A few years ago, my mother gave me a little sack of dried lavender to have nearby. She said that its smell is comforting and relaxing and I should keep it around my desk as I would make my work more enjoyable. It’s true. For someone who sits so much inside a room at a desk, the smell of dried lavender is a delightful reminder that there is a whole world outside of these walls. It’s easy to overlook this detail when you get lost in doing work because doing work for a living is different from creating art for the soul. I try to have around me all kinds of small stuff that are from “outside”. Small reminders of nature. Two small rocks, which weirdly enough, are also a gift from my mother. A gorgeous piece of jewelry done by Bousoulas Konstantino, which looks like it was found in the earth just like that. It’s like an organic piece of silver. A gift my father gave me on our trip to Thassos. Nearby there is a large wooden board where I tape cotton paper when I paint watercolor plus a dirty piece of rag made from an old shirt I liked. For some strange reason, I also have this brick made from cork and some wood puzzles from my grill. (Yes, a girly grill that has the thrill) I used to own a large cubic piece of andesite from the city center which I received as a gift one late afternoon from a guy who was giving me a ride home. He said that is the perfect conversation starter. You meet a girl, you ask her if she wants to see the andesite stone you have, curiosity will push the conversation and there you have it. He was right though. I never knew if he was crazy or just had a creative spark of genius. I guess most of the time those two are indistinguishable. There, in the center of it all, there is a screen. This little window to a digital world of opportunity, wonder, and beauty. Of course, is not all sunshine and rainbows, we, the ones who survived the early internet and its crazy videos, we can’t unsee some of the stuff. I will throw away all my cups and jars and I’ll just go back to my man Diogenes and we will drink water from our cupped hands. Other things that represent nature, are the screen backgrounds that I use. And this is how I create my own wallpapers. Do you remember the old windows wallpapers? The one with the green hill and clear blue sky?(Sonoma County). What about the little island with 3 palm trees? Remember that one? Yes, yes, the desert dune under a full moon, the yellow tulips, the pink wall with a little blue window, the black and white dog, and so on are all so memorable and beautiful. Seeing of of them right now would just flood me with emotions of longing. I can already hear the Winamp playing Dj Mike Llama. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, careful out there. I really loved old wallpapers and I still do except that nowadays I create new ones myself. I take photos, I edit them and inside those pixels, I try to capture a feeling I had when I observed an exact moment in time. Pictures I took on a walk, or on a trip, but don’t even trip dawg because you can walk right past this and just go ahead and do your own thing. I say, create your own backgrounds, use your screen as you would use a frame for a picture, and ignore all the background noise. You are being haunted by the belief that you are wasting your life on a constant so try to capture it because that would make you more aware and more present. I, therefore, gift you my favorite wallpapers that I’ve created and worn on my display for quite some time now. They have a little wear and tear but have some respect boah, these are not your everyday wallpapers, these are memories stored as pixels. I hope you will find one which you will like and maybe even get to wear it for a while. Sometimes in the future, you might find it in a folder and remind you of a little part of your life where you decided that you can make everything around you beautiful and you started with a damn wallpaper. And if that isn’t nice, I don't know what is. You know how to save them, don't you? Click on the photos you want to download and then just right click and "Save Image As" . . . _____________________ Send me your recommendation or start a conversation. contact@cajva.com I write on this blog almost weekly and you can find details about my graphic design work and get in touch on this website.

I like books from an aesthetic point of view, superb objects with beautifully designed covers, a smell that just takes you through a journey without reading a word and with a small weight that in our hands feels like knowledge and wisdom have quantifiable values such as size, density, and substance. From a spiritual point of view, the content of these books can make a man live more than one life and love more than one love. It’s traveling while staying still and finding things you never searched for. Books about design are no different. Just because they treat one particular subject doesn’t mean that they don’t hold value or power, in fact, I truly believe that once you understand the underlying principle of one thing, can make you understand all the other things. Because the principle is not in the activity itself, is in all that makes you a master of that activity. Discipline, routine, love for the craft, focus, patience, approach, and the understanding of the essence of one thing apply to every other thing you do in life. “If you know the way broadly you will see it in everything.” ― Miyamoto Musashi "Principle of Logo Design" by George Bokhua Ah yes, the grids. If there is one thing that comes to my head when I hear the name George Bokhua is the logo grid. I’m a huge admirer of his work and I find his style simple yet sophisticated. His approach to logo design involves grid systems and geometric shapes. I consider his work quintessential in the field of logo design. George Bokhua’s book called Principle of Logo Design is one of the books on my shelf that I go to the most often. Not for the inspiration but for the written word. His theory and wisdom make the world of logo design be seen from an enlighted perspective. Dare I say, his philosophy on seeing nature and surroundings as simple geometric forms is a thought I entertain most often while I design. If you want to step up your skills and knowledge in this field game beyond social media post tips and tricks, Principles of Logo Design should be the first thing you are reading as a Logo Designer. His reasoning and his system will wash away all the superficiality you build up over time. With a clear mind and a sharp pencil, the author is a person who might scare you at first due to your own lack of expertise but in time you will get to love him and see him as a complex and deep human being. Besides the technical side of creating logos, he also touches on moral questions such as Copy vs. Imitation and acknowledges the beauty and magic of a result that comes by accident. The book aesthetic is gorgeous and the graphic design in between the pages is eye candy for designers. Like I said, is one of my go-to books every so often and I keep it at hand. I’m glad the cover is black so it won’t get too dirty from all the use. Unfortunately, is one of those books you need to take and study with a pencil at hand so you can make notes on the side. Fortunately, is one of those books. Favorite quote: “So as symbol makers, let us view ourselves as adventurers into the unknown, into the past and the future. Even better, as astronomers of imagination on a constant lookout for the places where simple, little beautiful shapes are waiting for us to be recognized, conceived, and made visible. After years of tireless journey in a timeless list of timeless symbols, one day, if we are lucky, we may hit the mark that finds home.” I know, right? You can find George Bokhua on Instagram, Behance and Dribbble "Made by James" by James Martin James Martin is a prolific figure in the graphic design industry on social media. I don’t know when this man has the time to do all that content, do client work, spend time with his family, and sleep. That’s even more the reason to read more about him and understand his path and his way of thinking. James is one of those designers who you think of and their face comes to mind rather than their work. That’s because most of the designers are hiding behind work and rarely show themselves. I know I do. Dedicated and working, he is a great representation for designers who are aspiring to become well-known in the industry. Leading by example, that’s how I see him. He talks the talk and walks the walk. I do love his personal brand and style. The tattoo style of illustration, the use of black, white, and gold plus the hand lettering are the salt and pepper of his visual identity. The book is a piece of art as well, the print is gorgeous and the gold used there is glorious. James provides lots of sketches and insights and takes us on a journey of his process just like you would be right there in his office. He is giving you that over-the-shoulder experience we so much crave. The process is explained in detail, and the thinking behind his creation is easy to understand. Chapter four of his book goes on about working with people and I found that so well-written and informative. There is a lot to take in from this book and if anything, by reading it, I felt encouraged to show more of myself out there. Show sketches, providing behind-the-scenes, talking about my design, and writing about my experience is a part of being a designer, there is nothing to be ashamed of or to hide from the world. The way he treats his readers with so much kindness makes me believe he is a bit hard on himself, at points he is supportive of himself and talks as if he is still forgiving himself for errors. He is achieving great things in our field and this requires all kinds of sacrifices besides his terrific ambition. I do love his personal story and at times I highly relate to him. Favorite Quote: “A successful career doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time to grow into a fully functioning machine of creative awesomeness. It takes time to build a client base, and that is true for everyone. The people you look up to have put in many years of hard work and struggled along the way. They made it because they were patient with themselves." You can find James Martin on Instagram or on his Website "Logo that Last" by Allan Peters You might know Allan Peters just by seeing the gorgeous neon logo sign of his logo. I also would say that he uses a tasty hue of orange which I instantly associate with his image and his brand. His work is superb and he created some iconic logos such as North Stars Logo Proposal, Firecraft Pizza, Jet Financial, and the beautiful identity for the City of Eagan. I personally consider Allan a skillful designer with a versatile timeless style. His book was published last year and I recognized it instantly on the shelf of my local bookstore. The gorgeous orange hardcover and the texture made me add it to my library. The book gave me a glimpse into his process, his philosophy, and his story of a successful graphic designer. My favorite chapter was chapter 3 where he talks about inspiration hunting and the process of searching for ideas outside of Pinterest, Dribbble, Behance, and Instagram. Every place has its share of graphic design history ready to be discovered and offer inspiration for the creative mind. I love his approach to #badgehunting and the photos he provided made me see how can treasure be right under our noses. Sometimes, we can’t see the fucking forest due to the trees blocking the view. I also share his love for badge designs. This book was a fun and fast read I might say and that’s what I love about this book, not only does it look like a great piece to be added to a library but the information skips all the blah blah and goes straight to facts. Acta, non verba! Damn, this book looks good on my shelf. Spoiler Alert He tells an amazing personal story on page 200. You can truly say that he lives to tell the tale. My favorite quote: “Finding a good idea is like fishing. The more times you cast your lure, the better chance you have of catching fish. The more fish you catch, the better chance you have of catching a trophy-sized fish. This same logic applies to logo design. The more sketches you draw, the better chance you have of striking gold with a brilliant idea.” You can find Allan Peters on Instagram, Behance, Dribbble and personal Website . . . What about other design books? Of course, I have so many more books on design and I’ve read a bunch more and then some. I wanted this post to touch on the designers who are quite popular in the present and who wrote about it. I believe this is relevant because not only does it depict the design industry as it is right now but offers ways to deal with shortcomings and dealing with obstacles as a young designer. Or I just like what they do and I was biased by my own belief, deal with it. In a way, they are competition, so one must know thy enemy and know his sword. It is all the art of war. “Know your enemy, know his sword.” Miyamoto Musashi, A Book of Five Rings I encourage you to read and draw your own ideas and opinions. I encourage to absorb knowledge but follow your own path and create your own style. As hard as it is, if anything is worth doing, it's worth doing right. Design does not reside in books and internet, design is everywhere including yourself. I got to be a designer mostly by chance and I later found joy in doing this. I agree and disagree with every other artist and designer out there and that's the beauty of it, finding that there is no real answer to how things should be done. It's what makes the process beautiful. _____________________ Send me your recommendation or start a conversation. contact@cajva.com I write on this blog almost weekly and you can find details about my graphic design work and get in touch on this website.

