On October 4th, 2010 I plan to bring the strip back in it’s black and white glory!

During the month of September I will be doing a lot of housekeeping on the website and refining characters a bit (sort of like what you see in today’s sketch) and bringing features and characteristics together a bit more to, hopefully, craft better drawn and fluid characters that I can do a lot more with in terms of movement and action because when the strip returns it’s gonna be an action filled fun fest (yes, I used “fun fest”).

Right out of the gate for the strip will be a HUGE story line that will bring our favorite robot back into the strip more frequently. October will reveal the entire back story of Robot Friday and follow all of the characters on an adventure to set the little guy right once more (as you may recall he was broken in this series of strips). Don’t worry, though, there will be tons of gags in the strip and even design and art related topics to keep everyone giggling

I don’t want to say that this will be Robot Friday 2.0 or anything, but the sketchbook comic exercise over the summer has helped me tremendously in terms of refining how I draw the characters and how consistanly I do that as well. Because of this I feel that the strip can now be pushed a bit further than what I was doing in the past to open up new chapters in the characters lives, so you will definately see new things and hopefully have a lot more fun reading everyday.

Yes, I said EVERYDAY. I am still sticking to my five times a week schedule for the strip. In reality the strip will probably update three times a week with twice a week having sketchbook comics to round out daily content. But I plan to eventually get back to five strips a week.

Just know that there are a ton of great things in store for the remainder of the year. Over the next month I’ll be posting more sketches and blogs giving you a behind-the-scenes look at how I go about tightening up character looks, back stories and refining the look and feel of the website and a whole lot more. So, spread the word and get peeps on board now because it’s a great time to start reading.

A person I follow on Twitter yesterday tweeted a very interesting article about advice on graphic design and the act of creating art in general. Some of my favorites listed are below, I’ve linked to the entire article and highly recommend its reading. Enjoy

• If you meet a person who cares about the same obscure things you do, hold on to them for dear life.
• The things your teachers tell you in class are not gospel.
• You will get conflicting information. It means that both are wrong. Or both are true.
• Libraries are a good place.
• Patina is a pretty word, and a beautiful concept.
• Develop a point of view.
• Design doesn’t have to sell. Although, that’s usually its job.
• Helvetica is nice too, but it won’t turn water to wine.
• Reject most of your initial ideas.
• Change contexts when you’re stuck.
• If you say “retro” too much you will get hives and maybe die.
• Learn your design history.
• Graphic design has just as much to do with words as it does with pictures.
• Start brave and brash: you can always make things more conservative, but it’s hard to make things more radical.
• Aesthetics are fleeting, the only things with longevity are ideas.
• Stop trying to be cool: it is stifling.
• It is okay to romanticize things a little bit every now and then: it gives you hope.
• Success is generating an emotion.
• Failure is a million different things.
• Everyone is just making it up as they go along.

Read the rest of this very enlightening article and many more points of great advice here.

I finally pushed myself to create some link buttons and link banners for the website and the comic and include them on the site. Just right click on the button or banner that you want and save them to your computer. Use the url www.robotfriday.com to link to this website. If you link to me please let me know so that I can return the favor and link back to you as well.

The buttons are designed in small sizes so they are more easily placed anywhere on your website. In keeping with some of the themes of my comics they are in the traditional printers colors of CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black – the colors offset printers use to print realistic photographs in a techniqed called “four-color process”) as well in case you don’t want to stick with the standard black. If you use any of the banners please link it to the site via www.robotfriday.com and send me an email or Twitter DM letting me know that you did so that I can get a link to your site on mine as well.

Thanks for the link and for reading and supporting the comic and keep spreading the word

As I try and increase the size of my audience and the range of people that I attract as that audience I keep trying new things all the time. I am gearing up to start doing a frequent live broadcast of me drawing. Below is a test run of me drawing a recent sketchbook comic.

I’m working on investing in better equipment – such as cameras – but I wanted to share some dry runs with you in the meantime. Feel free to share any of my videos on your own site as well

At first glance this just looks like a bunch of geeks cosplaying, but I’ll bet this kinda thing is pretty welcome to commuters that trudge this same subway line everyday.