<p>Published on <a href="https://blog.prototypr.io/cool-illustrators-front-end-thoughts-inklings-ae083d6aad1f?source=rss----eb297ea1161a---4">| Prototyping: From UX to Front End &mdash; Medium</a> Lizzy Klingen </p>
<h4>Collection of October thoughts — mind dump</h4>
<p>Since it’s inktober and because all I really think about includes drawing or plants or both, I wanted to share some thoughts around my current creative thoughts, favorite plants, and all things inclusive design.</p>
<h3><strong>Some female illustrators I have been following lately:</strong></h3>
<h4><a href="http://www.ameliagiller.com/">Amelia Giller</a></h4>
<p>I love Amelia’s style of depicting bodies as these disproportionate figures. Features like necks and legs are elongated and exaggerated to a point at which her characters are on the edge of human.</p>
<p><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1000/1*gxtvoReYk8qXDY0cfDCvKg.png">Amelia Giller for Refinery29</p>
<h4><a href="http://hildapalafox.com/">Hilda Palafox</a></h4>
<p>After seeing Hilda’s work on a magazine cover I fell in love with her minimalistic palettes and strong, bold lines. She also depicts figures in a way that I find really interesting because her bodies parallel other elements in her artwork and designs.</p>
<p><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/600/1*cep43gO0FN7foQsBOfnBqA.png">Hilda Palafox</p>
<h4><a href="http://ateliertiti.tictail.com/">Ellen de Bruijn</a></h4>
<p>Kees de cat makes my heart warm. I just love cats and cat shapes and un-cat shapes. Get a card or two from Ellen’s store!</p>
<p><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/655/1*fCEJi9o7iYacuzHKq3wzhw.png">Ellen de Bruijn — Color Cuddle</p>
<h4><a href="https://www.lauraberger.com/">Laura Berger</a></h4>
<p>Laura explores female bodies through geometry, symmetric shapes, and negative space. Her drawings feel effortless and flowing, but you can tell every line is just as intentional as the next.</p>
<p><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1000/1*YaVUmjxHPWYN2GSLMG2d1A.png">Lauren Berger — The Forest</p>
<h4><a href="http://www.jillianevelyn.com/">Jillian Evelyn</a></h4>
<p>Ya I love Jillian a lot, can’t really get over her paintings. Her work is something that I wouldn’t have liked even like 5 years ago, but through my own path as an artist and as a designer, I am more and more impressed by what is not drawn but is still communicated. I think Jillian removes the perfect amount while still communicating impactful messages.</p>
<p><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*rLGHm84Qvk1ZzbysNrI3kQ.png">Jillian Evelyn — Better Together</p>
<p>And just because I am still an emerging illustrator and want to speak a little bit about my own process and growth, I want to talk about a breakthrough that I had earlier this month. Something I find myself really drawn to in others’ work is very subtle grain or very obvious textures in the bodies and backgrounds of shapes. I think I am on my way to a sweet spot but will still need a lot of playing around, but am really excited about the textures I am creating for my illustrations and how they are talking to each other. I have been developing a lot of these on my Photoshop Sketch app with native and custom brushes.</p>
<p><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*6jwfXO8bNkef0KxFPnolYA.png">Lizzy Klingen — hello world</p>
<h3>Front-end thinking from a non-developer type</h3>
<p>I’m currently in a responsive design class at UCSC Silicon Valley Extension that brings out a different creative side of myself. Some things I am learning include:</p>
<ul>
<li>How screen readers really work, why they matter, and how to design for people who rely on screen readers to get digital information — all the way from which elements to tag sr-only in my HTML to best practices around the button element and alt image attribute.</li>
<li>How to dynamically push and pull elements responsively</li>
<li>How to effectively utilize open source frameworks like bootstrap and jquery and how using these frameworks compares to just writing everything from scratch</li>
<li>What makes something heavy on a website and how to test page load</li>
<li>That I really like grids and think that everything should be in a 12 column grid now.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Inside Plants</h3>
<p>I am part of the plant craze and love inside plants, but unfortunately or fortunately, my cat also loves inside plants. Marceline eats the leaves of my plants and enjoys the snapping sounds of branches, so I have to be strategic about the kinds of plants that I purchase and where I put them. Plants that have a thumbs up include:</p>
<p><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/600/1*lnzBDbaPsth3hRKBsxHRDg.png">My west elm planter and my plant eater, Marceline</p>
<ul>
<li>Palms aren’t poisonous to cats and they are pretty resilient to cat munching as well. If you don’t have a green thumb, these are pretty easy to keep alive.</li>
<li>Money plants are great inside plants and are said to bring luck. They don’t need a ton of regular watering and I find it best to underwater than to overwater.</li>
<li>Spider plants are also great cat plants and look like illustrations themselves — their bold, yellow leaf outlines are very visually interesting in home spaces.</li>
<li>Monstera plants are my dream plants, but keep in mind that these are toxic to cats! If I end up getting one of these or a rubber plant, I plan to keep in a room where my cat is not allowed.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Some other unorganized thought topics</h3>
<p>Since I recently updated my eyeglass prescription, I got light pink glasses that look like sea glass — not really opaque or transparent. Maybe it’s because it’s millennial pink, but I have been really into that light pink color as a hair color too and am currently in a debate with myself around whether I am high maintenance enough to maintain colored hair. Thoughts?</p>
<p><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*gUH94l4HnqFfX0OhKp9VAA.png">Lizzy Klingen — neon planter</p>
<p>I am also very interested in neon signs. Mimicking this effect in my designs is fun to experiment with, and you learn a lot about stacking different appearance attributes in the process. In this particular illustration, I captured the neon sign effect in Illustrator with gaussian blur, a drop shadow, and outer glow.</p>
<p>More and more, I have also been thinking about how colorblindness affects 8% of our male population (and a very small percent of our female population) and how that translates into my design decisions. Testing my visual decisions with people close to me who are red-green colorblind makes me realize that the things that look good to me are basically unintelligible to others. Everyone sees a little differently, so getting as much feedback and input as possible is super important for supporting underrepresented groups — and this holds true for all mental and physical disabilities and experience design. Companies are so focused on supporting the larger masses that they forget about human qualities that need to be considered to grow diversity and inclusion.</p>
<p>I have been reading Ellen Lupton’s latest <em>Thinking with Type</em> edition, and it makes me want to go to MICA just to learn from her, she is so awesome and detail oriented and thorough. There a lot of more basic typography topics, but even if you aren’t really an emerging designer anymore, this book holds a lot of value because it investigates project prompts and work examples from students in her classes at MICA. They are the kinds of projects that make you want to sit in a coffee shop all weekend and make things.That’s basically my entire creative experience; get so inspired by things that others have created that all I want to do is make things.</p>
<p>None of this was really organized, but I did warn that it was a mind dump.</p>
<p>Cheers.</p>
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<p><a href="https://blog.prototypr.io/cool-illustrators-front-end-thoughts-inklings-ae083d6aad1f">Cool illustrators, front-end thoughts, inklings</a> was originally published in <a href="https://blog.prototypr.io">Prototypr</a> on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.</p>


Cool illustrators, front-end thoughts, inklings

Collection of October thoughts — mind dump

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