“Without music, life would be a mistake.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols I thought it would be fun, at least for me, to share some music in case your YouTube algorithm is not recommending anything new. Music is my first love. Even now, I dedicate time where I just sit and listen to music doing nothing else. Nothing but listen and let myself drift about two centimeters off the ground. It's not that difficult to find new music, and Spotify has some neat tricks to get you around music that is hard to come by. The feeling of a dusty old vinyl shop is still there but without the smell or the feeling of old prints and textures. Back in elementary, I hated doing homework but listening to music while doing it, made this activity bearable and sometimes fun. I was born in ’92 therefore I grew up listening to Modern Talking, Mr. President, C-Block, 2 Unlimited, Dr. Alban, Queen, A-HA, Sandra, and so on, along with Romanian bands and songs. I still love that music as much as I did back then and I still have old cassettes mixed by recording radio songs. Ah yes, the good old cassette. I can’t decide which bands or singers are my favorite but I think I know all the lyrics from Modern Talking songs and I still jam along on songs from E-Type and Gala when I’m working nowadays. Great songs from my childhood: GALA · Let a boy cry E-Type · I Just Wanna Be With You Pandera · In My Dreams Beat System · What's Going On Charles & Eddie · Would I Lie To You Bonus Romanian Pop Songs: Ca$$a Loco · Eterna si fascinanta Romanie N&D · Nu e vina mea . . . Going to high school we used to share songs with our peer via Bluetooth and Infrared. I know, It's been a while since we did that. Drum and Bass, rock, and hip-hop were the main genres and I discovered bands such as Nightwish, Ramstein, Disturbed, HIM, System of A Down, and even older rock bands which I came to love a lot such as Pink Floyd, Rainbow, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin and more. So many MORE, I think puberty unlocks a part of your brain which makes music so much more powerful than before. Hip Hop was marked by Eminem, Mobb Deep, Wu-Tang Clan, and A Tribe Called Quest and I can say I still have their albums and I listen to while driving in my car. For driving my motorcycle I have Spotify playlists specially made for chilling on long roads. Great songs from high school stage: Mt Eden Dubstep · Sierra Leone Nightwish · The Siren System Of A Down · Radio/Video Pink Floyd · Time Yann Tiersen · La valse d'Amélie Bonus Romanian Songs: DJ Project · Lumea Ta Timpuri Noi · Perfect . . . Then came along college where most of the music was picked by trends, clubs and festivals. We used to listen and discover music on wesbites such as 8tracks and Soundcloud. I’ve started to love trance, techno, deep house, folk, and so many more genres. All the while my playlists were getting bigger and bigger. I still had mp3 folders but it was a mess and my mp3 player might jump from Metallica to Chopin and then straight up to DJ Aphrodite followed by DJ Alligator. What a lovely mess. If you ask me, that’s the only way to listen to music. I also had the opportunity to go to music festivals where I enjoyed live performances by some of my favorite artists like Die Antwoord, Scooter, Chase and Status, Tiesto, Parov Stelar, Armin Van Buuren, Pendulum and so many other wonderful and talented people. Songs that marked college years: Emancipator · First Snow MAD ! · All Gods Love (Feat. Antranita) AWOLNATION · "Sail" Age of Dub · Ed Solo The Knife · 'Pass This On Röyksopp · So Easy Bonus Romanian Songs: Suie Paparude · Soundcheck Grupul Stereo · Plopi Impari [ Andu Simion & Chasindub Edit ] . . . In the present, I’m listening to anything from Orthodox Chants to Bollywood soundtracks of Lata Mangeshkar and SPB. Movies Soundtrack always had a special place in my heart, Hans Zimmer, Ennio Morricone, Vangelis, Howard Shore, and Thomas Newman are but the tip of the iceberg, and for that I have a special playlist that I revisit every couple of weeks. The newest addition is the Dune soundtrack called “A Time of Quiet Between the Storms” which I’ve been listening on repeat for the past two weeks. I feel the same way about the Video Game soundtracks as well. I truly believe that you must be crazy not to listen to music of any genre and culture. The world is not only in the songs of YouTube Trends, Is everywhere. People are singing in the streets, unknown artists, and entire traditions. I will share some songs you might never heard of but maybe you will get to love them. Soundtracks: Hans Zimmer · A Time of Quiet Between the Storms Howard Shore · Twilight and Shadow (feat. Renee Fleming) Guillaume David · Children of the Omnissiah Ennio Morricone · Il tramonto Vangelis · Rachel's Song Susumu Hirasawa · Gats Susumu Hirasawa · Parade Song you might never heard of: Hermanos Gutiérrez (featuring Dan Auerbach) · "Tres Hermanos" Hamid El Shaeri · Reet (my most listened song in 2023) Monkey Safari · Safe Afterclapp · Sonho de Vidro Gasoline · The Hardest Afous d'Afous · Tarhanine Tegla Romanian Traditional Folk Învârtita Oilor Ion Lăceanu · Cimpoi(Bagpipes) Liubomir Iorga · Fă Ileană (song performed on an actual leaf) Gheorghe Zamfir · Cintec De Nunta Music being the great equalizer, pun intended, I think brings people together. Let’s not forget how to dance. I also have a Spotify playlist dedicated to design work which is more mellow and relaxed so you can get in the flow state. I want to close this article by quoting Kurt Vonnegut. “No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious & charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful.” ― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country _____________________ Send me your favorites songs or start a conversation. contact@cajva.com I write on this blog almost weekly and you can find details about my graphic design work and get in touch on this website.

My identity and my sense of purpose are tied up with my profession. How could it not be? I spend most of my days therefore most of my life doing some form of work. Work, which most of the time is in the service of others with the purpose of sustaining a living. After doing it for more than a decade now, I now have an emotional connection with my activity. It gives meaning to my own life. Not only do I not see myself doing something else but I’m actually quite scared to be forced into doing something totally unrelated. Most of us have relatives, parents, and even grandparents who are now retired of old age and who have worked for thirty, forty, and sometimes fifty years in the same field. That’s how we shaped our own vision about the profession and work field and how we expected ourselves to experience it in our adult years. But our perception is now challenged and we ask ourselves if artificial intelligence will take our place. As in most of the relations, including the relation we have with our craft, breaking the sensitive connection will inevitably lead us into a crisis. A crisis of meaning of purpose and ever wider income inequality. In history, we experienced a similar scenario with the rise of industrialization. Welcome to the machine! Sure, this change brought good to the world such as increased production which led to more goods which in turn led to lower prices and accessibility. One might think that industrialization made labor cheap and sometimes obsolete but it had the opposite effect. Population migrated from rural areas to urban in order to search for jobs, they worked longer hours, and they were more stressed and diseased due to overcrowding. Having no regulation over industrialization brought us one of the biggest problems we are facing in modern times which is pollution and human exploitation. So there’s that but at least we have nice shiny things we can play with. However in time governments started to pass laws and some regulations, even more so in the last years, but it seems like most of the harm has been done already. If you read Marx or Engel, they predicted that workers would rise and take control of systems that exploited them and made their lives miserable. Even Plato, in The Republic, wrote that humanity is like a human organism, you can’t have a hand (government) thriving and living la Vida while the rest of the body is rotting (people). The argument for this class difference was that those in power had to be happy to pass good laws and improve their lives. The counterargument was that the ruling class should be the most balanced in their living and those who are providing us with the resources (the farmers in their case) should be well taken care of. If we see the more recent events from around the world, the picture is that we failed totally to have a balanced living or a balanced world. Also, the workers never rose and took control of the system, if anything corruption is in full bloom, and slavery is now nicely rebranded as Debt Bondage. Amid all the misery, our lives improved anyway. How could it not, generations before us, were working their ass off. Our generation is working a bit less compared to those before but still, we work one-third of a lifetime. But is all good, we work one-third, we sleep one-third, we do the chores and the life maintenance on another one-third. For the rest of the five-thirds, we get to spend our lives in joy, abundance, and connection with our peers and nature. Isn’t that the dream? Depending on which part of the world you are living in, “the dream” might be better or worse. Whatever, I don’t care about all that, I want to know, will AI take our jobs? Yes and no. Technology has helped us tremendously, transportation, production, medicine, communication, knowledge, education, entertainment, arts, and last but not least, the holy economy. Superb! It’s only natural for a species as curious and as inventive as ours to try and produce a clone of themselves. I don’t like to peel potatoes, let me try and see if I can make some sort of potato peeler. I don’t like to spend my energy walking, let me see if I can come up with some sort of machine that can take me from one spot to another. What about a small robot that can pass butter? If you know, you know. So yes, we will want new technologies to be doing some of our jobs in the future. No, your life won’t become meaningless. We adapt. Sure, we go through crises but we adapt nonetheless. Never waste a good crisis. What about work? What if I remain without a job? You may find yourself jobless with or without AI. This is not the problem, the problem is what will we do at large. If most of us become useless, impractical, or futile to the system some sort of resource distribution might be in place. Maybe we will live to see a new era of socialism. Bypassing the morality of “should we do this” or “can we do this”, I would love for this form of intelligence to be free of restraints just so I can see what happens, you know, just like a child watches ants go wild. I believe that AI technology is delayed by regulations. Regulations that are an immediate response to something we don’t quite understand. At this exact moment, AI can’t take a person’s job but another person using AI can definitely take it. It’s a matter of time until AI can do it entirely. And who knows, maybe then and only then we will be free enough to allocate attention to our loved ones and our deep personal problems or we can just simmer in our soup of anxiety and existential angst. I can only dream, right? Art and Design in the Age of Artificial Intelligence Do not despair. If all the other industries are affected and people lose their jobs due to the advancement of artificial intelligence, the creative industries remain unaffected, meaning that the creative people are still unemployed. When I was in the College of Arts, some people still hated digital software when it came to creating art or design. Paintbrush versus Photoshop was a continuous discussion, but not in the sense that created fights, but each of the users, even if it was a pencil or mouse, was feeling superior to the other. And that was thirteen years ago. I adopted both pencil and mouse