The Beauty of the Sketch
I've come to have a deep appreciation for design sketches, even to the point of enjoying the aesthetics of them. My fine arts background doubtless has something to do with this--I spent a lot of time in school looking at and learning to appreciate abstraction.
But now I think it's that I've made the connection between the utility and the beauty that I've developed a real attachment to this non-form.
Papermaking process
And now, a brief detour into the world of analog artmaking, in response to a request from a friend:
I know this may be an odd request, but can you post your process for creating homemade paper from (and/or including) dryer lint? I have dryer lint. I want paper. I remember water, and screens, and pressing, and a lot a LOT of drying....
Though I've never used dryer lint for papermaking, apparently some people have had luck with it.
But recycled paper works a lot better for me. If you really want to do it "from scratch," you would use cotton linters, which is a more involved process. I use recycled paper.
The following is my quick & dirty papermaking process. You can always get better supplies and tools if you want to increase the quality of the results.
Supplies
Some of this you can make or find yourself, but for better results, look into acquiring some basic printmaking supplies. Carriage House Paper is a good place to get moulds, felts, etc. for a modest outlay.
- Make or buy a screen (also called a mould). Hosiery stretched over a wire clothes hanger can make a quick & cheap screen, but a properly built/purchased screen will be more stable and give a more predictable paper shape and flatness.
- Cheesecloth or felt sheets. The number you have will limit the number of sheets you can make in one session. They will get wet, so in between uses you can throw them in the dryer.
- Lots of paper of different kinds. Obviously, no staples or plastic, etc. Discarded photocopies, packaging, tags, etc. Just as long as it's real paper, made from some kind of natural fibers (Most likely to be cotton. And before you ask, you can't use cotton balls, the fibers are too thin & weak).
- If you want, put aside some small light objects to add after the paper is laid: flowers petals, confetti, small bits of various kinds of unblended papers, bits of newsprint, etc.
- Something heavy to press the wet sheets with to dry them. A couple of flat boards with heavy objects placed on top will do. You will need weights upwards of 20 lbs to be of any use (think cinder block).
- A regular blender. Expendable, preferably used and discarded; if you do several sessions of papermaking, you WILL likely blow out the motor and destroy the blender.
IMPORTANT: Last time I checked, brown paper shopping bags (and probably other paper) is made with processes that leave carcinogens in them. So this should NOT be a blender that is being used for food.
Instructions
Keep in mind, I'm posting this from memory, haven't done it recently, but this is the basic idea:
- Preferably do papermaking in warm weather: Paper pulp is COLD when your hands are immersed in it for hours. Also sunlight helps. And being outdoors so you don't flood your house.
- Tear the paper up into roughly 1-1½" square pieces.
- Get a storage bin or similar and fill with warm water.
- Using an old blender that is no longer used for food [1], blend up the paper in a mix of about 1 handful of paper scraps to 4 cups of water. In other words, LOTS of water to very little paper. If you put too much paper in you will kill the blender.
- Optionally, soak the bits of paper in warm water for a couple hours, or overnight.
- Using a high water-to-paper ratio (full blender of water with a handful of paper shreds), blend the paper for about 10-30 seconds. You will see the discrete pieces of paper turn into a fluffy, greyish (depending on the source paper color) cloud. Don't push the blender too hard, use short bursts. It's easy to blow out the motor.
- As you finish each chunk, pour the results into the big bin.
- Once you've got a good amount of pulp (I should repeat, this stuff is pretty much 99.99% water, it shouldn't take too long to get enough pulp to start), you're ready to begin forming sheets.
- Stir the pulp around with your hands. Feels funky, doesn't it?
- Dip the screen in (for a screen on a wooden frame, the screen material should be on top), keeping it roughly parallel with the ground. get the screen as far down in the bin as you can. Now slowly draw it up, keeping it parallel, and gently pull it out of the water. You should have an even coating of paper pulp on the screen. If it's not even, just plunge the screen back in, stir it around and try again. This is the easy (and fun) part, and the more even the coverage you get, the better the end result will be.
