I’ve been doing these two exercises almost yearly since I was 18 (nearly 20 years ago). I should’ve kept the results and collected them in a notebook.

The Death Letter Exercise

You’ll need:

• Pen and paper
• A timer

We’re going to do a little solitary roleplaying exercise. Let’s pretend that you are going to die in five minutes. There is no possibility for survival, but your death will be quick and painless. Also, you remembered (as always) to bring your trusty pen and pocket notebook.

Set the timer for five minutes and write a letter to the people who are important to you. This is your last opportunity to say the things that need to be said.

The Obituary Exercise

You’ll need:

• A word processor with word count
• A timer

It’s three years from now, and you’ve just died (perhaps the same way as in the previous exercise). This isn’t the same you that you’d be if you kept doing the same boring stuff you’re doing now. This is the ideal you that you’d become if you got off of your ass and started working toward doing the things you really want to do.

Now pretend you’re the rookie reporter tasked with writing your obituary. You have a limit of 250 words and 30 minutes until your deadline. Your only restriction is that you have to be realistic in that what you write could possibly happen. Don’t pretend that you’ll suddenly become rich or have lots more discretionary time.

Here’s the thing: three years is enough time to learn to do nearly anything you want to do. Actually, if you apply yourself and focus, you can learn to do something reasonably well in a year or two. You can learn to paint or play a musical instrument. You can write several novels. You can lose weight and get in shape. You can fall in love, get married, and have children.

You can do all of these things in three years. Especially if you stop wasting the majority of your day on Facebook and watching television that you can’t even remember tomorrow.

What now?

If you practice GTD, and you should, incorporate reading these exercises into your weekly review. If you’re struggling with the higher-altitude stuff, these exercises will help you clarify your vison and values.

I’m selling sets of reproductions of the artist trading cards I drew for Thing-a-Day last February. If you’re interested, go here: Buy Stuff.

Today marks the beginning of Thing-A-Day month, and I have several hours of guitar lessons to teach after I get home from work, so I don’t think I’ll have time to draw or record a song before midnight. Instead, I spent part of my lunch hour compiling a number of rules I’ve come across over the years that help me stay sane and productive as an artist.

It isn’t done until you’re proud of it.

My friend Joe McDalno wrote this in a blog entry a couple of years ago, and it’s resonated with me ever since:

The world has a ton of artists, of art, of games, of bands, of professionals. The amount of stuff we produce and participate in is astounding. And, as a result, the world has no need of things which are good enough. And I reproach myself for going to press with something that I told myself was “good enough.” If it isn’t something that you’re unwaveringly proud of, there’s zero need for it.

What doesn’t enhance detracts.

I believe Henri Matisse said “whatever doesn’t enhance a picture detracts from it.” I’m sure I’m paraphrasing, but I couldn’t find the original quote after casual searching.

Make art you want to experience.

Don’t worry about being original, or if your work is derivative. All that matters is that you like it, that you’d be impressed by it if you heard it on the radio or saw it hanging in a gallery.

Create much, reveal little.

For every work of art I release for public consumption, there are dozens that no one but me will ever know exists. Even so, I should be a little more careful about what I release. Your audience will think you are as good as the worst piece you show them, so choose carefully. Maybe spend a little time removed from the work before you make the decision to let it out.

Find inspiration in the classics.

There’s a reason the classics are the classics. Helvetica is over 60 years old, Futura is over 80. Kerouac’s On the Road and Miller’s Tropic of Cancer are still subverting young men and women after half a century, and Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue will still blow your mind.

Don’t be boring.

You can be cool, elegant, sexy, flamboyant, dramatic. But boring will bore your audience.

Challenge your skills and polish your craft with each piece.

When you are writing an arrangement for the guitar, try to write something you can’t play without a little practicing. If you’re drawing something, and you always have trouble with hands or foreshortening, consider making those elements an important part of the composition.

Style results naturally from skill & taste.

Don’t worry about developing a personal style. You can’t help it. After awhile, if you ever get good enough, you’ll begin to see your style as a product of your limitations rather than your skill.

If you’re the best whatever, you’re in the wrong wherever.

