I've been working on a web site for security for the last couple of weeks and today it was posted to the production server and one of these days an email will go out to announce it to our corporate world. Since it's essentially finished, I picked up one of these "clip art" collections from marketing (65,000 images you can't live with or without) to see if I couldn't come up with something additional in the way of a logo. If you've ever seen one of these collections, you know its a graveyard strewn with the bones of every graphic artist who ever finished their productive lives working in some depraved reality you will never find outside of serious nightmares and Dante's version of hell.

Some of the journals use "clip art" from earlier decades. These go beyond kitsch, way beyond anything I saw in this clip art collection and achieve an entirely different status, some of them actually approaching the aesthetically swell. Maybe some of this stuff will make that grade 40 years from now, but I doubt it. Anyway, I went through the book and found a small icon/logo sized piece that I was able to play with in Photoshop, adding some type from Illustrator, fitting it all on a page that ended up looking good.

Just noodling around, on my first pain pill of the afternoon so I was tired and cruising and wishing I was home in bed and lo and behold it came out pretty well. I added some copy (six reasons to take security seriously and play along, changing your password every few weeks instead of throwing up on your keyboard and dropping your monitor down a stairwell), spiffed it up a little bit and showed it around. They liked it, I liked it: words by me and graphics by the clip art collection from hell.

I'm a great believer in little things like this. An afternoon that finishes better than you thought it would because some stupid little pursuit led you to something that worked in a reality where very little works at all. Another day closer to getting these fucking braces off my teeth so I can sleep the night through without taking pills. Or work an afternoon through, for that matter, without the dull aching. Little things. Someone with a migraine is experiencing a whole lot more pain and suffering than anything like mine, but still, it goes on and on and on causing me to write about it on and on and on and thinking maybe I should just hang it up for a week and go to bed.