Year in Review

by Terri & Ariela

"Well, that was interesting*." ~ Just About Everyone

It's been a year. There were plenty of highs and just about as many lows. We released 14 products, discovered that Ariela is eligible to be nominated for awards (more on that later), did our best to keep Combover Caligula out of the White House (didn't succeed on that one).

Picture shows chibi Terri and chibi Ariela toasting with champagne flutes. Terri is giving the thumbs up.
Not pictured is the next frame, where Ariela is passed out after drinking half a glass of champagne.

Some important numbers from Geek Calligraphy in 2016:

• Got our 1st business license (in Chicago, you need to renew every two years, so this is the first of many)
• Launched 1st ecommerce website
• Launched social media presence on 3 platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr
• Released 14 new products since launch
• Donated items to 2 charities, raising a total of $196
• Hung art in 4 art shows in 3 states
• Ariela started scribing her 1st sacred text (Megillat Ester/Scroll of Esther)

We now have 14 art prints, 8 greeting cards, 5 ketubah designs, 3 miscellaneous Judaica products, and several small add-ons.

When Ariela was first signing up for our website platform (we use SquareSpace because of our ketubah form needs), she was debating between two service packages, one which allowed a maximum of 20 products and a more expensive one that allowed for unlimited items. We're rather thrilled that we need the latter.

Before the nomination period for the 2016 Hugo Awards closed (back in March), Terri noticed something very interesting. Well, first off she noticed that the Artist categories delineated by the Hugos were rather antiquated and no longer reflect the SF/F art landscape. But in her examination of the categories she realized that because our art has been shown at convention art shows, Ariela is eligible for the Best Fan Artist** award. Due to yet another instance of #Puppygate, a last minute campaign did not get enough nominating ballots to put Ariela on the list. We are hoping that in 2017, the air will clear some. 

Since Geek Calligraphy art has been hung in convention art shows in 2016, once again Ariela is eligible to be nominated for the Fan Artist Hugo. If you are in a position to nominate, we hope you will consider her work.

It's been a good first year for Geek Calligraphy, PCA (present circumstances aside).

Our efforts to make the world a better place continue.  While we were blindsided by the results of the election in November, we have both gotten back up and are doing our best to keep fighting. Each of us has our preferred social justice avenues in our private lives, but here at Geek Calligraphy we will continue to make art. We hope it will inspire you, help you feel less alone, and help you to keep getting up each day. And we're gearing up to meet 2017 head-on.

*The sort implied in "may you live in interesting times," or "Oh god, oh god, we're all gonna die!"

**"But wait," we're hearing the peanut gallery declare, "Ariela and Terri make money from the art. Doesn't that make Ariela a professional artist?" NOPE! The Pro Artist category requires your art to have appeared in a for-sale print publication (magazine/book cover, book illustrations, etc). This means that you could be making a primary living from art, but unless you've been published that year, you're just a fan. Hence the reference to antiquated categories.***

***TERRI'S NOTE TO SELF: We do not have time/bandwidth to submit a proposal to the 2017 WSFS Business Meeting. We do not have time/bandwidth to submit a proposal to the 2017 WSFS Business Meeting. We do not have time/bandwidth to submit a proposal to the 2017 WSFS Business Meeting. We do not have time/bandwidth to submit a proposal to the 2017 WSFS Business Meeting.

New Product: This Should Not Be Normal And It Is Not Okay

By Terri

Usually I come up with pithy copy for this section. Unfortunately, reality is intruding on the parts of my brain that are good at pithy copy. 

Ariela and I are not shy about expressing our political opinions. It's safe to say that if you read this, you have a pretty good idea of what they are. Neither of us are happy with what's going on, and we've spent a lot of time exclaiming loudly at each other over the results of the election.

How It Came To Be:

Everyone from John Oliver* to the Washington Post** is saying "This is not normal."The fact of the matter is that this is becoming our normal, and will be our normal for at least the next four years. Plenty of things that are terrible and should not be normal are, in fact, normal. Systemic racial bias is normal. The wealth gap in our country is normal. Religious hatred is normal. I will argue that kleptocratic cabinet choices and the insane amount of conflict of interest that the PEOTUS has aren't normal***, but continuing to claim that it isn't normal misses the point. What it isn't now and never will be is okay. This is our way of saying that. 

It's also important right now to keep creating. To keep making art, making music, cooking, loving, crafting. To do the things that make you happy, because happiness is the best defense against the mess the next 4 years are going to be. I cast on a rainbow shawl the day after the election. Ariela painted this, and is working on other projects as well.

Ariela added the border text because she felt that the central text by itself was visually boring for calligraphy. Also because she likes Copperplate and has been playing with it lately.