You will learn little, and find little inspiration if you’re the best in your circle of friends. You need to be a bit uncomfortable to grow, and surrounding yourself by people who are better than you are at something you think you’re really good at is a great way to make yourself uncomfortable.

The only way to master anything is by doing it over and over again.

I don’t believe in natural, God-given talent. I’ve spent years teaching myself to draw and design, and have labored over countless mistakes. I’ve logged about 33,000 hours playing the guitar, over 20k more than the Gladwellian Virtuoso Threshold.

Speaking of Malcolm Gladwell:

Talent is the desire to practice.

Your art is what you do, not who you are.

I’ve had a lot of problems resulting from defining myself as an artist. There’s lots of ego inflation and deflation going on, and I think that might partially explain some of the weird mental states many artists find themselves in. You have to try to remember that being a great artist won’t make you a better person, it won’t make people like you more, and it won’t make you feel better about yourself. If anything, you’ll be so absorbed in your work that you’ll neglect those who love you, people will think you’re aloof and elitist, and you’ll constantly torture yourself over tiny details of theory and technique that most people, even most of those who participate in your particular discipline, don’t know exist.

I know it’s hard, but try to separate your self-esteem from your work. Don’t forget that the most important things in the world are relationships with the people you love. They’ll be the ones who pick you up out of the gutter of deep existential depression when you can’t seem to draw that nose quite right.

Make something every day.

Which is why you are here.

The day is the atomic unit of your life. If you make something every day, you’ll have lived a lifetime of making things. And, to me, that is a life worth living.

It’s pretty sad (and telling) that the iOS5 feature I was most excited about is Reminders. Like millions of others, I installed iOS 5 last night. Like a handful of others (hopefully it isn’t just me), I’ve spent my morning combining my weekly review with transferring my GTD system into Reminders.

Since becoming overwhelmed by the amount of tweaking and fiddling that I was doing in OmniFocus, I’ve been on a quest to find, or hack, the perfect minimalist GTD system. For the last several months, my trusted system has been based in Simplenote, used in conjunction with ResophNotes (like Notational Velocity, but for PC) and iPhone list-making apps that integrate with SimpleNote, such as Listary and NoteTask. This ubiquitious-capture-capable, cloud-synced, text-based system has worked pretty well for me, but it isn’t particularly inspiring. I’m hopeful that Reminders will be the silver bullet that kills my compulsion to experiment with task management software and actually get things done.

What I Require in My Trusted System

I’m a notebook and pen geek, but I don’t use a paper system for my GTD because I’m screwed if I lose or forget my notebook. For me to really enjoy the GTD’s benefit of stress-attenuation, I need to know that I can access my lists anywhere at any time. There are tons of beautifully designed (visually) task-management apps for iPhone that don’t sync with anything, not even a proprietary web service. This is the ultimate deal breaker for me.

Pros

Free

If you have an iOS 5 device, you already have the app. You don’t have to shell out $40 for an app with a ton of features you’ll never use.

Visually Appealing

Reminders isn’t the most attractive (to my aesthetic sensibilities) list manager out there, but it’s not at all ugly. As a graphic designer and artist, I simply can’t use an ugly application, even if it’s extremely functional.

Idiot-proof Syncing

If you have an iCloud account, your lists sync automatically. You don’t have to worry about manual backup. Since I use Outlook at work (calendar and email only, not for GTD), my empty Outlook task list was available the first time I opened the app. You can select which task lists are visable in iPhone settings.

Simplicity

There is no tweaking do be done here. There are no subtasks. No folders. No assigning tasks to projects. These are the things made me waste so much time in OmniFocus, so I consider their absence features rather than omissions.

I’d like to point out that Getting Things Done was designed for whatever tools are available (including paper) and canon GTD, as written, doesn’t require subtasks and pre-planning every action for a project, but relies on what David Allen calls the Natural Planning Model.

Ubiquitous Access

I can view, add, and remove items from my iPad, iPhone, and web browser. If my two-year-old drops my iPhone in the toilet, I can wipe away my tears and still access my list.

Moving items across lists

It’s easy enough to move items from one list to another. There’s one too many taps involved, but it’s something I can live with.

Listary does this with SimpleNote lists.

