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I have a wrist injury from my job as a graphic designer, as you might know, so I’m always on the lookout for pointing devices that don’t aggravate the pain on a daily basis. A few months ago I got rid of the Mighty Mouse that came with my iMac because it has no ergonomic value whatsoever and the little scrolling nub was forever getting stuck. I moved to a Logitech MX something-or-other, and while it looked pretty ergonomically sassy, it cursed my thumb with additional pain!

I was quite stoked to win a Bamboo Touch from @WacomAustralia the other week, because I have been envious of the touch pad on Macbook Pros and the Touch looked like it would be relevant to my interests. I thought I’d take a few photos and write a little bit about how the last week or so has been since I have gone mouse-free.

I like to document receipt of exciting new toys on my dailybooth!

Here, you can see me debut as a hand model. That rest underneath my hand is a Fellowes gliding wrist support. It is super! It’s meant to work with a mouse, but I’m using it with the Bamboo Touch just fine.

It’s pretty easy just to rely on the Touch for general computer use and web browsing. I really enjoy flicking down and back and forward! I’ve never used a Macbook Pro for long enough to understand the multi-touch gestures, so I’m not sure what I’m missing out on with the Bamboo Touch because it’s limited to only two finger gestures.

In this photograph you can see my demonstration holding the stylus. At my old job I had a Wacom Graphire, and the stylus was built much sturdier, but the Bamboo stylus works fine. I do accidentally hit the side button a bit though.

Here you can see the injury I sustained after angrily washing up a food processor blade a few weeks ago. Treat those things with respect, it hurt a lot!

Err, back to the Bamboo Touch! The nifty light tells you when the stylus is close enough to the surface to disable the Touch sensitivity (around 1cm above the surface). Sometimes I scroll by flicking with my fingers but use the stylus to click around, and it can confuse the device (and me). When I have used the stylus in Photoshop to draw I have noticed a lag but it has been wonderful to use in Illustrator.

The pen holder is awesome and looks cute, but I very rarely remember to put my stylus back in there. I tend to confuse it for my Faber-Castell Pitt pens too!

A couple of annoying things:

Dudes, what is going on with this cord business? The Bamboo Touch really needs to be cordless. In all honesty, I have actually been using it flipped around and on the “left hand” setting so I can trail the cord behind my iMac. Cords hurt my life, boo!

I have had to switch to Safari for my browser, because the scroll always gets stuck in Firefox. This is kind of annoying, but now I only use Firefox if I need to use Firebug or other similar web design extensions. One of my friends has the larger Bamboo Touch and runs it on a PC, and hasn’t had a single issue scrolling in Firefox. I’ve been googling to find out if it’s just me, or if it’s a common issue using the Bamboo Touch with Firefox for Mac.

The surface is no where near as nice and glossy as the MBP touch pad. Sometimes it really irritates me because my finger can’t glide smoothly and I will “drop” files mid-drag. The left side of the device, where all the buttons are, is much glossier – I wish they’d used that surface for the Touch area! It also picks up a lot of lint, which has the potential to confuse the sensors. Sometimes my cursor skips erratically all over the screen and there appears to be nothing interfering with the Touch zone!

Some good things:

My hand feels less pain because I am moving it in different ways, instead of moving it only one specific way over and over. I have been trying to move my arm from the elbow instead of the wrist (the Fellowes gliding wrist support assists with that) so that might be helping too!

Aside from some minor lag in Photoshop, the stylus works perfectly. This small size is more than adequate for my needs, even after using an A4 sized no-name tablet for a couple of years! It’d be nice to have a little more sensitivity too, but if this is your first graphics tablet you probably won’t miss it.

Overall I’m really happy with the Bamboo Touch, and I’ll continue to use it as my main pointing device. I really prefer not to use a mouse at all because it encourages small movements over and over and over in the fingers, wrist and arm which leads to RSI. I enjoy the freedom of movement when using a graphics tablet, even though it takes a bit of practice to develop accurate and quick pointing.

Lastly, the Bamboo Touch being touched!!

A couple of weeks ago I was notified that I’d been picked by Pilgrim and Stefan Sagmeister as a finalist in the “Happy” design contest on Red Bubble. I was pretty stoked (read: squealing) to be hand picked out of all the entries, because Mr Sagmeister’s approach towards graphic design is one I am very influenced by.

My prize was a copy of Stefan’s 2001 monograph “Made You Look“, complete with a personal message scrawled in his own distinct penmanship. I don’t get to buy books often, especially the most luxe of design and art books, so this is one I will put in the “pool room” along with the Marian Bantjes – Fox River Paper promotional booklet that I managed to get shipped over to Australia by a kind fellow designer!

The book is infused with the spirit in which Sagmeister undertakes all of his work. Written by Peter Hall with loads of hand written notes, his story to date is fascinating and inspiring and speaks of his quest to design things with meaning and heart.

This little flick animation is just one of the surprising things in the book! I love how I felt encouraged to really use the book, as if it wanted me to pour over it and find all it’s little secrets.

Thank you so much Red Bubble and Stefan!

I bought some books from Book Depository the other week and two of them were typography related, Mike Perry’s Hand Job and The Handy Book of Artistic Printing. I really relish these books because I don’t often by them for myself, and I’d been eying them for a while! As a result, all I can think about is lettering and typography right now and I wanted to share with you my favourite lettering and typography artists.