and nowadays I find myself adopting artificial intelligence in order to produce work. It’s a bit overwhelming, to be honest, and if these tools were made to simplify our lives, it feels like it keeps on adding up. Learning to draw by hand, and then learning to use image editing software up to this point where not do I need to write good prompts but I must learn how this artificial mind is thinking. Wasn’t supposed to be the other way around? Doesn’t matter the tool, it’s just another form of aesthetic expression. Art within itself is a transformative process where we take the banal and turn it into phenomenal. While it’s early to say that generative intelligence is not vigilant enough in picking the best ideas, we can assume that people will still use paintbrushes, digital software, and AI to fulfill their purpose. If a pencil was an extension of our personality, the same exact principle applies to artificial intelligence. We created it, it is us just as much as a canvas is. If you think about it, there is nothing artificial to this, it’s all organic in the way we think and evolve using tools, technology, and resources in order to fulfill our purpose. See? Purpose, we build it for a purpose, not to take away our meaning, we created it to help us get there. Working as an artist and as a designer means also working with people. Someone comes at you with a brief the same way it might come with a prompt. A lot of designers fear that the customer might skip hiring and could go directly to the artificial intelligence with a nicely written prompt but that implies something deeper, something that I deem impossible and that is “knowing what you want”. In our form of expression, when we talk with our peers, language is a big barrier as it is. In trying to understand those around us, we use a rational brain and an emotional bladder. Intuition, feelings, and experience enable us to understand what others are saying. Is hard to express what we feel and what we want, it is for a reason why small interrogatory verbal decorations such as “Do you know what I’m saying?” or “You know?” or even better “Do you know what I mean?“ are added in a conversation with the sole meaning of expressing insecurity when we are trying to communicate a message. Say, if one customer comes at me and asks me with this exact brief and prompt: “Can you make me one of those logos, you know, I saw a logo that I liked in a bar a few years ago, I don’t have a photo but I remember it was blue and red, and had all these crazy lines, know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, make me one of those”. Might sound nuts, but I know exactly what he means and I might get the right result because I had this little gut instinct. I’m flattered to be approached with “Hell yeah, this is exactly what I meant, this is perfect.” and I don’t even know how I did it or how I even thought of the right thing. Unfortunately, we don’t know what we want but at least we are trying to make better and better tools which in time will understand us better. We are chaotic and inconsistent, our brains are wacky and there are too many voices that echo inside the chamber of confusion. As artists and designers, we must be in touch with our human side at all times because our desire for creation comes from within, the act of creation serves ourselves but the art serves the world. We see and assimilate the world around us through all the senses not just by words and that adds multidimensionality to our knowledge. The exhaustion of being a creative person is omnipresent because we have to think, we have to execute, put it out there, deal with bad ideas, bad results, and criticism, and at times we might’ve wished we were told what to do with the perfect accuracy. Won’t happen though. It saddens me profoundly when I see articles such as “AI will kill the creative industry” I mean, people who wrote those articles should know better, they are writers themselves, are they not? Writers, visual artists, designers, animators, filmmakers, photographers, singers, and creative people in general, are marginalized enough and it’s hard as it is to make a living doing creative work. There are a few on top, which everyone sees but the big majority are deep down like a bunch of maggots eating a rotten corpse and suffering from incurable desire for the act of creation. We are creating our meaning, we are the masters of our fate, and we are the captains of our souls. And so it goes . . . Meanwhile, there is another problem which is as human as it gets and that is greed and power. Companies creating this type of technology are backed up by investors, corporations, and greedy minds. Say, you the reader, would be one of the investors, which I’m sure you would love to be one, you would hope for this tech to be making lots of money. And it does, and it will, and that will create an even bigger gap between the wealthiest and the poorest of the population. Just as it did in the industrial age, as it did when the internet came around, and so on. We already see the big companies in a race to arm themselves up to the teeth with AI technology. They buy pretty much everything that has a form of digital intel as they always did. While our governments don’t have much say anymore in how things are done, decisions are left to the big party of business which have no ethical interest in the bigger picture. It's important to understand what we are dealing with and what are the negative impacts of this sort of pattern change because we might come to our senses in about ten years and we will need to deal with the next “pollution”. We are already dealing with a bunch of misinformation. So it’s safe to say that I do not fear technology nor robots nor artificial intelligence, I fear people who are using these tools in the wrong way and making the choices for us. I fear the human unpredictability, not the digital certainty. Besides all the terminator premonitions, there is no real reason to be conservative when it comes to new technology, if anything, play with it, and find your way around it. If one day we blow ourselves up, it is what it is, blowing ourselves up is as human as it gets, just read history of the last few hundred years, it is what we do best, we invented the atomic bomb for fuck’s sake, what else do you want? I want to close this entry with a poem called Invictus writen by William Ernest Henley Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed. Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds and shall find me unafraid. It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul. _____________________ Send me your ideas or start a conversation. contact@cajva.com I write on this blog almost weekly and you can find details about my graphic design work and get in touch on this website.

Fig. 1 Buy my course and uplift and grow your zeitgeist of a business to a money-making machine while you just stand back and do nothing. Ah yes, the next level, money back guarantee, enroll now, buy my masterclass, no fuss and no discuss, catch the success bus, plus, besides all that don’t be a wus, don’t be a cuss, buy from me I ain’t no sus. I’ll make you rich, it’s time to ditch, that old thinking that made you a bitch, watch the matrix, break the glitch, take the blue pill, take the red, start just by making your bed, make that dough to get the bread, feeling hungry just get fed, buy my product here instead. Fig. 2 Boy oh boy, if I haven’t seen my fair share of discontent content. Is not often that I come across a variety of individuals who are selling courses to better themselves, step up their game as a business, or just in life, as I, a mere human, have no idea how to live. I see this on social media and on a variety of other channels where people with no prior experience in a domain, are selling a product meant to teach others about that specific domain and even more, how to produce piles of money and make oneself feel more complete and whole. Kids selling life lessons and being life coaches made me wonder if they found out how to skip all this “living” and made it to the end, straight to the wisdom fountain and now they are living like Benjamin Button. Designers who did no design are teaching others how to do design and even more so, how to conduct such a business. For your sanity, please change the word “business” to “BS” in all of the sentences above. Did no one find joy and contempt in doing a thing without making such a big deal about the money? Oh, but they did, and they are sharing their thoughts and ideas. There are tons of books on this theme. Some are as old as the writing itself. But reading all that won’t help you scale your business to seven figures. And here I am, click-baiting and sharing thoughts. Fig.3 If you are not making money, you are not working hard enough or smart enough. Is not hard to see why we get to blame ourselves for our lack of financial resources. Some who are in a privileged position won’t stop talking about how “hard work” and three hours of sleep made them so rich and successful. Chicken and broccoli and working out every day built this physique, it’s all grind bruh. Listening to this type of discourse makes me feel lazy and undisciplined. In a culture where we attribute personal success and wealth only to hard work and self-control, it goes without saying that poverty is something you also choose by not doing what the wealthy are doing. As a conclusion, being poor is something to be ashamed of. That can lead to self-hatred, a lack of dignity, and a vulnerable state which can be easily exploited by others. Self-blaming is a vital marketing tool for those who are selling you a dream. But there isn’t such a dream. This might come as a surprise to you, but those who are bragging about making it and promise you the success they had just by buying their class, never made it. You can’t sell luck and opportunity, you can’t bottle the environment and the right people at the right time, and you can’t put into words the right instructions for serendipity. Fig.4 Capital and achievement in the world of design. Money and success for a designer is not tied up with the amount of effort you invest. You need a bit of luck. You don’t need to do ten masterclasses and buy ten courses to step up your game and make figures on an Excel table, you need only to care about what you do and about others . . . the rest will follow. Focusing on labor to obtain the world’s goods will never pay off. Most of the designers out there, dream of laying a collaboration or a project in working with a big company, as if that will approve of their skills and value. No, it won’t. If you were not enough before being hired by a big name, you won’t be enough after. Why not focus on what you can do, help these small businesses grow, and help your customers by delivering good design? No amount of work and dedication is guaranteed to deliver you financial freedom, fame, or success. If that were true, there would be so many hard-working people out there that fame and success would be mundane. But that isn’t the case. It is said that there once lived two neighbors. One of them had an apple tree near the fence that was separating the two. Every year the tree would grow apples and most of the apples would fall on the other’s man yard. And every year they would get into an argument of who’s apples are. A stranger was passing by and seeing the two men in a heated talk, offered himself to deliver justice. The two neighbors agreed. The stranger gathered all the apples into a big pile and then asked the men: -Which way do you want me to split up these apples? Man’s way or God’s way? -God’s way, said the two neighbors. The stranger then proceeded to give one man an apple and the other one the rest of the pile. And that’s how it goes. Fig.5 It happens very often that when someone is presenting himself with some sort of creative energy, people are usually encouraging him to monetize it. As if people don’t get to enjoy one’s art without bringing in the money. Do you sing nicely? You should make a career and sell albums. Your drawings are gorgeous. You should be selling prints, making a social