Rearranging Things

It’s very easy to rearrange the order of items in a list, or the lists themselves.

EDIT: Unfortunately, you can’t rearrange the order of items in a list. This is kind of a silly omission, because all you’d have to do is tap and hold to enable reordering.

Due Dates & Repeating Tasks

Yep. It does this.

This is the thing Reminders can do that my SimpleNote/Listary system can’t.

Cons

Simplicity

As I mentioned earlier, there are no subtasks, no folders, and no assigning tasks to projects. Some people really need these things, or think they need them. If you do, I strongly suggest OmniFocus.

Too Much Leather

I don’t really need my list manager to look like a real leather organizer. I’d prefer access to the real estate to be able to see more items on my list. This is really only an issue on the iPhone.

Web App Interface is Clunky

The iCloud calendar is so slow as to be nearly unusable on both my work machine and my laptop.

Difficult to Manage Lots of Lists

I gave up on importing all of my lists from SimpleNote because it’s difficult to add new lists on the iPad once you fill up the initial window. I’m thinking of keeping my non-actionable lists in Pages.

3GS Omission

Location-based reminders aren’t enabled for 3GS iPhones.

Siri

For the moment, I’m using a 3GS, but I’ve been told that Siri integrates into Reminders. Depending on how well this works, this could be the feature that David Allen has been waiting for all these years.

What I’d Change

• Get rid of the leather “chrome” around the app.
• Make it easier to move items across lists
• Make it easier to add new lists

Athletes don’t eat the same way regular people eat. The food they consume is carefully considered for the effect it will have on their performance. An athlete’s body is his medium, and if he wants to compete at their maximum potential, he has to treat his body like it is as important as it is.

The artist doesn’t consume media the same way regular people consume media. The artist knows that the quality of work he produces is directly proportional to the quality of media he consumes, so he chooses carefully the things that enter his brain to fuel his imagination. The writer who only reads inside his genre and the songwriter who only listens to the music on the radio won’t be able to produce important, vital art.

The gradual, unintentional sacrifice that I’ve made as an artist is that I no longer seek entertainment. When I watch movies, read novels, or listen to music it is with the singular purpose of fueling my imagination. There are few best sellers in my reading queue. If I, as an artist, am to compete at my maximum potential, I must fill my imagination with images, mythology, and philosophy that will ferment in my subconscious, then randomize and recombine as inspiration.
I must treat my imagination like it is as important as it is.

This article has been popping up on Twitter over the past week, purporting to explain the difference between a “font,” which most people erroneously use when they mean to say “typeface,” and “typeface,” which they don’t really use at all. It does a horrible job of explaining it, and in fact gets it wrong. This is particularly tragic since the article is posted on the AIGA website.

So I’m going to clear it up for you.

Let’s pretend you’re an old-school type designer (I’d like to say here that I know very little about the profession of type design, especially the historical techniques of creating type, so please forgive any inaccuracies and abstractions). You’ve drawn up and refined your designs, and now you’re cutting them out of tiny bits of metal. Once you finish creating your alphabet at 10 points, you put it in a wooden box and label it Old School Roman – 10 pts.

Your friend Tom asks you to print his manifesto, and you think this is a perfect opportunity to use your new letters. The only problem is that his manifesto requires that certain words and phrases be set in italics, and there are lots of headings. Since you’ve only created the Roman (normal) version, you decide that you’re going to cut an italic version as well.

When you’re finished with the italics, you put them in another wooden box labeled Old School Italic – 10 pts. It would be really stupid to put the 10 point Romans in with the 10 point italics, because it would take so long to find the letter you need in the correct style. For the headings, you decide to make a larger version of the Roman, but at 18 points. You put that in an appropriately labeled box as well.

Tom thinks you’ve done a great job, and he loves your type design. He’d like something different for the title, though, so you go to a door labeled “Alternate Gothic” and you grab the wooden box upon which is written “Alternate Gothic No. 2 – 24 pts.”

It goes like this: Alternate Gothic and Old School are two different typefaces. Old School Roman – 10 pt and Old School Italic 10 pt are different fonts. Old School Roman – 12 pt would be a different font than OSR 10 pt. Everything in its own wooden box is a separate font.

