:

“Option-Command-* (asterisk)” = Turn on Zoom
“Option-Command-+ (plus)” = Zoom in
“Option-Command– (minus)” = Zoom out

and so it begins

r2witco — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 20:05:32 +0000

Well, here is my second attempt at setting up a blog, besides my Live Journal. I’m not really sure what I will be posting up here. I will probably set this up as a place to display design/art projects I am working on. Untill that happens, I will probably spend too much time working on the look and feel of it.

Whit Brezina
		OurStory/Whit
		Digg/r2witco
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		Facebook/Whit Brezina
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		Del.icio.us/r2witco
		Wishlist/Whit Brezina
		AIM/ff00005
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