Requiem for a blog
So long.
The Moving of Extra Grind
Extragrind has now officially moved from http://www.extragrind.blogspot.com to http://gregoryhubacek.com/blog. All subscribers, don't worry you don't have to do a thing. If you got this post that means it worked. For all those who visit extragrind.blogspot on a regular basis, you'll have to change your bookmarks, or just subscribe to the RSS Feed. I'm going to leave the blogspot address active for a while, but this will be the last post under the old address.
Walking on Glass - Today's Layer Tennis
Today's layer tennis match with the amazing Chris Glass was a tight one for sure. In fact, I can't even tell who's ahead. I got a spike in the twitter votes early, but it seems like Glass' following has been showing steady support. I'm at the edge of my seat. So, if you got time and you're on twitter, Check out the match and throw up a #lyt in your next tweet with at #cglass to vote for Chris Glass, or a #ghubacek to vote for me.
Either way, I had a great time. Big thanks to Coudal Partners for hosting the event, Adobe for sponsoring (and making the software that allows me to make a living), and all the Layer Tennis Twittersphere for bothering to pay attention.
Also, don't forget to vote on that other match going on today between some dude from Oregon who doesn't wear pants, and another guy from New York who pees in his.
Like putting lipstick on a pig.
As you may have noticed, Extra Grind and gregoryhubacek.com have taken a new redesign. In the next few weeks expect a new portfolio section, a store, and a more integrated blog. Plus many more changes to come. It's gonna be a great summer.
Layer Tennis
Tomorrow I lace up the Layer Tennis shoes again to take on Ohio favorite Chris Glass in a friendly but fierce playoff battle. Shortly after they clear the spare clipping masks off the court it's Portland vs. NYC when Aaron Draplin squares off against Sam Potts. Get the info at www.layertennis.com and check it all out tomorrow.
Typography of the North Woods AKA Lard Letters
This weekend I spent some time at my girlfriend's family's cabin. We stopped by a few spots and I shot some photos of some beautiful typography. I think that the lettering of vintage lard containers completely took me by surprise.
There's a lot more over at the flickr set including an awesome sheet music piece, some really nice Spice Cans, and a lot more.
MacPoop Pro
As an extension of this tweet towards David Stewart (which is actually a response to this tweet), I present to you my reciept from FirstTech.
Click the image to see the whole reciept.
Saturday Junk
Took the afternoon for going out to a few local places. Thought I would share with you the bounty of what I did not buy (you can see a larger collection of random shit from today and other days on my flickr set here.
Some random collage found as liner inside a otherwise unsuspecting basket. 
ROOK, an old card game. Probably one of the coolest things I've ever seen as far as amazing found vintage type. 
Stag Aftershave for that cool, fresh out the woods deer urine smell.
Thoughts on Layer Tennis
Last week on Friday, I got the privilege to play a round of Layer Tennis in a qualifying match for Coudal Partner's "Layer Tennis Presented by Aobe CS4". It was a truly fun experience, not to mention a fantastic excuse to take a Friday off. My competitor was Miron Kiriliv who proved himself not only to be a worthy competitor but a really nice guy as well. I decided to work from my "home office" (read kitchen table) rather than to do it at Fame where I would have many distractions.
My first correspondence with Miron came on April 28th when the layer tennis staff sent me an email to set up the event containing the following:
"It's generally helpful to contact your opponent before the match and come up with some sort of game plan. It can be simple, it just helps to have some sort of theme or story or premise as you prepare for the match, though of course we like to see surprises and improvisation during the match, that's the point, right?"
With that I sent off a friendly email to Miron just to check his temperature... " was curious how you want to play it. I'm pretty much down for whatever. If you want to do it battle style, or if you want to take a more collaborative approach, that's cool. Let's just have fun with it regardless though... "
Miron (to his credit) responded with a completely amicable approach of wanting to collaborate or have some sort of theme other than just us slitting each others throats. Eventually we decided to settle on the idea of "advice" which provided not only a great path to follow, but lots of opportunity to do something more.