All of the Old School designs belong to the same typeface.

Got it? Any questions?

An Israeli favorite, shaksouka is a cheap, easy dish of eggs poached in a tomato sauce.

Sauté an onion (diced) and 4 cloves of garlic (chopped) in a little olive oil until soft. Add 1 28 oz can of crushed tomatoes, and season with black pepper, kosher salt, cumin, coriander, and paprika. Cover and simmer for 30 minutes.

Carefully crack 4 to 8 eggs into the sauce. Re-cover and poach for 5 minutes.

Scoop eggs and sauce onto plate, and serve with grilled (or toasted) crusty bread for sopping.

I’m constantly being emailed substandard photographs which ruin my beautiful layouts. Enough was enough, so I wrote these guidelines to email to my long-distance clients.

The Ideal Portrait

The ideal portrait is a studio portrait taken by a competent photographer and saved at high resolution without compression (such as a TIFF file). If possible, have the photographer forward the file directly to us.

TIFF is the standard image format for print. JPG files usually leave out information to save space, while usable, this is not the most desirable option. GIF files aren’t ever good for photographs, even on the web.

The Next Best Thing

If you don’t have a studio portrait, here are some tips for taking a decent portrait on your own:

• Leave plenty of space around the subject. The more headroom the subject has, the more options I have in composing and cropping the photograph.
• Use natural light, preferably outside on an overcast day. On sunny days, the light is too harsh and causes the subject to squint. Overcast days provide naturally diffused light which will make your subject appear more attractive.
• If you have a camera that will focus, make the background as out of focus as possible.
• Use a neutral background that contrasts with the subject.
• Watch out for objects in the background that stick out of the top of the subject’s head (such as telephone poles).
• Be aware of glare and reflections in glasses.
• Don’t use flash. Flash destroys the shadows which make the face appear 3-dimensional on a 2-dimensional surface (paper or screen). This is what adds those proverbial ten pounds in photographs.
• Did I mention not to use flash?
• An exception: the only time you should EVER use flash when taking a portrait is when you have no choice but to take the photo on a sunny day and there are lots of distracting shadows on the subject’s face.
• Take lots of photos. Professional photographers might take a hundred photos for every one that gets used.

Resolution and File Size

The larger the file, the better it reproduces in print. The standard resolution (amount of detail) for a photo on the web is 72 ppi (pixels per inch). The standard resolution for a printed photograph (in a magazine, for example) is 300 ppi. A photograph at standard resolution will reproduce on paper at approximately 25% the size that it will on a web page.

A 4″ x 5″ photo will have the dimensions of 1200 x 1500 pixels.

Follow these guidelines and you will make a graphic designer very happy.

I’m not sure if I’m finished with this or not. I’m a little off on the anatomy in places, but it’s late and I don’t know enough about anatomy to see where. I don’ t like the hair, but I’m not sure what to do to improve it. I’m pretty happy with the way I was able to get Photoshop to look like nice wet oil paint with a single brush.

A good painting starts with a good drawing. Having a developed drawing saves lots of time and frustration later on.

Don’t copy photographic reference slavishly. If you do, you might as well trace. Use it as a reference or inspiration, but mainly use your knowledge of anatomy and proportion to create the drawing.

Don’t draw what you don’t have to. There’s lots of detail that you can leave out.

Simplify. Simplify your lines, your values, your anatomy.

Often you have to change the lines as they appear in reality, since reality isn’t trying to make a good picture. You have to look out for tangents, you have to overlap to show depth, and you have to place your lines rhythmically so they harmonize with the picture as a whole.

A good color scheme begins with a good value scheme. Limit your values to 3 or 4.

Limit your highlights. They draw attention to themselves. Use that attention where you need it most.

Hard edges advance. Soft edges recede.

If you aren’t composing your pictures using classical principles, you should have a damn good reason.

Cast shadows have hard edges. Shadows that show turning form have soft edges.

Look for reflected light and color.

Vary your line weights.

Imagine the figure in 3 dimensions. Draw it that way. Draw through the form.

Take your own reference photos when you can. That way you can have exactly what you want and you can be sure no one else has used the same photo.