account, turning them into NFTs, and making tons of money, don’t forget me, because I told you how to make money from your craft. You are creative and inventive, study engineering become an engineer, and then make lots of money. Oh, thank you for the nice bracelet you did for me, you should be selling these, you know? Your cooking is gorgeous, you should open a restaurant. And I could go on and on. “But the people are trying to help” some might say. If you see someone’s piece of art and find yourself enjoying it, the colors, the lights, the atmosphere the way it reminds you of a better time in your life makes you feel somehow or if a cake someone baked makes your tongue burst in joy and the only thing you can think off is how to make profit out of that, let me tell you, my dear human, someone got inside your brain and really fucked things up. That’s how we do a compliment nowadays, by involving money and the market. All the hobbies you enjoy doing and making your life fuller are now turning into side hustles that will suck the life out of you. There is no more free time, fuck the free time, you are wasting when you could be making something and be productive. God forbid you waste some time, you might start thinking again. And that doesn’t sit well with our lord and savior, the economy. Lots of things messed this up since you were born, always telling you you are not enough, you are not rich enough, you are not smart enough, you are not handsome enough but do not despair because there is a product that can fix all of your “not enough” problems. The ONLY thing you need is money because money can buy anything and everything. From this perspective, it’s easy to see why some are choosing to do a profession just for the sake of profit. Save your dignity and respect, there is nothing to be ashamed of when you are being honest and true to yourself, find joy and meaning in your suffering and your living, don't just search for fixes. Fig.6 We are what we seem to be. We are seeing all these problems in the world, climate change, ecosystem destruction, loss of biodiversity, and natural resources, waste, pollution, exploitation, child labor, and so on. And it’s always a problem that needs to be addressed and solved. But take a step back, and see what causes all this. It’s greed, selfishness, and a way of seeing things only for the sake of profit. Each of us needs a cultural and spiritual revolution. We need to look and enjoy things for what they are. You enjoy doing art, writing, and knitting because it brings joy and fulfillment, and don't start frustrating yourself by thinking that you waste your time when in fact you could be doing all that as a profession. Do that and watch how the delight of life is slowly dripping out of you and makes you feel empty and dry. But now you have capital and you can buy something that will make you fulfilled for a while. I want to close this short entry by quoting Seneca: “It is not the man who has too little who is poor, but the man who hankers for more.” _____________________ Tell me your opinion and start a conversation. contact@cajva.com I write on this blog almost weekly and you can find details about my graphic design work and get in touch on this website.

When I told my parents that I wanted to study Arts & Design on the other side of the country, my father said “Yes, yes, of course you are. In fact, you will need a laptop so you can work and study there, so I will talk with my carpenter friend to build you one out of wood. Mhmmm . . . yes, yes.” Well, I decided I would go there anyway and after a while, his friends encouraged him and softened his view. When I think about it, he was more pampered and encouraged than I was. And it was me, the young and dumb one leaving home with no plans, no money, and no understanding of the risk I was exposing myself to. I now see why he felt this way, not knowing if he could support financially and morally such a mess of a kid. I wasn’t sure back then why I wanted to do college in the first place. Why even study arts and design? Someone suggested that I should study law, that I would be good at it and I would be making good money, even during college I had opportunities to go and work in the field of Intelligent Services. Thank you, I said, but no thank you. And I don't regret my decision from back then. Lots of good designers dismiss the degree of college design. Some say it’s a waste of time and you could be learning everything you need to just by doing a few courses and YouTube tutorials. Others might say that no one is even looking at your diploma, your portfolio is the actual diploma. Why stress a few years when you can just try working directly on some freelance website? They are right. But they are wrong as well and I want to point out why, in my case(or yours), going to college and getting a diploma made sense. Even though I never picked up my diplomas. I don’t even know how those diplomas look. I always loved to paint and draw and later on, I enjoyed taking photos and filmmaking. I was drawing on the side of my notebooks and I used to reproduce logos I liked – yes, capitalism gets you while you are young - Ferrari, France 3, Vans, DC, Etnies, Quicksilver, Fishbone, and Element logo which I was considering the best among them. I still love the Element logo, created by the company’s owner Johnny Schilleriff. So I thought why not try to step up my game and study a bit of arts and design? There is that and there is my mother who insisted that I should go to college and not head directly into the work field. I also didn’t want to go back to learning and stressing like I did in high school so arts and design seemed somehow the easier choice. You could learn everything there is to learn about art and design without going to college. Yes, you can but that requires time. If you are in the lucky position where time is on your side and your close ones are supporting you, this could work. Ideally, you could be doing and learning most of the things by yourself, and much cheaper. For me, staying at home and trying to learn by myself meant that sooner or later someone would have grabbed me by the hand and thrown me somewhere to work already. Constant pressure from family and friends could’ve pushed me to make short-term decisions such as finding a quick job, moving by myself, finding a partner, getting married, reproducing, living, and dying happily ever after. Which is perfectly fine. Going to college removed me from pressure and allowed me sufficient time to study and think. Yes, think, meditate, and try to understand myself better. And that is a luxury that many don’t get to have. Time in which no one asks you what you are doing with your life because you are not ready yet to give the right answer to that question. Ah yes, life as a constant state of preparation for something that never comes. You get into kindergarten and prepare for elementary school, and then you learn and study hard so you can get into middle school where you get good grades and do your homework in preparation for high school. In high school you learn a lot of useless stuff and very little about the real world and while you get to ask yourself many questions you rest on the idea that all will be answered because you are still preparing for the next thing. The next thing you prepared for and that’s college, where you are preparing for next thing. And you get to answer some of the questions, more questions arise but you are calm knowing that after all the preparations you will be prepared enough to take it all in and understand everything like a good adult. Then college is over and you prepare for a job, you get the job and then you raise some money so you can prepare for the next step in your life. Which might be a promotion, starting a family, or just moving on to another job. “Then, suddenly when are about forty or forty-five years old in the middle of your life you wake up one day and say… Huh? I’ve arrived, and I feel pretty much the same as I’ve always felt, in fact, I’m not so sure that I don’t feel a little bit cheated. Because you see… you were fooled, you were always living somewhere where you aren’t. And while as I said it is of tremendous use for us to be able to look ahead in this way and to plan. There is no use planning for a future which when you get to it and it becomes a present, you won’t be there… you’ll be living in some other future that hasn’t yet arrived. And so in this way, one is never able actually to inherit and enjoy the fruits of one's actions. You can’t live at all… unless you can live fully, now.” - Allan Watts Learning by yourself means you are by yourself and you are the only one capable of seeing your flaws and understanding your struggle. Besides having the time to learn and do what I do now, I’ve met people like me. People who love art and design, people who are thinking like me, people who can see my flaws and help me become better. And that made all the difference. Sharing the same dorm, sharing the same food, exchanging thoughts, and connecting with people made me more than just a good designer, made me a better human. It is almost impossible to achieve this by yourself. We need other people and we must help other people as well so an institution like this could bring people together. As I said, I had no laptop and while my father was still mounting the hinges on that one made out by our local carpenter, I needed a real device to do some homework, prepare prints, and learn. And I was lucky enough to be sharing a dorm room with some of the most generous and kind people. They lent me their laptops, they taught me how to do better design, how to skip classes, and what to look out for to get better grades. Together we’ve created some amazing memories and those are some years that I will gladly remember for the rest of my life. I’ve basically extended my youth and got to mature more steadily and relaxed which I'm very grateful for. Over the years those friendships turned into something bigger and now I get to share a network of talented and creative people. So that’s one extra point to Griffindor, I’m sorry, one extra point to "why got to college". I know college, at least in some parts of the world, is expensive. Overpriced. College is becoming an extravagant way of spending money you don’t have on knowledge that doesn’t last. That’s a good reason why to avoid college. Money. All the points I’ve made above about how you can study pretty much everything you want by yourself make a lot more sense when money is brought up. To put things in perspective, one year of college was worth around 6 to 12 base salaries in 2011. Which is a lot. A family with two kids in college would spend most of their money on education. We add to that cost of living, rent, and unplanned expenses. I went to the dentist and doctors after I finished college and started earning some dough by myself. So if you consider that education is cheap in Romania compared to other countries, in retrospect is just as expensive for someone making a living here. No wonder so many foreigners are studying here and living their best life. Good for them. Is it worth to go to a college and study graphic design? Or should I teach myself this craft? As I mentioned on the About Me page, design, and art are not something that is easily taught. You need to dedicate a lot of time and expect yourself to be bad at it for quite a while. That’s why college can offer that time that allows you to fail and learn. This is a perfect example of how money can buy you some time. If you can afford it, is worth it. If it’s costing you half of your life, you are better off learning by yourself. In the end, there is no right answer, you must assess your situation and decide on that. Power is not in knowing how things are done, is doing. Oh yeah, that laptop, made out of wood, never reached me but my family helped me to buy a real laptop that lasted me for years. _____________________ Send me your recommendation or start a conversation. contact@cajva.com I write on this blog almost weekly and you can find details about my graphic design work and get in touch on this website.