I've received a good deal of advice in one form or another throughout my short career (whether or not it was solicited or even listened to is another story). This idea seemed like a good opportunity to pass along some truths we've come to know and love while having a good clean game of tennis. I also saw it as an opportunity to thank some people who have invested some sort of time and energy into me as a person and as a designer over the years.
It is interesting that I got at least two IMs during the match in response to particularly harsh reply, and there's also this tweet: which reveled at the fact that your mama jokes didn't make a cameo. In truth, this match was never intended to be vicious or hurtful, in fact it wasn't even really supposed to be a conversation. In hindsight I could see how someone could create a narrative where it looked like we were responding to one another but I'm pretty sure there was no malicious intent on either side. I guess people see what they want to see.
So with the theme in mind, I went to task of thinking about advice the night before. All sorts of people from my father to former bosses, co-workers, peers, friends, and relatives all came back to me. I wrote down as many as I could think of and kept them as a text file on my desktop for the next day. I also went through all sorts of old projects to find assets.
The process I work with typically involves a lot of asset gathering and form making, particularly in the way of found and modified imagery and scanned typefaces. This provided me with a pretty substantial stash of things to work with. With the theme of advice in mind I isolated some typefaces and imagery I wanted to use and threw them all over onto a pasteboard in illustrator. This way I could have it open live during the match and not have to be flipping through bridge in order to find assets. Typefaces that were scanned were available in auto-traced versions for easy layout of headlines and other text, regular working typefaces were laid out on the document as well so they could be quickly acquired with a dropper tool. Images and textures were either live traced and ready or placed into the document for pasting into photoshop. Having all my assets in one place like that streamlined the process allowing me more time to work with composition, type layout, and textures.
The other thing that allowed for quick work was the careful utilization of spaces. I have (on my laptop) four spaces currently available in a left to right organization. My allocation of them for layer tennis went as follows:
Space 1 - Illustrator with artboard full of assets
Space 2 - Photoshop with tabs of previous layers
Space 3 - Layer Tennis Match Page, Layer Tennis Crowd Page, Campfire Chatroom, FTP
Space 4 - iTunes, iChat, twitter
Using this method I could easly hop between spaces to function efficiently. The first space could be used to compose objects, the second space to ready the file, the third space to upload it and keep up with Layer Tennis, and the last one just because. By the way, Coudal says not to watch the crowd fee while you're playing, I found this not to be true. It was a really good source of inspiration to watch what was coming in. The comments in the crowd page are hid beneath layers and layer of comments from Draplin and Glass epic match. To see some of the comments from our match, check here and here.
Van Horgen, a writer and creative director once said this to me about his time at various places of employment. The idea was just that you have to observe and question things around you at all times, especially when you're not the one in charge so that some day when you are you won't repeat the same mistakes you saw your whole career. Seems to make sense to me. 
The big homie Izzak is one of my favorite people I've ever met on this earth. He's a constant source of inspiration, laughs, checks, and balances. He's a habitual line stepper, a grade A asshole at times, and I love him for it. He's said something to this extent on numerous occasions and I think it's always welcome.
Pa Dukes. What that line trailing off the bottom said after it got cut off was "the man is a saint". Maybe that's a bit much to put on the guy, but he's probably the only reason I have any moral backbone at all. Besides, the man said to always do as he says and not as he does. Thanks for all the good advice, dad. And yes, I'll quit smoking soon.
Dan Apparatus (one third - I believe - of Mineapolis print awesome house Aesthetic Apparatus) is perhaps more responsible than anyone for my love of the old, the printed, and the-dog eared. At different times of my life he's been a boss, a teacher, and a friend. Hopefully someday I'll feel right calling myself his peer. Until then, his advice has stayed with me for years. Thanks, Dan.
An last but not least Santiago Piedrafita, my design chair throughout the majority of my MCAD career, and the first design teacher I ever had. Thanks for listening, thanks for talking, thanks for everything. I'm trying not to be an asshole.
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