Prints are available in two sizes (8"x10" & 11" x 14", matted dimensions), with two text options. There is a plain white version, and for $10 per size, you can get sparkly silver letters! $5 from each print sale will be donated to EMILY's List.**** One of the ways we fight is by raising money to elect the candidates who can fight for us on every level, from local legislatures all the way to the White House. 

*Fast forward to 5:45 for the first statement of "this is not normal." It will be repeated.

**Yeah, there really are that many articles that we can link one to every letter in the words "Washington Post." And those links were found just by scrolling through their twitter feed.

***For the United States. In lots of countries, this is normal. For us, it's new.

****We are donating a portion of these sales to EMILY's List purely of our own volition. They are not sponsoring this product, nor are they in any way affiliated with it or with Geek Calligraphy.

Custom Ketubah for Terri: A Customer's Perspective

By Terri

Ariela and I have known each other since sometime in the fall of 2004. Our friendship has outlasted a total of 3 serious relationships, as many as 6 casual ones and has been going strong through two marriages (when for some reason, friendships can fall apart). We've kept in touch across an ocean, the distance from Boston to Chicago, and across a few New York City blocks. Even back in 2008, when I was dating someone who is now happily married to someone else, Ariela had claimed "dibs" on my ketubah. I was working at The Judaica House at the time, and knew just how valuable a gift I'd been offered. I also was in a unique position to know exactly what I wanted out of my ketubah. Unsurprisingly, what I thought I wanted turned out nothing like what I ended up with. This is because Ariela is one of the best artists I know, and an incredibly intuitive person when it comes to design. It's also because what Matthew wanted out of the ketubah he was going to be giving to his future wife wasn't like the image I had in my head in 2008.*

I had been thinking about a standard text in a fairly unique font with intricate border art that had lots of hidden images of things that were meaningful to me and my future husband. Mostly these things were geeky - every man I've seriously dated was just as big of a geek as I am. After Matthew proposed, I got an email with this sketch attached:

Image shows a scribbled sketch on notebook paper which will be explained. Also there is a Caspi all-Hebrew ketubah text superimposed on the image.

The sketch came from the wild corner of Ariela's brain where her muse lives, and is the back of a cuckoo style clock with a dragon nesting in the base. There are a few balls of yarn in the eaves, and a scribbled firebird coming out of the dragon's nose.** She apologized that it wasn't at all like the original designs we had thought of, but I reminded her that when I'd conceived those designs it was three years ago and I was a different person then. Now I wanted something that Matthew and I would enjoy. 

I asked Ariela if there would be visible clock gears. She informed me that some of those scribbles were meant to suggest them. I thought that there should be books in the eaves, because while I love to knit for Matthew, he doesn't have the same feeling about yarn that I do. During a brainstorming session with the three of us, Matthew mentioned that he liked dolphins, and Celtic knot work. I wanted there to be a few things in there that brought back how we met. If you look very carefully, you will see that one of the books is Women At the Seder. Matthew and I first really became friends at a seder, and that's the haggadah I was using that night. Matthew wanted some specific comic collections among the books (can you guess what they are?), and I asked for some Manheim Steamroller sheet music, because it reminded me of my father. There is a stuffed bear that Matthew bought in Australia that has always reminded me of Paddington Bear, so Ariela drew that bear with a similar hat. The biggest nod to Matthew is something that was part of the design since its inception, though the sketch doesn't show it. All around the clock is a Hebrew verse from שיר השירים, Song of Songs, rendered in binary. The verse states: "I am my beloved's and my beloved is mine."

After the brainstorming, the process was largely hands off for me until sometime in July. Ariela would send me sketches of the progress she was making, I would send back lots of exclamation points and typed squeeing. Sometimes I would remind her that while this might be a difficult design, at least I wasn't making her paint a dozen red roses like some of our friends. When she had trouble finding something specific (the sheet music), we tried to figure out a way to include the idea, if not the precise object. When Ariela told me that the font I had long lusted after really didn't mesh with the art, I trusted her.

In July, I sent Ariela the text for the personalization. In early August, she had the art painted and the text ready for me to proofread. At that point, it was done and I didn't think too much more about it. I was dealing with wedding dress fittings, the fact that I was invited to three weddings on either side of my own, and the myriad other tiny details one has to worry about when getting married.

My wedding photographer really digs on process shots. There are a whole bunch of pictures of my getting my makeup done, my mom putting my earrings in and fastening Matthew's boutonnière into his jacket, stuff like that. When he found out that my friend was painting and calligraphing my ketubah, he asked if she could bring it to the wedding with some inking left to do so he could get photographs. 

Ariela finishing the last line of the ketubah at my wedding while we were all getting hair and makeup done.

