I was poking around the Xbox Verse the other night and stumbled upon one of the most amazing things ever: Cardboard Tube Samurai!

Ok, so maybe I’m exaggerating a little bit, but it is cool. I also achieved the impossible by buying and downloading this costume, I used the exact amount of surplus xbox points that I had. I now have a zero balance!

Now that the Xbox is up and running again I will most assuredly be on more often so feel free to shoot me a friend invite anytime. I am also on the Raptr network so, again, feel free to send me a friend invite anytime

I made a freelancing mistake on Thursday to the tune of $350.00. Granted this isn’t as large a mistake as say $1500.00 could have been, but it’s going to set me back a little bit, but that’s not the point of the article. I have been doing freelance work for this client for several years now. I have been creating artwork and separations for their t-shirt business. I handle probably a lot more technical work than I should, but it pays the bills. This mistake landed squarely on my shoulders this time – and it was a technical mistake – the customer tried to correct me in the proofs and I just forgot to make the corrections, simple as that and the shirts got printed. I admitted to the mistake, took the fall and made it as right as I could with my client.

The funny thing about all of this is on the very same day I was dealing with clean up on this mess with my customer they printed shirts incorrectly for another one of their customers. This customer had emailed them “camera ready” art to print and my client had printed it as they had sent it, but that customer had sent it wrong. Why? The excuse was – and I quote – “Well, our artist didn’t understand what the term camera ready art meant and assumed that you (the t-shirt printer) would fix the art if it wasn’t right.” Yes, that is a real quote.

To clarify, my client (a t-shirt printer) had a customer that walked in off the street and wanted to supply art for them to print so that this walk-in customer didn’t have to pay me to do the art the correct way for the t-shirt printer in the first place. But, when they sent art wrong they assumed my t-shirt printer client would fix it FREE OF CHARGE if the walk-in customer’s artist didn’t sent correct artwork. WHAT?!

First of all, it isn’t the t-shirt printer’s job to educate their customer’s artist on how to create artwork. If you are a designer – or call yourself one – and you don’t know terms such as “camera ready” or “negative” or “reverse” then you need to get on the internet and figure them out or find a new field of work. Claiming ignorance in graphic design today should NEVER be tolerated. If you claim to be a designer or an artist you better know what the hell you’re doing, in my opinion. Secondly, if you don’t know these terms and made a mistake that cost clients money, you need to own up to that mistake and make things right. By doing this you effectively do two things: 1) You will remember this mistake and (hopefully) not make it again 2) your client will remember that you made the mistake right by them and (hopefully) their loyalty will become stronger.

The point I want to make with this article is this: we all make mistakes, it’s a part of the business, you can not avoid them all. But when you do make mistakes or you do not understand something own up to it, fix the problem, make some phone calls or internet searches and do the job right. More often than not today I find people trying to place blame of their ignorance or mistakes on other people, not just in art, but all facets of society. The reason I care in the design world so much is because when you mess up and try to weasel out of it, you make me look bad. But not just me, all the guys that are trying to do it right, and it’s pissing us off. So man up, read up and do it right the first time!

@khurlebusch and I were discussing the Xbox logo the other day and what types of programs that you might be able to create it in. Being an Adobe Illustrator zealot I held to the belief that it could be done in Illustrator fairly easily while she leaned more toward the 3D program side of things (which is probably the easiest way to create it – but Illustrator zealot!). So I decided, on a lark, today to see just how hard it would be to recreate.

From start to finish it took me about thirty minutes to complete. As you can see from the step-by-step image below I recreated it with primarily gradients using the Adobe Illustrator CS4 gradient tool (which I adore).

UPDATE: Download the Adobe Illustrator file of this artwork in .eps format here.

I created video of the recreation as well that I am working on getting onto Youtube. The video shows in better detail exactly what I did with the gradients to achieve the end result. I’ll let everyone know when it goes live via my Twitter feed.

UPDATE: Links to the video of this vector recreation can be found here for part one and here for part two. Enjoy

I haven’t played a Mortal Kombat game in years. After about the third one things seemed to just get crazy visually on them and, to me, it seemed like nothing was new and it was all just to show off the next cool video card upgrade or what not. But I do hold a special place in my heart for the franchise in general and the first movie in particular.

Granted the movie, for today’s standards, is visually hokie and the acting is pretty bad (even for 90′s standards), but it was one of the first video game movies that really hooked me for some reason. Maybe it’s because the Mortal Kombat games changed the face of gaming and paved that transition from arcade gaming to adult home gaming in a way no other game did or maybe it’s because I was just a geek, which leads me to the new movie.

From the looks of this video I am probably going to be geeking out all over again. Granted the acting looks spotty in places and some of the shots and concept are a bit weak in places, but COME ON, it’s MORTAL FREAKIN’ COMBAT! I’m sure I’m going to be standing in line with a host (I’m seriously hoping) of other geek boys in costume or draped in hand made control mimicking move shirts. In short, I can’t wait for this flick, as cheesy as it may be I’m up for the ride. GET OVER HERE!