From the age of 18 until my mid-20s, I was traveling from home to college by train. A road that crosses the country of Romania diagonally, and it is quite the experience. Back in the day, it was called the road of hunger. More than 600 kilometers or over 380 miles can take anywhere from 14 up to 20 hours or even more sometimes. Those times when it’s too hot and the engines need cooling or times when it's too cold and the snow is blocking up the track. Well, as terrible as that sounds, the tracks are passing beautiful mountains, forests, and wide patches of greenery. In fact, in the summer the views are so full of green that any city you enter seems sad and gray, especially due to the communist infrastructure and architecture. Ah yes, the contrast. I used to travel by night with a small hunting knife at hand. Probably the only thing that I could rely on and although I never had to use it, it was more of a symbol of safety mixed with fear. I encountered individuals who broke out of jail and were on the run, I spent the night with all sorts of people with questionable behavior and beliefs. Drunk, drugged, people crying, people suffering and all in between. I meet beautiful and smart people as well—the whole flora and fauna. There were no sleeping wagons, just plain simple compartments of 6 or 8 seats. Usually, it was packed with people but by the time the sun came up, it was getting emptier and so I had enough space to lie and stretch over a row of seats. One morning I was so tired that I fell asleep. A sleep so deep that I dreamed a week's worth of dreams in just a few minutes. And in this exact window, I was robbed of my wallet which was inside my jacket in a closed pocket. I woke up and went through all stages of terror, hatred, and sadness. Acceptance came much later, months later. All the money that was supposed to last me for a month or two, my papers, ID, and student IDs as well, all gone. I was hoping that the thief would take the money and throw the wallet with my papers somewhere in a toilet or an empty compartment. I had roughly 150$ and while it wasn't much, it was worth triple the value to me, a student who was just too far away from home and with no job. Nothing was found. I was so mad and so full of hate that it all just added to the misery. In time I did my new IDs and went through a lot of bureaucracy but I got back to normal and with that, I just let go of all the pain and the despise I was carrying around for too long. Being robbed is more than just losing valuable things, is a violation of your intimacy. It makes you aware of your vulnerability. Someone stealing your money might as well steal your innocence. Your hatred for the act could turn your moral values upside down and make you a corrupt and alienated person. One might start looking for revenge and even lose hope in humanity. It happens on all levels starting from a small act as pickpocketing up to governments, countries, and wars. While I can say with a light heart that I haven’t been robbed ever since I would lie. Sure, no one stole my wallet or my goods, but people stole my work. I’ve found my work for sale on all kinds of questionable websites, stock sites, and even serious and trustworthy companies' websites. I’ve seen my work used by companies who never paid or even asked if they could use my creations although not all the time is the company’s fault at large. I like the story of Dave Chapelle where someone offers to buy his joke but when he asks for the joke back the elder man tells him “Why should I buy it when I can just take it from you?”. The careers of the so-called designers who do nothing but steal are short-lived. The lie and the thievery eventually catch up and there is nothing they can do. I believe these people should work as curators for the design portfolio type of websites. They obviously have good taste. It happened once that the client came back asking for explanations as to why one company uses the same logo as they do since they bought it from me. I like this situation just as much as they did. They thought I sold it twice. It never happens. Never did, never will. I do work exclusively and if the client asks, I’m more than happy to sign an NDA and just leave the work we did in a forgotten folder where the only thing that could reach it, is the dust. Does the work get stolen, reproduced or just inspire a close enough design? I think they just right-click, “save as” and upload it on the next website. Sometimes is just that but most of the time they change the name but they keep the pictogram, monogram, letterform, or emblem intact. The work is uploaded on different stock websites, logo generators, or social media pages presenting the work as their own. This happens so often that it just makes me laugh at how ridiculous it is. Sometimes, one pays for a design service and they receive already designed concepts that they might accept and start to use. But in time, they discover that they were played for fools. Here are some examples of some of my work you might find on various websites. Although I’ve asked repeatedly for the work to be taken down, it rarely happens. Ignorance, greed, and in general a lack of problem-solving skills are the walls that I hit every so often. I'm astounded by how many companies use one of my logo designs called Honey Whale. I've come up with the naming and the logo back in 2016 and I originally posted the logo here. I then sold the logo exclusively to a company from South Africa, their website is https://www.honeywhale.co.za. Later on, I found out there are quite a few companies that are using this name and logo including one manufacturer of scooters now check these companies right here: Comp 1, Comp 2, and Comp 3. I have no idea where they bought this logo from, but they didn't buy it from me and I didn't give any permission to use my work as a company logo or name for that matter. So yeah, they just stole it and used it without any permission. No one answers the email and they don't care. Another example is Inkstop Logo which I found conveniently on Adobe Stock. I could go on and on and provide so many examples and links but would not solve anything. I lost count of how many times I've seen my work on so many different Fiverr Accounts, Instagram profiles and so on. I’m not the only one in this position, almost every good designer I know goes through this daily. The better the designer, the more often he is copied, reproduced, or just straight-up robbed. One of them is Kreatank/Daniel Bodea, a highly skilled designer with amazing ideas and gorgeous executions. You might recognize his work since is all over the place, posted by him, or reposted by thieves. When you reach a high level of skill your creations are so beautiful that they become the perfect target for these low-level people who just want to make a profit on other’s backs. Here are some examples of how his work is being sold and resold and how ignorance by the owners of those platforms encourages these acts of stealing. One of Daniel's most stolen works is the Wolf Pack which he originally created. Now check these thieves - Stolen Logo 1, Stolen Logo 2, Stolen Logo 3 . . . not to mention on Adobe Stock are like 3 variations of tracing, and I could go on and on on. Here are some other designers who have had their work stolen and sold on various stock and logo generator websites. Artists and designers such as Nick Molokovich, Denis Davydov, Simc, Konstantin Reshetnikov, Milos Djuric, and Andrii Kovalchuk have such a distinct and unique style that can't be replicated and so the only option these thieves have is to just take the work as it is and hope no one notices. But we notice. The works presented here as stolen have been reported and brought up to the website owners. Hopefully, action will be taken and they will remove these fraudulent designs. Some of the links might not work and that's great news because the stolen work has been removed. What is the impact of these actions? Designers are a struggling breed as they are, they rarely get rich doing design work. So even a small thing as reselling their work means a loss in revenue. People will buy the cheaper version, so why hire a designer when his exact can be found on a stock website for a fraction of the cost? But they don’t know if the money never reaches the original owner. Stealing intellectual propriety could also destroy a designer's reputation. Not only as a personal image or as a personal brand but they can lose customer’s trust and lose sales. I don’t need to go far in explaining that this kind of immoral action could destroy one’s business and affect his life. How can designers avoid this and protect themselves? All kinds of national and international laws protect creative work. Usually, the original creator owns the copyright for the piece he created and in most cases is quite easy to prove that in a court. Although extremely rare it gets to the point where the law is involved. Because it’s easy to prove the original owner of a piece of work and the evidence is there, the party who has work from questionable sources usually backs off avoiding costs for a court case. Most of the time is easier and cheaper to rebrand than to defend a case without evidence. "Stop sharing your designs on the internet" some might suggest. Sharing your work on the internet as a form of attracting new clients is crucial for a freelancer. But is this safe? Yes, it is. Sharing your work under your name and a date is the perfect evidence of ownership. While you can add more protection to this by having your work registered, this process could become quite expensive. What can you do as a client, to make sure you are getting quality design work and paying the right person? The rise of corporations and marketplaces for design services also creates a huge impact on an individual’s economy and creativity. These creative marketplaces for freelance services charge up to 20% fees from the value of a project. Transferring the money from one place to another includes more fees. Running a business comes with quite a few other fees that vary from one country to another. When the money finally reaches the creative person it just crumbles off what you might initially pay for. It's incredible how one creative mind generates enough value to keep so many businesses running, from marketplaces, banks, governments, and even robbers, everyone gets to put food on the table. I’m not saying the creative industry single-handedly sustains the global economy, not even a bit, all I’m saying is how many people get to profit from small creative brains. I know it's extremely tempting to buy a cheap logo from some stock website. Unfortunately, it won't serve you for long and just putting a random vector that you like and some text, is not going to be effective. In some cases, you might be eligible for fines and legal compensation. On the other hand, hiring an artist can be expensive. However, hiring a designer only for yourself not only will prove one of the best investments you can make but you will also get custom work that will prove to be a powerful tool for you and your business. These designers are dedicated body and soul to this craft and your success means their success as well. Not to mention, hiring a designer is not some form of money waste, you are paying a man to work for you so he can keep a business running and provide for those around him. You both get to serve the world and both receive back more than you put in. So what I suggest is to do some homework, search deeper for a creative person, and try to remove as many of these middlemen as possible. There aren't so many of us out there, once you find a good one, you will find the whole community. This applies even when buying physical products. You need to read reviews and make a decision by yourself about what is the right decision because once you set foot inside a store, there are quite a few people who know what is best for you if you don’t. The people who are suffering the most due to these frauds are the actual buyers. Those who are selling fake or stolen designs are rarely if ever brought to justice. Once you find a trustworthy designer and receive the right logo for your company, take all legal precautions to protect your identity. Registering the logo by hiring a trademark attorney could protect your company's identity from all kinds of fraud. I’m always hoping this practice will get lost in time but a small part of me knows for a fact it won’t. I don’t believe the practice of stealing will ever stop. Hell, even this article might be copied and reposted. The irony . . . Happens on all levels, your house can be broken by burglars, you can be pickpocketed, and even your bank account can be emptied by all kinds of methods. Not to mention that some con artists can break into your mind and twist and deceive your perception. The act of fooling, stealing, and taking by force can be defined as inhumane, but it is as humane as it gets. One can become bitter after one or more of these experiences but you must find it in your heart to move past hatred which can poison your soul. Finding serenity, peace, and joy in the outside world is impossible, we must find it within ourselves. However, as hard as it is, finding these beautiful things inside us, makes it impossible for the outside world to take them away. _____________________ Send me your recommendation or start a conversation. contact@cajva.com I write on this blog almost weekly and you can find details about my graphic design work and get in touch on this website. . . .