Daren Newman

Allison Carmichael

Adam Hayes

Marian Bantjes

Ray Fenwick

Chris Piascik

Deanne Cheuk

Adam Garcia

I have a lot of talented friends, and I only realised it when I sat down and thought about writing profiles on all of them to share with you here! I have friends who are photographers, artists, designers, models, performers, publishers, writers, musicians and activists. For most of these guys, I’m lucky to have fallen into their company as just a “friend” while others I met in a professional sense and then we developed a friendship. Because there are so many, I am going to break this up into a series of sorts, to allow you to digest the sheer amount of talent and creativity I have around me!

Tea Tasbihgou – jewellery designer for Sacré Coeur

I met Teayam online so long ago now! She does heaps of creative things – illustration, modelling and jewellery design. She recently started up Sacre Coeur, and creates steampunk styled accessories out of the most beautiful found objects. Of course, I chose the above image because there’s a paisley pendant in it, muahaha!

Mark Payne – artist and designer

Mark and I struck up a friendship on Red Bubble when he sent me a ffffound invite (no sorry guys, I still don’t have any and even if I did I’d give it to one of my mates!) Since then he has been one of the biggest supporters of my art practice – he even won the auction for my drawing at the Brisbane Twestival! His graphic work is beautiful – foreign worlds of fragmented and dizzying objects twisted like bright alien car crashes.

Kate O’Brien – photographer

I had the fortune of befriending Kate a couple of years ago when I was planning my wedding. I had admired her vintage-esque photographs for a while, and nervously emailed her asking if she’d like to photograph our wedding – she agreed and we became friends! She has also never done another wedding since

Ashley Moyer – fat activist and Chunky Dunk organiser

It may or may not come as a surprise, but I am fat and I am a fat advocate. Ashley is one of my fat activist friends: she has been a cheerleader and is running Chunky Dunk in Portland this year. Chunky Dunk events are private pool parties for people of size and their allies, and were started last year to provide a shame-free venue for swimming, bathing and bomb diving for fat folk. I really want to be Ashley when I grow up, and start Chunky Dunk parties here in Brisbane, Australia!!

Stick around for the next few days to cop a load of my other talented friends!

Now that I have more time I’d like to be able to focus on contributing more to the knowledge base available for Adobe Illustrator on the world wide interweb tubes. If you have a tutorial request, or a simple question, let me know so I can start planning a series of posts on de-mystifying this fabulous piece of software.

You’ll notice to your left, a piece I created all in Illustrator for the TED696 competition. Basically, you get to dress up a brown paper bag (I’m all about brown craft paper at the moment actually) for Toohey’s Extra Dry. Dmote, Shepard Fairey and Luca have designed three bags to kick it off, and the first week’s entrants are now in the gallery. When my entry is up I’ll post about it again and implore you to vote for me every day! Mama wants a MacBook Pro!

In my design, I have included paisley motifs taken from my sketchbook and paintings and vectored them. I was always going to work on vectored paisleys but put it off because of the time involved and the complexity of some of the designs. Now I’ve started, it’s almost like an investment in the future because I’m going to build up a bank of paisley motifs that I can include in future designs (including patterns for Naked and Angry!) Some of the Illustrator techniques I used in this piece include custom designed patterns and borders as well as extensive use of the pathfinder pallette (dividing, merging and cropping).

I grew some paisley in the garden for you

I’ve decided that paisley is the new flourish. Paisley is named for a town in Scotland that ended up manufacturing the symbol repeated in pattern on fabric and woven into wool. Originally the buta motif was designed in Persia and it decorated royal robes. There are a few schools of thought on what the paisley symbolises – harvest time, protection from evil, life, eternity or rebellion. Some even say that the symbol is a stylised medicinal leech….!!

Many people probably don’t care to learn the story behind such a symbol, but I find it fascinating. As designers, we must be aware of the symbolism that we utilise in our work – we can inadvertantly put our audience off side, or win them over forever through design!

This is a really unsexy topic for me to blog about, but I wanted to draw attention to the issue of RSI in the graphic design profession. It’s an injury that is very real in the workplace, but it doesn’t get much press. Usually sufferers pass it off as “just part of the job”, but I’d be interested to find out the actual percentage of people who suffer RSI and the percentage of those people who take days off or “just work through it”.

Moreover, OSHA’s sound advice to “vary activities” and “take frequent breaks” doesn’t acknowledge the reality that many jobs, such as graphic design, programming, and word processing, require nonstop computer use.
Deborah Quilter

Generally, I just try to work through it, but this typically results in a pretty bad spasm or episode, meaning I am forced to take a day off work to have a break from sitting on my butt all day making tiny and precise gestures with my right hand. Even typing this entry is giving my wrist a break, and I’m always amazed that a sedentary job like graphic design results in such debilitating injury.

At work I use a Wacom Graphire graphics tablet. To be honest, I thought this would be the solution to all of my pointing related problems (sore neck, sore shoulders, burning wrist, restricted movement in my fingers), but after two months of use I can’t say its any better than the optical mouse I had before. I do love using a tablet and stylus, it has sped up my work flow quite a bit, however I can’t feel any benefits in terms of my RSI, which I’m really disappointed about.

So I’ve done a little bit of research and gathered some cool ideas for combating RSI. I’ll pick a few to road-test over the next few months and track their effectiveness.
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