I don’t read a lot of comics, but I came across one recently that I can’t go a day without. What the Duck, provides great, daily humor on photography, business and more.  

I support the production of a comic strip in more current job (another much more talented person actually creates it) and I can testify that it’s much harder than it looks. It’s a lot like logo design and other similar visual communication effots. You have to communicate a lot with a little. And in this case it has to be funny. If it weren’t already difficult enough, comic creators often do it every single day. Honestly, it’s amazing.

Aaron Johnson is able to do all that. You can check out What the Duck, here. You won’t be sorry.

I was reading one of my favorite photo blogs today, ScottKelby.com (who, by the way, is also a great book writer) and saw his post on a really great tool/time killer. It allows you to upload an image of yourself and in a few easy steps create a Simpson character that looks just like you.

It does a suprisingly good job doing some auto-recognition of hair color, length, etc. and let’s you do some tweaking on your own. Check out Scott’s blog on the topic for some tips on formatting your photo and then go to the Simpsonizer.

A few things they didn’t mention though, are that it works best if you can remove all the background from the photo. If there isn’t enough contrast, it tends to error out. Also, when I exported my final result, I had to add a .png extension (otherwise it wouldn’t save at all). It didn’t give the option to choose an extension, which I felt was odd, but I am also working on Windows Vista, so others’ experiences may differ. One way cool thing though is that by saving it as a .png it set it with a transparent background which made it much easier to create the family collage!