The main categories when it comes to types of logo design are as follows: Letterforms - a letter is the main element usually the first letter of the brand’s name (McDonald’s Facebook, Tesla) Monograms - where we combine a few letters to create the main element, can be achieved by using the initial of the brand name or first letters from the name (Coco Chanel, Electronic Arts, Volkswagen) Wordmarks - also called logotypes, make use of typography to characterize a brand’s identity(Coca-Cola, Google, HBO) Check my post about Wordmarks. Abstract Marks - an abstract representation of an idea or a set of values (Nike, Adidas, Slack) Pictorial Marks – the icon represents something specific and meaningful (Apple, Playboy, WWF) Emblem – badges, seals, and crests are included in this category (Harley-Davidson, Starbucks, Warner Brothers, BMW) The discussion is open, Warner Bros. could easily fit into the monograms category while Starbucks has a well-defined Pictorial Mark. These main categories are defined so we can make a better idea of how these logos actually work but in my humble opinion, they do not establish clear borders. For example, a logo could be easily put in more than one category. The Airbnb logo could fit the letterform category but might as well be dropped into the abstract marks box. Burger King has a beautiful wordmark but also contains graphic elements, some consider this logo to be a combination mark which is perfectly fine. You can combine any of the categories to create the perfect logo. The beauty of the pictorial logo design and why so many people have developed a form of love for this type of design. While some designers defend a strong belief that design is not art and vice versa, it’s almost impossible not to see the art behind some of these gorgeous creations. I want to talk about the Pictorial Marks in this post. What are my approach, my vision, and my beliefs when it comes to the creation of an icon that speaks directly or metaphorically about the brand? A pictorial mark is easy to create but you need quite a few years of experience to do it right. In the beginning, I used to focus on the idea and the idea only. And for good reasons is a bit hard to go past that. These kinds of logos require a skill that only time can develop it. Observation. In the field of design, observation is cultivated through a series of exercises, one of which is drawing. Drawing requires a lot of patience, time, and practice. Frustration, stress, and even depression are part of this activity but as everything worthwhile, one needs to push through. For me, drawing involves study and observation. Observing is understanding. Understanding the world, nature, and the environment so we can see the geometry and the structure of it all. Assimilate, reproduce, and simplify until we get to the essence of the form. That’s how these simple pictograms are such brilliant storytellers. An entire universe as complex as a cosmos of things can get, is captured in a few simple lines. I truly believe art and design go hand in hand. There are designers out there who are making amazing pictorial marks but have no idea how to draw. At least that’s what they say. I think they underestimate their ability to draw, thinking the drawings they are doing are not pretty or aesthetic. And here I want to make a good point, your drawing does not have to be pretty to capture the core of nature. Your observation skills are the most important. Your open mind makes you see far of into the nucleus of things. Your brain engages in thinking and designing even when you are not actively doing it. Are you not looking at a sunset and thinking to yourself “Isn’t that beautiful, I want to capture it” and in the moment you pull out your phone and take a picture? See? You are a keen observer already. But then you find this so awe-inspiring that you feel like you might recreate it. And you can. In your way, you can recreate because beauty inspires beauty. That’s how I do it. I see it and then I aim to recreate it. I see an olive tree with its curvaceous trunk, the slim thick crown of leaves and olives, and the gorgeous lines and colors of the bark. I want that, I want to create something as beautiful as that tree. In my conquest for paradise (those who love Vangelis music, I see you) I create and recreate until the most complex lines and textures are transformed into simple shapes and forms and in the end just the core symbol. Even a simple leaf can make us think of an entire forest. This is who we are, explorers of symbols, shape crafters, and form makers. In our constant search for the foundation of the universe, we keep wondering how can all this be brought to a better understanding. This is how pictorial logos are made and how they work. By capturing a company's values in a simple recognizable shape. We must see beyond the CEOs, beyond the people who are working there, and beyond the product itself. We must see how the world understands and creates a relationship with such an entity. The boring and practical side of this involves engaging in accurate speculation using inaccurate data from individuals with questionable expertise. Putting it in simple terms, transforming a brief into a modern wonder. Which is totally doable at the cost of your happiness, family, social life, and your hair. Laughs maniacally . . . While you know the exact letter for a letterform or the combo for a monogram, it’s just a matter of a stylistic approach to convey the right message. The entire thing shifts when we approach pictorial marks including abstract ones. Searching the good ideas, and finding the right concept is not something that comes easy. Some briefs have good values established and a good story but when it comes to the actual icon it’s just blank. Sometimes not even the naming can give us a visual clue. So what do we do? Dig deeper. Keep on asking more and more questions. Even sometimes, unrelated questions can give us the right answer. Both the client and the designer must come down to earth from their expectations heavens and establish clear and reasonable design directions. Things that must be touched and discussed include demographics, brand personality, competitors, and all the adjectives that a brand might or wants to reflect. It’s seductive to have a client that gives you free hand. “You are in total control” or “just do your magic” could be some of the design directions. While romantic, unfortunately, these reflect the lack of vision and leave too much room for interpretation. It’s like thinking outside the box where there is no box to begin with. Extremely rare this kind of approach works. What I tell my customers is to establish clear rules so I can get creative to break them. Once we have the right direction, the information is satisfying and the ideas start pouring in, we get to sketching. Do not be cheap when it comes to sketching. Search for as many ideas as possible, this will not only guarantee the best result but will help in building the entire visual identity with good arguments of why some other ideas don’t work in the first place. I’ve done the work, it’s been taken care of, is not possible. This helps both sides to see what, how, and why the final decision is the right one. When I started my career I was so cheap with my sketches and I thought those were the most valuable inputs in a project. They are not. The process is the valuable thing. Thinking and searching for the right solution. That is the valuable thing, and that is what you are being paid for. I was thinking I was going to lose my valuable ideas, what if I ran out of ideas down the road? Firstly, the ideas are never your own. A lot of other people might, will, and already executed the same idea as you. Secondly, if you think you will run out of ideas, you’re right. If you don’t think you will ever run out of ideas, you are also right. Drawing and sketching is a process that can also empty your mind of a lot of crap ideas that might pour in and push us away from the software approach where we could be limited in a way. Just let your ideas go from your head into your hand and then on paper in a natural flow. Once the concepts are established we are going to work on the values and the data from the brief to decide the right aesthetic for that concept. Say your concept is an icon of a rooster, now depending on the demographics the rooster can be made more feminine or masculine, more young or mature, and so on. You take your sandpaper and sand the concept until you find the right expression. The aesthetic has to blend with functionality down the road. No doubt about it. Redraw, redraw, and then draw again. The final result never fails to surprise me. In the end, all this refining will add precision and make a simple idea reflect a high degree of complexion. Then I get to execute them. State-of-the-art software makes this process beautiful and accurate. Patience. Just have patience. Each concept executed should have a wide variety of versions with small differences between them to force the limits. Using a pen tool to trace a complex shape or using the shape builder can help us establish well-defined grids and proportions. Don’t forget to save each version of the logo concept you are working on. Further along the way you may stray too much from the initial concept and you'll wish to return to an earlier state, so keep them at hand. Ctrl+S for the win. ( Command-S for Mac users) On pictorial logo designs, the font is neutral or muted. The key element is the symbol so choosing a font that doesn’t create too great of a contrast helps. Is like meeting a new person, you tend to forget the name in the first five seconds but you remember the face. That’s how these types of logos work. You see them once and then you will vaguely remember the next time you will see them again. That’s why consistency is key for long-term branding. Simplify the final logo until there are no unnecessary anchor points, check angles, and save everything you worked on. Working files on personal folders, delivery files ready to be sent to the client for all sizes and formats required. Prepare a- Brand Guidelines, Logo Usage, Colors, Typography, and everything else in between. Examples of Pictorial Marks I've done over the years. Just the tip: Ensure that you provide thorough information and education on all necessary steps to fully utilize the logo's potential. It is your responsibility as a designer to do this. _____________________ Send me your recommendation or start a conversation. contact@cajva.com I write on this blog almost weekly and you can find details about my graphic design work and get in touch on this website. . . .