I honestly couldn't have asked for a better ketubah, one that really tells the story of my relationship with my husband and suits our style and the general decor of our home. It is a beautiful piece of artwork and a wonderful wedding gift from one of my best friends.

My ketubah, in all its glory.

*For one thing, he was dating someone else entirely.

**Based on this LiveJournal post.

Buy Our Stuff, Help People!

By Terri

Image shows Patrick Rothfuss (A Famous Author) holding a very cute lamb.

Ariela is a huge Patrick Rothfuss fan. Even before there was a business, she was trying to figure out how to contribute art to his annual fundraiser for Worldbuilders. This year, they took two of our prints for their auction. The ever popular Coder's Oath, as well as our Families That Game print. If you've been looking to buy one of these pieces and want to contribute to a good cause, please check out the links!

Reminder that if you want to make sure that any gifts you purchase directly from us (as opposed to from Worldbuilders) arrive by December 24, you need to order them by December 14.

Ariela's Love-Hate Relationship with Her Computer

by Ariela

Surface Pro 2, image courtesy of TechSpot.
It's ... okay ... I guess.

In our comedy of chibis last week, I revealed that I grudgingly use a Surface Pro 2. I feel some amount of shame over this. Between my membership in the graphics community and the tech community, I have been strongly inculcated with scorn for Windows. So this is me justifying my choice publicly, and also griping about the situation that led me to it.

Before I left NYC in 2012, I had an iMac desktop and an Ubuntu laptop. I used the Mac for image processing and the laptop for when I was on the go. I had an Intuos II 4"x5", but I did a lot less imaging then, so the tiny work surface wasn't such a hardship. I'd gotten the iMac secondhand as a discard from my uncle's office when they upgraded, so by the time I moved, the cost of packaging it properly to keep the screen from breaking would have been far greater than the value of the computer. Also, when moving to Chicago I started telecommuting and my day job set me up with a workstation at home, and two desktops for one person seemed ridiculous. So I left the iMac with Terri and went to Chicago with my Ubuntu laptop as my only personal computer.

By the time the laptop began to die, I was convinced that running PhotoShop in WINE wasn't going to cut it for me. While I know GIMP has its enthusiastic supporters, it doesn't work for me and I loath using it. I also wanted to get something with a touch screen, since my tiny Wacom tablet was getting cramped, and I prefered the idea of a display I could work on directly.

I was all set to get an iPad and ditch the laptop entirely until I discovered that iPads can't run the full version of PhotoShop. Print resolution for me is 800 dpi and I sometimes work as large as 18"x24". PhotoShop Express maxes out at 72 dpi and 1000 px x 1000 px. So I abandoned that idea and began looking for computers with touchscreens built in. I didn't want to have to get a box and then also an expensive external display.

With Apple making nothing with a full computer operating system and a touch screen, I began looking at PCs. Reviews quickly made it clear that the most sensitive touch screen was on the Surface Pro line. The Surface Pro 2 had come out a few months before and I decided on that. I named it Yang Guifei, a joke which no one has yet gotten, but pleased me.

It came with Windows 8.1 64-bit, and ... it did what I needed it to do. Which was what I had aimed for, but other than that it had a lot of annoying quirks. It also didn't recognize different levels of pressure from the stylus in PhotoShop, which infuriated me at first, but then I found a driver online that fixed that, and after that, the only problems were those that inveitably resulted from an OS that was trying to be both a laptop and a tablet simultaneously and managing to be neither particularly well. Windows 10 eliminated some of that jankiness (the onscreen keyboard no longer pops up every time I put my mouse in a text field despite having keyboard cover attached), but brought with it all the problems that everyone knows and hates about Windows 10. It still reboots unpredictably for no reason I can find, so I have been inspired to save obsessively, which isn't a bad habit, but I shouldn't have to protect myself from guerilla rebooting. And as with any Windows machine, its primary purpose seems to be to run Windows updates.

My Surface Pro 2 is 3 years old now and is beginning to show its age, so I am starting to watch tech news again to see what I might want to get next time. Apple just unveiled its newest laptops, and still hasn't added a touch screen, which has me and a lot of other graphics people I know scratching our heads. (I remain uninterested in buying a computer and an external touch screen, so AirDisplay and Duet's promise of being able to use an iPad as a touchscreen monitor for another device is not enticing to me at all.) Then, as if we don't already have enough proof that 2016 is the year Normal decided to take a leap out a window, Microsoft came out with the Surface Studio, which has impressed the heck out of most people I have spoken with.

I'm hoping to eke at least another year out of this computer before I have to shell out more money. I'm hoping Apple will release a MacBook Pro Pro with a touchscreen before then, but chances are good that I will wind up with a Surface Pro 5.