Exciting news, you guys — I was honored to be a guest on The Pen Addict podcast this week! Brad and Myke are great guys — I’ve been talking to Brad for a few years now, and I’m a big fan of Myke’s other podcasts from the mighty 5by5 network, like CMD+Space and Bionic, so listening to this one regularly is a no brainer.
I was a guest on The Pen Addict podcast this week! Click the graphic to check it out.
Finally got my pencils back from Tony for the Woodclinched Pencil Vector Pack, so I wanted to compare them to see how well he did.
He changed some details here and there; the color of the Eagle Flash; the eraser color of the Golden Bear, but man, it looks good to me.
The Confidant, a notebook by Baron Fig. Photo from BaronFig.com.
When it comes to the Baron Fig notebook, I totally missed the boat. I definitely heard about it the day the Kickstarter launched, but when it came time to pledge, I either didn’t have $20 I could spend on a pledge, or I just had other stuff going on. Excuses, excuses.
Long story short; I’m excited that they’re about to sell their notebook! According to the website, the Kickstarted product is called the “Confidant” and will be on sale for $20 starting Tuesday, March 4. Continue reading
I just opened my back of “Drink Local” edition Field Notes and started writing in the golden Pilsner notebook. It’s gorgeous, and the 120# “Dull” coated cover is amazing to touch, and holds up well in my back pocket.
My only problem? The inside cover. It’s black, and none of my pencils can leave a visible mark.
At Target today, I found a five-pack of gel pens on clearance which included one in white. It has the smeary, skippy ink flow that many cheap gel pens have, but it does the trick:
I guess gel pens do have their uses outside of tweens doodling in notebooks. I guess I’ll keep this pen around for just this occasion.
My friend Tony Headrick is a super talented designer. His studio, Neno Design, has won design awards and he’s created some of the coolest logos and websites around Fort Wayne (including my blog’s logo!).
We decided we wanted to work on something together. Trouble is, I’m not a designer, and he’s not a writer. Luckily, we figured it out.
It contains 14 pencils from my collection, some vintage, and some new. I tried to include a variety — including an old bullet pencil and a fancy antique mechanical pencil — in addition to straight-up wood cased pencils.
Roughly, here’s what real-life pencils the designs were inspired by, from left to right:
It was fun hearing Tony talk about creating these:
To me, pencils are one of the most accessible and basic art tools. Working with Andy Welfle, a professional pencil collector, made the experience so worthwhile. Andy provided some of his favorite pencils, the history behind the design and it was a real privilege to be trusted with such unique, vintage and storied pencils. It was a real challenge to try and keep the design minimal. The colors, materials and textures were what really stood out.
Just look at the detail between various lengths o points, and of the sharpening of the barrel between round and hex pencils.
He did an amazing job, too. As someone who doesn’t normally spend a good portion of his day thinking about wooden pencils, he caught a lot of detail: how a hex pencil differs from a round pencil where the tip meets the paint; how the shape and tip of a carpenter pencil differs from, say, a regular round pencil; the shine pattern on a ferrule or a tipped end. From a design perspective, I love how he managed to keep the design pretty flat and basic, but was able to incorporate a lot of detail, still, like the woodgrain and that shine on the barrel.
What does one do with a vector pack, all you non-designers may want to know? If you’re a designer, or find yourself in a situation where you may want to use a pencil like this in a design, then this might appeal to you. Rather than a raster like a JPEG or a PNG, a vector file allows you to scale an image up or down infinitely, keeping its shape and integrity all the while. Plus, you can easily change color, add text, or otherwise manipulate your image to fit the needs of your project.
This pack exists in a few different forms:
Sample pencil pack on Dribbble. Click the image to view
Check out Tony’s Dribbble page for a sampler of six pencil vectors. Some of my favorites aren’t in this package, but if you want those, check out the…
Click the image to go see the full vector pack at The Creative Market, and purchase for only $5!
This includes all 14 pencils and is for sale for $5 on the Creative Market!
This is coming soon. I’ll definitely have more information when we get this up and going. We’re going to submit it to The Cotton Bureau to crowd fund the printing of these t-shirts.
Woodclinched 