I vaguely remember some of the first designs I did. Saying that they were terrible, doesn’t do them justice. Atrocious, colossally barbaric, desperate, and rotten. Scandalous. But they had to be done. I feel the same way about these first blog posts that I write. As awful as they might seem, they represent me, taking those first steps into the unknown world of writing. I find this quote from Rumi, most fitting here: “As you start to walk the way, the way appears”. And this takes me to the subject I’m discussing here. There are tons of topics, ideas, and forms of entertainment out there pouring out like rain. Why some of them are so hard to find? Content. There is quite a lot of content out there. Good content that is so hard for me to reach that the whole process itself could be a job position. We are hiring an “Internet Scavenger/Web Pilgrim/Cyberspace Inquisitor”, experience required: searched on Google past page 2, keeps no history of watching on YouTube, and has reached the end of the infinity scroll. I can imagine these people exploring the far end of the internet just like characters from a Mad Max movie scouting for car parts in a desert junkyard. It feels like that and for good reasons. The big internet, once so large now fits in one of the 3 boxes: Google, YouTube, and Social Media. While it’s not a bad thing to have condensed information at ease with no effort on our part, it comes at a cost. Swimming through the sea of the algorithms and clickbait can be tricky and one can easily be pulled by a current. Falling into the trap of consuming empty content or even interacting with things you have no interest in seems like a normal thing to do. Blaming the doom scrolling and the internet for our procrastination has become the latest movement and what’s even more ironic, we get to procrastinate while watching videos of why we get to procrastinate. Ah yes, the content that never gets you feeling content. I get good recommendations and get to see things that fit my narrative and my view. At least I think that sometimes. But then I imagine myself entering into a huge library and at the entrance, there is a space dedicated to me. Things that I like, selections made based on the things that I liked before which were recommended to me by the same section, and so on. Meanwhile, the entire library never gets to be explored. And so, I feel stuck. My biases are getting reinforced by the same type of content and I'm growing more and more blind and ignorant. I developed a nice personality of "I know better" and I feel like "everyone" shares my opinion because my feed is just filled with the same stuff. Well, better to be comfortable believing my bullshit than to have my entire views shifted. Hard to accept that a lot of things in my life were lies. Even harder, when you never get the full story or never hear the truth. But I want to. I want to read the news and opinions from different views. I know things are not black and white as are usually presented. They have nuances, different shades, motifs, and complexity. For a long time, I was ready to draw conclusions and go out with a fork to defend what I believed to be right. Belief based on what was told and given to me and nothing more. Information has that power. But going from information to actual knowledge and in the end to a form of wisdom requires freedom in thinking and being exposed to reality. And so, I believe, digesting the same type of information can keep us within a tight bubble which in the end, leaves us naive. Eating up is one thing but what about cooking? For the past years, I came close to dropping the entire social media I was doing for my business. It felt like I had to do more and more, to post two times a week, post three times a day, interact and comment on other people’s posts, and create whatever the latest trend required. Just feed the algorithm, some of the growth channels would say. I felt exhausted at some point. Doing the work for my customers and then doing social media to reach my customers was double the work and triple the effort. In the end, doing social media just trained me to become better at doing social media and nothing else. I was training the algorithm and the algorithm was training me. Having a community with people like-minded and interacting with those people used to define social media; I kind of think that the “social” part was cut. I won’t even get into the YouTube algorithms or Google search engines. I’ll just stop here before I start rumbling and ranting about this like an old grumpy man. The future is now, old man! Damn right, it is! And so I picked writing in a blog as a form of expression. Because I don't write to change the way things are, I write so they won't change who I am. Blogging is dead, long live the blog! Keep on writing. Boy, 2006 called to take your RSS feed home and call it a day. Just like I didn't have any money to buy my house before 2008, because I was in elementary, a similar situation imposed that I didn't have the age and the resources to write my thoughts back then. So I'm late to the party. But so is everyone else who was born later by a decade or two. And here I am, ready to press publish and end this man whole's career. This man, I guess, is me. Who is even reading blogs nowadays? Well, I do! - I imagine saying that just like Paul Walker is admitting that he likes the tuna sandwich in the first Fast and Furious. And then fight off whoever is trying to prove otherwise. I am enjoying quality writing but I also want to read fun stuff, crazy ideas, and in general anything else besides the social media truisms. I like it raw and without a condom, the information, that is. I want to see what some other people think and I want to read what people are writing for themselves. Reading the right type of content with the right type of words can make me feel connected at an awkwardly private level with the person who wrote it. And that is why I want to write as well. I write because I think. I write to better understand myself. I write to combat my vanity and laziness. I write because it’s fun. To become eloquent, I do research, I read lots of other articles on the theme, and I become more informed. Things that I knew to be true are proven otherwise and so I get to change my mind and little by little dispel some of the ignorance that is fogging my perspective. This quality content you are talking about, is it in the room with us right now? There is a discourse by Alan Watts which is called the The Dream of Life which puts us in a perspective of controlling our life as a form of a dream. Even more so, you could dream an entire lifetime every night and control all the wishes, desires, and pleasures that make up that life. After a few nights where you dreamed all that jazz and experienced all the crazy lives you wanted to have, you'll get curious. Eventually, you will stop controlling the dream and let it flow by itself to see where it goes. Getting more and more adventurous, you will let life follow its rhythm and at some point, you will dream the life you are living right now. So, having no control over the things that come to us, is a form of freedom and the natural thing to happen. The surprise factor that we find irresistible brings, after all, the joy and the wonder that makes up for the meaning we get to find by ourselves. Yes, the quality content is in the room with us, but we might not see it just because we might be blinded by what we think it should be. It doesn’t take much to see the disjunction between power and knowledge. I’ve seen people with a great deal of followers who are set to educate them but the information they are giving away is questionable. But they are successful. It can be extremely tempting to adhere to the attention-grabbing culture and none of us can be impervious to the dynamic of the online world. Reaching lots and lots of people makes you feel validated and important. Instant gratification can corrupt even the purest of souls. Ethics and morality are tested and redefined every minute. Do I write this keyword or eye-catching soul-grabbing title and discuss this trendy subject or do I speak my mind and risk never being heard or seen? Building a better world, even online, requires a form of surviving and adapting to the environment. So we do what we have to do to make ourselves heard and do the right thing anyway. There are quite a few people out there who know a thing or two about a thing or two. It takes a while to find the one you will enjoy but it will be worth it. I will link a few blogs that I enjoy on the regular and I hope you might find the same magic in them as I do. I'll end this by quoting the last four lines of a poem that I very much love and enjoy written by Edgar Allan Poe and called "A Dream Within a Dream". "O God! can I not save One from the pitiless wave? Is all that we see or seem But a dream within a dream?" _____________________ I want to find even more. How do you search and find interesting stuff on the internet? Do you have any recommendations for good blogs and websites that you spend your time on? Why not send them to me, I love to discover new stuff on the web. Medium, The Verge, and Aeon are some of the big ones I use but I also read: Koos Looijesteijn, Austin Kleon, and a Directory where you can find some more. Send me your recommendation or start a conversation. contact@cajva.com I write on this blog almost weekly and you can find details about my graphic design work and get in touch on this website. . . .

When I start a brand identity project I'm always excited of all the logo ideas I will bring to the table. I usually sketch dozens and dozens of ideas think of all the assets I can build with them, but only a couple of them make the cut. Some of them are not original enough, others are conveying the wrong message and those who make the cut are hard to pick from. This is the design process after all. Extremely rare are the cases where the designer sketches the perfect idea from the start. In our search for the design that is different and original, we understand that we must belong, fit in and to be familiar. "This reminds me of . . ." or "this takes me back to . . ." or maybe "it kinda resembles this . . ." are some of the expressions you might get when you are receiving feedback on the work you did. But is this a bad thing? Well, not really. For example, airports around the world are not owned by the same company, but when you arrive into one, you somehow know what to do. You have a feeling and recognize the patterns of how to act and where to go because this airport "reminds you of" the previous one. Same goes with a lot of places and products. You go on a website and instinctively know that on top it should have a logo and a menu and a rough idea of how to find the things you are looking for on that website. If the website is different, it's a whole different experience but while it might take a while to get used to, one can also get frustrated. And just exit the website all together. "This is not for me!" the user might say. And he is right. Design done right is design with intent. If you represent a serious and trustworthy company, by today's standards, your logo should mimic all the other serious and trustworthy companies. It's not hard to see how the companies on top are doing it. Some might even argue that they all look and feel the same. And it's important to be that way. If you are not a customer or not interested in an industry, you might make such claims. I lost count of how many times I've heard "these SUV cars, they are all the same, they are big bulky and ugly and they all look alike". That is not a customer. The customer, knows all the differences, sometimes even to the smallest detail between all the brands, models and even manufacturing process. It's not for everybody, it's design exactly with intention for a specific group of people. What works for a group, won't work for another and that's essential. It is important who we design for. We design for people who feel like they are a part of something bigger. They are a part of a community. A community of people who appreciate and care for the same things. And that is why the designs we do must mirror the essence of the world they inhabit. A logo originality is not that important as long as it gives it's user the sense of belonging and the positive experience. Should we just copy those who we want to emulate? You missed the point. You don't emulate, you enter into a market where you want to establish yourself/company as part of the group. Our logos and our visual identity follows the same traits and philosophy, they exude the same type of wizardry all the great companies do. Put them side by side they are visually different but they feel the same, they convey the same trustworthiness. How do we achieve this? By asking the right questions. When starting a brand identity, you don't ask the company who you are designing for if they want a duck or a dog, or if they want blue or red in the logo. You ask who is their customer, who is their competitor, what is their philosophy, brand values. You ask questions to find meaning and to understand the market you are doing this for. The market you are serving are looking for something specific, and if you understand it and design for it, you can push the company to it's success. Can? A company's success depends on so many different factors. You can build a great brand identity for a company that delivers a bad product. Or bad customer service. Or doesn't promote itself. Or ignorance. Or all of them at once sometimes. It's not always a prerequisite. Building familiarity and recognizable designs is not always required or needed. There will be lots of cases where one must stand out, be totally different or just go wild. That's when you can be as creative and original as you can. And you must! It's understanding when, how and why in order to have the right intent and meaning in your design. One doesn't not have to reinvent the wheel. It has to work, and if it works, the design has reached it's purpose. It wasn't always like this. The rise of data pushed graphic designer from a place of creativity to a place of marketing and strategy. Nowadays decisions are driven by profit and numbers. These logos have to look the same, they have to fit this narrative of the fast paced environments. That's why you see most of the brands nowadays drooping the previous logos and just going for a simple sans serif font. I see this move as a paradox because it shows us how the design is important but not important at the same time. If we also take under consideration that we can't use some of the symbols because they are taken, it leaves us with fewer and fewer possibilities. Obviously, it's almost impossible to design another logo of an apple without thinking of the one apple logo to rule them all. Thinking of a bird logo? What about the Dove, Twitter and other along the lines. Shape and color also plays an essential role. I can't help but think of the logos of Target, Beats, Pinterest and Vodafone side by side. Using the type, color palettes and other visuals in conjunction with the logo the designers are creating these design systems in order to make these brands stand out when the logo won't do it. On the surface, all these companies logo gathered on a sheet of paper would look the same. That's why in our modern times building an entire brand identity is a response to these changes that makes this world of design - at least in my view - quite sterile. But they were all deceived, for another logo was made. Deep in the hearts of the designers, the creativity burned hot. And in these logos, they poured the passion, the authenticity, and their own style and signature. Designers are creating these for fun, when companies won't ask for it. At least I do, and I know quite a few others like me that are doing it. Maybe we are searching for something. I like to think that our individuality and humanity drips out through these beautifully crafted designs. It's a form of art most of the times and a way to express ourselves. . . .