- Gently shake the screen back and forth to settle the pulp. Tilting the screen very slightly, let the excess water drip off a corner of the screen back into the bin. Take your time with this, the more water you drip off the better.
- Have a piece of dry cheese cloth handy to couch the sheet. Turn the screen upside down and gently press the sheet onto the cheese cloth. The screen should lift cleanly away from the pulp. You may want to have the cheesecloth sitting on top of a board, in turn sitting in a large pan or tray to catch water--you will be pressing the stack and removing moisture from the pulp.
- Put another piece of cheese cloth on top of the pulp you've just laid down.
- Repeat the process, building a stack of alternating cheese cloth and paper pulp.
- When you have a high enough stack, or run out of pulp, or are finished forming sheets, put one last additional piece of cheese cloth on top of the last sheet.
- Put a heavy, flat weight on top of the stack to compress it. This will start pressing the water out of the paper.
- You will need to leave the stack pressed for a good long time. Maybe even a few days. At this point the pulp still has a high percentage of water, and it takes a long time to remove the water (which is why it's good to give a lot of time for water to drip out when forming sheets -- saves a lot of time later).
- Once they're dry, lift the sheets carefully by the corner off of the felts or cheesecloth. If it's not completely dry you may want to leave it out in the sun (or somewhere indoors with good air circulation) for further drying.
That's about it.
One further consideration is sizing. I haven't done enough papermaking to have found a good solution for this yet, but sizing is important if you're going to do something like write or paint with ink or thin washes or watercolors on your paper. The sizing will keep the color from bleeding.
Update: If you want to see how it's really done (i.e., with a proper Hollander beater and a 50-ton hydraulic press), see here: [http://aprilhl.net/2011/03/339/]
Puxico / Dothan
These two new jewels from Tomorrow's Man lead off the next batch of Geographical soundbites:
Riverdale
A gorgeous textural piece by Charlie Hoistman, with improvised electric guitar strummed, plucked, struck, rubbed, tickled, and processed with custom SuperCollider effects. Fresh off the vine. Enjoy.
Smile + Remix
Soundbites presents Smile, a Tomorrow’s Man track originally cooked up in 1996, plus a new remix by Charlie Hoistman. Originally appearing on TM’s Twist album, this is a dense little nugget with a lot of layers and ambiguity (and is not an instrumental, a first for Soundbites). The basis for the remix was baked into the original track when it was originally recorded, but has not appeared until now.
Notes for a Particular Algorithmic Approach to Composition
...or rather, several particular approaches.
Notebook pages from 2007.
Skittery I @ alt-classical.com
Charlie Hoistman has a track featured at alt-classical.com called "Skittery I (excerpt)", taken from a longer 25-minute (!) piece.
Wireframing for Web Apps
Wireframes can sometimes become too much of an end in themselves. Of course we know better, but sometimes a good reminder can keep us focused.
Some choice quotes from this short article by Eric Kelly at the Contrast blog:
- "The whole point of working at this fidelity is the speed at which you can explore ideas with a reasonable degree of precision."
- "Everything means something." If you have an outline AND a fill AND a drop shadow, you are probably building in distinctions that don't actually mean anything.
- At low fidelity, you should be exploring, not refining.
- "The path to UI hell is sign posted 'Lorem Ipsum'." Using real data helps remind you that yes, that title will sometimes wrap, photos or data will not always fit in the box you have provided them.
- "Know your technology." Building out features takes time. Save advanced interactions/bling for the core element(s) of the application.
- "The goal is great delivery, not great deliverables. No one marvels at great deliverables except other UX designers"
- "Whatever works." If the sketch you've drawn on the whiteboard communicates the design well enough, don't waste time doing it up nice in OmniGraffle/Visio/Illustrator. Take a snapshot and move on.