I should be working on design projects, but I can’t stop playing with the Drip Sessions. This ain’t easy on a trackpad…

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Inspiration can often be found in strange places. What begins as a mistake, an error, or even a complete breakdown in a system, can lead to intriguing and beautiful results. These “happy accidents”, as Bob Ross liked to call them, can be captured, and exploited. This phenomenon is the topic of the new book Glitch: Designing Imperfection, which came out this year. Four years in the making, it’s not just a collection of pretty pictures, but also explores the aesthetic of the error, in several essays. I submitted several images to the authors back in 2005, in hopes of getting some of my images in print. Just one was selected, but that was enough to score me a complimentary copy of the finished product.

Since I was hoping to see more of my pieces used, I figured I’d take this opportunity to showcase all the images I submitted. The first two are screenshots captured after random crashes of my work PC, back in 2000. The rest are the result of a corrupt JPG contact sheet that a photographer emailed me, which became a source of fascination, as it mangled, distorted, and posed a general threat to itself and others when I attempted to view it in Photoshop. I learned to direct the effects to my liking, and assembled the set of images that you see here.

I will be taking an active part in getting this group up & running, and have developed this slideshow to help sell the idea of Tega Cay Trails. (In typical fashion, I’ve also gone overboard and set up a Twitter account and a Flickr account to spread the love further still.

Please follow, link, promote, and/or join, as appropriate. ;)

That is all.

I have posted a lot of new art on the Brubaker site, which I photographed while visiting the shore this month…

It’s actually in Rock Hill this time around, but… close enough.
I’m going to be presenting “The Incredible Shrinking Media”, which I’ll post on cultivatecreativity.com tonight for your enjoyment. (It’ll also show up in my lil’ Slideshare widget over there –>

As we bid farewell to 2008, I’m looking again at the places I’ve been spending my time online. Last time, I attempted to chart all the places where I actively create content. I decided this time to catalog just the sites I use the most, and try to classify the activities that take place on each. I came up with these categories:

• consume
  RSS feeds in Google Reader, music on Last.fm, all sorts of stuff on miscellaneous sites
• collect
  links on Delicious, contact info on LinkedIn, all sorts of activity on FriendFeed
• curate
  images and links on Tumblr and imgfave
• converse
  conversations on Twitter, Facebook, and various groups and forums, commenting on blogs, email
• create
  photos on Flickr, slideshows on SlideShare, posting on this blog, Cultivate Creativity, and guest posts on other blogs like Design Charlotte and CLT Blog.

Some of these sites span multiple categories (e.g. – most sites have features that support conversation), and I do show some crossing over between two, but I’ve just tried to show the categories they fit in best, based on my most typical uses. I’ve also started drawing the connections that track the flow of info from one site to another. I’m mostly interested in how publishing can be automated, so in future explorations I want to try to focus on individual flows (e.g. – a photo on Flickr is used in a blog post, which gets automatically published to the Twitter feed, and aggregated in FriendFeed).