One of my Project 25 goals for this year is to do at least one design tutorial each month. I decided to start with an Illustrator tutorial from graphic designer Chris Spooner for creating a doodled business card. This was my first time really using Illustrator, and it took me a bit (read: most of the afternoon) to get somewhat comfortable with the menus. After I finished the tutorial, I decided to create a card that incorporates some editing marks.

This reminded me of a sketch I did several months ago, where I recreated my blog header using editing and punctuation marks. So I played around some more to see how well my pen and paper doodle translated to the screen.

Overall, this tutorial made me realize I don’t have the fine motor skills required for detailed work (especially after a bucket of coffee), which makes me appreciate those who use the tool to create art even more. I’m sure I’ll do more Illustrator tutorials in the future, but for now I’ll stick to the pen tool I know best—the red pen of doom.

I’ve been finding inspiration in punctuation-related design lately, and toying with an experiment that applies punctuation to my personal brand. That is still in the works, but until then, here is some of my punctuation inspiration.

brackets + phonetic spelling via The Dieline

punctuation owl via ohhsweetnothing

punctuation inspired logo designs via Spyre Studios

Design Observer recently reprinted one of Paul Muldoon’s poems in their poetry section. It caught my eye because the poem celebrates the @ sign, which I use in my personal branding. I also love the way the words “Like a whorl of an out-of-this-world ear” trip off my tongue. Here is the poem, originally published in The New Republic.

Paul Muldoon
@

Like the whorl of an out-of-this-world ear that had been lent
to an oak-gall wasp by a tenth century Irish monk
who would hold out oak-gall ink against the predicament
in which he found himself…

Like the ever-unfolding trunk
of the elephant in the room that gives such a bad vibe
it vies with your old hippie girlfriend who once lent such weight
to any argument to which you feared she might subscribe,
including her insistence we abbreviate
our most promising rlshps…

Like the scrolled-down tail
of a Capuchin monkey drawing on its inner strengths
as it hammers short-sighted snail against short-sighted snail
that has nonetheless gone to extraordinary lengths…

Like the tapeworm swallowed by a hippie who was once fat
but is now kind of bummed out you’ve lost track of where she’s at.

Muldoon is a poet, a professor, and an editor. He has been called “the most significant English-language poet born since the second World War” by The Times Literary Supplement, and he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2003. Muldoon is a professor at Princeton University and previously taught at Oxford University. He is also the Poetry Editor for The New Yorker. You can learn more about Muldoon’s accomplishments on his website.