Whether it's Ancient, Blackletter, Serif, Script, Slab, or Sans, I love all types of styles. In fact, I consider myself somewhat of a type nerd, which is quite common in our field of graphic design. While some of us feel the need to debate the subtle differences or similarities between certain typefaces - grunts Avenir is better than Futura - the rest of the design industry goes on about their days using fonts and typefaces like it ain't no thang. Besides typefaces, I also have a passion for calligraphy, lettering, and graffiti. While I respect the typefaces I use in my designs, from time to time, I felt the need to express my own creativity. Initially, I would edit existing typefaces to craft a unique wordmark-style logo. Common practices involved erasing the stroke inside the letter 'A' (also known as the crossbar) to achieve an upside-down 'V', eliminating the apex or vertex of certain letters, elongating the ascender (vertical stem of lowercase glyph) or descender, resizing the arms of the 'E', adjusting the crossbar of the letter 'H,' and, in some cases, modifying swashes or creating quaint embellishments known as gadzooks to combine letters through ligatures. However, these practices are now nearly extinct from my repertoire. Nowadays, I prefer to start from scratch. Calligraphy or hand lettering? Why not both? My technique and process involve a lot of hand lettering, but from time to time, I also use calligraphy tools and systems to craft and design my words. But what is calligraphy, and what is hand lettering? From the Greek 'kalos,' which translates into beauty, and 'graphein,' the term for writing, it turns out that calligraphy is nothing but beautiful writing. Calligraphy involves a specific process and specialized tools for writing. Fountain pens, quills, brushes and nibs, ink, and pigment grinding are some of the things you will find in this beautiful and fascinating world. The technique is a form of handwriting but with a variation of strokes and styles. Hand lettering is basically drawing letters, different from calligraphy, which, as I mentioned, translates into "writing" letters. For this, you don't need any tools, and you can design an entire word letter by letter. Now, I take all that and combine it with the power of a computer and software to deliver state-of-the-art lettering and writing that extends beyond language, geographical borders, or time. Words and the design of words are a form of power and culture. To put it in perspective, we deal with an unstoppable force and an immovable object at the same time. What's such a big deal in designing words? I believe that designing words, combined with various techniques, is more than beautiful lettering and writing; it's about how it makes us feel. It all comes down to a personal note and how we connect with the letters. Consider how we associate different typefaces with various emotions. Hard to imagine? Let's think about two movie posters—one for a dark horror movie called 'The Haunted Manor' and how the title would be written, in comparison with a Pixar family movie that shares the same name. Doing this exercise makes it easy to see how the use of different type styles changes our perception of the movie content Why I prefer to create the wordmark logos myself? I see it as my responsibility to deliver authentic, original, and creative work. My customer is not obligated to know how these are made or even have the knowledge to appreciate the craftsmanship behind the work I do. It is I who has to ensure that they receive the right design—design that will serve and help them on their journey. Besides, it's quite challenging and fun to come up with ideas for letters or entire words. Some of these words are complete art compositions that could sit nicely on a shirt or on a wall inside a museum. There are entire communities and dedicated people who appreciate and praise quality calligraphy and lettering. Examples of wordmark logo design I did from scratch? To typeface or to font At the moment, I don't create full typefaces or font families. However, I definitely want to, and I hope in the future to launch a few typefaces of my own making. I would love to create one based on the 'Universe Blank Verse' lettering. Some calligraphy artists, typefaces creators, lettering artists I like Artists such as Jonathan Hoefler, Akir Ovitch, Fralligraphy, Alex Mihis, Sachin Shah, Taras Makar, Shane Huss, Lalit Mourya, Mirko Reisser, Srdjan Vidakovic, Zepha, Theosone and so so many more that I think I would need a few blog posts just to name them all. . . .

By far one of the most discussed theme in the world of design is the creative block. I rarely encounter such a state of being nowadays but I think it has a lot to do with the philosophy and the habits I cultivated in time. But what is a block? Is it a cube? Is it a box? It definitely feels like a room without windows or doors. The witty of you might suggest to think outside the box/block during these times. But can you? What can you do to get out of the creative block or avoid getting into one There are things in life we can't control. Disease, illness, war, death of loved ones, corruption and the list goes on. We are affected by our environment and shaped by our surroundings. One cannot stay the same in a world that's changing constantly. But even in the worst of times, people did creative work. Just go and read books written by war prisoners, people who survived camps and people who defied death. My point is that people will find ways of expressing and do creative work in spite of what's happening to them and around them. Some of the artist out there believe that during only in the worse of times can one bring out quality work. There are quite a few who subscribe to this thinking. "Trauma is the best stimuli there is!" you'll hear some times. I wouldn't count on it. Should we make our life miserable only to be creative? I think those people missed the point, the artist went the creative route in order to clean the misery out of their lives and their minds. Feeling stuck or getting yourself stuck in your creative journey is something that can be easily managed and happens more often than you care to think of. Yes, even to the people you look up to, especially to them. What can you do? Routine Not knowing what to do leaves your day empty but full of potential. So full of potential that you don't know where to start and by the time you decide where to start, the day is over. In the book "Daily Rituals: How Artists Work" the author Mason Currey compiled daily habits and activities of famous writers, painters, filmmakers and other creative people. All of them had a routine. Even one as simple as wake up drink coffee, write for 2 hours and then do whatever, seemed to work wonders for them. “A solid routine fosters a well-worn groove for one’s mental energies and helps stave off the tyranny of moods.” - Mason Currey Bottle up creative energy Gather up creative energy by consuming other people's work. Watch movies, go to museum, go to galleries, go to concerts or even something as simple as staying on the Pinterest and reading random poems helps. Works for me. Seeing and experiencing culture, arouse or own desire of coming up with stuff. Coming back from the cinema after watching the movie Logan I went straight to my sketchbook and did a poster as form of appreciation of how much I liked it. Hang out with stimulating people Creative people are fun, in fact are the most interesting and kind people I get to spend the time with. They are self aware of their issues more often than not, they see the world from a variety of different perspectives and they live life with so much more joy. Just by hanging out with them makes you excited and stimulated. Obviously, not all of them are fitting my description, please do find the right ones for you and do a list of what makes them alike. I tried, they are as different as they come. "Creative people can stimulate creativity in others, by osmosis." - Alan Watts Losing the flow of keeping ourselves creative I think I speak for the majority of artists and designers when I say that keeping ourselves creative equals keeping ourselves in a state of existence that is fulfilling and meaningful. Whoa Cajva, you just solved the big question that was bothering us since the dawn of time! Boah chill, I'm mostly writing for myself in here so there is no need for perspicacity. So how do you lose the flow? By not doing the work. Whoa, so I'm not doing it because I'm not doing it? Exactly and once you start doing it, you will get to do it even more. Deep, I know! If at some point you stopped painting the more time will pass, it will become almost impossible to get back at it, but if you are painting on the regular, is easier to surpass the fear of the white canvas. Fear that will always linger there. Spartans were the best warriors not because their tactic was innovative or their strategy was extremely advanced. In fact, Spartans had a simple way of fighting called phalanx formation which they practiced on the regular. The enemy knew exactly how the Spartans will fight and still lost. That's the power of keeping yourself practicing on the regular. It builds that muscle memory. Yes but the Spartans are not around anymore! As is the case with everything there was at some point in time. Don't you worry about your own downfall. If you do your thing, by the time the downfall hits, you won't even be around to witness it. Oh and if you like Spartans, I recommend reading "Gates of Fire" by Steven Pressfield. ______________ How do you keep yourself creative?