The Paper Tiger Blog

Our friends at Domino Records wanted to jump on the Spotify...

jasondebiak — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 11:33:15 -0400

Our friends at Domino Records wanted to jump on the Spotify train with an app for their brand new App Store. Paper Tiger worked with Domino & the Spotify platform and created a sophisticated (and responsive) browsing experience for Domino fans to browse and discover new music.

Click here to check it out!

if you live in, around or even remotely close to New York City,...

jasondebiak — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 20:27:00 -0500

if you live in, around or even remotely close to New York City, we highly recommend you check out FUERZABRUTA - an absolutely stunning performance that will leave you filled with Instagram photos… Think Circus Soleil (in a smaller room) mixed with the Stop Making Sense DVD by the Talking Heads, and the most bizarre dream you ever had. Oh and give it an electro/dance soundtrack. Oh and add a pool… and a giant treadmill.

Just go, it’s better than whatever you plan on doing this weekend. It’s got the Paper Tiger guarantee.

TEDx WallStreet We just finished up the Wordpress development up...

jasondebiak — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 13:45:02 -0500

TEDx WallStreet

We just finished up the Wordpress development up for the new TEDx WallStreet site. Who’s going?? We’d like to thank our good friends over at Experience Interaction for supplying a wonderful design.

Check it out here.

Pretty Darn Helpful

jasondebiak — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 11:46:18 -0500

Pretty Darn Helpful

It’s Firefly! Head over to www.itsfirefly.com to check our...

jasondebiak — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 09:31:00 -0500

It’s Firefly!

Head over to www.itsfirefly.com to check our newest creation. For now it’s in beta, but we are excited to launch this to the public soon.

Truck Spills

jasondebiak — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 09:24:42 -0500

Truck Spills:

Finally, it’s all in one place.

Screen test.

jasondebiak — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 10:01:00 -0400

Screen test.

The Great Muppet Challenge

carjackd — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 17:27:00 -0400

For a Q&A about what the Water Cooler Olympics are and how they work, please see the this article.

THE CHALLENGE: Create your own muppet! Having grown up around Jim Henson’s muppets, we here at PaperTiger wanted to honor The Master with creations of our own making, the challenge rules are as follows:

Don’t spend more than $40 (we ball on a budget)
The muppet can be anything (semi-tasteful, please) - a caricature of yourself, your favorite animal, plant, alien, etc.

DEADLINE: The deadline is October 31st 2011, but we encourage everyone to send pics of their process along the way! We can’t wait to see what everyone comes up with!

Here are some links we found to get everyone started:

Some daily inspiration arises from artist Edouard Martinet. His...

jasondebiak — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 15:41:12 -0400

Some daily inspiration arises from artist Edouard Martinet. His work, including this brilliant little bird, are made out of discarded parts of bicycles, mopeds and cars. Brilliant stuff. Check out his other work here.

The results are in from the first ever Paper Tiger WATER COOLER...

marcdebiak — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 17:21:00 -0400

Caption

Jason Debiak's Hop Rod Autobock.

Jason's Hop Rod Autbock label.

Jack Doud's I'd Tap That Amber Ale.

Jack's I'd Tap That label.

Daria Debiak's Miss Lonely Hearts Ale.

Daria's Miss Lonely Hearts label.

Marc Debiak's Oaklander Socialist Lager.

Marc's Oaklander Socialist Lager label.

In the fridge

The results are in from the first ever Paper Tiger WATER COOLER OLYMPICS!

For a Q&A about what the Water Cooler Olympics are and how they work, please see the this article.

JULY/AUGUST 2011 - Make, Brand & Drink Beer

THE CHALLENGE: Come up with your own brand of beer. Design the label, bottle it, and eventually drink it. Paper Tiger will be brewing a batch of Red Ale in our office “Mr. Beer” keg. We’ll be providing bottle caps, a bottle capper, label paper and a color laser printed. Just bring your own empty bottles and your design.

DEADLINE: This entry is closed. As the first one, we decided to complete it on our own and post the results to kickoff the Olympics. Keep an eye out for next month’s challenge!

Where did all the shadow people go?

jasondebiak — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 17:32:18 -0400

Where did all the shadow people go?

Aweshum!

papertigerdaria — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 16:54:47 -0400

Aweshum!

His amazing life.

marcdebiak — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 16:51:05 -0400

His amazing life.

Paper Tiger Fieldtrip: Creating Wolfboy

papertigerdaria — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0400

I’ll start by introducing myself. My name is Daria and I started working at Paper Tiger a few months ago as a project manager/ business manager, but I have an alter ego. Before my days at Paper Tiger, I worked for 9 years as a makeup artist and member of the training team for MAC Cosmetics. I am still actively busy doing freelance makeup for various clients and try to keep myself in the industry as much as possible.

I have transformed all types of people into all things beautiful. From models during NY fashion week, to brides on “the most important day of their lives”, I have done it all. I’ve always wanted to do more, something a little less beautiful, and a little more fun. So when my friend Courtney asked me to help her out with a project she called “Wolfboy”, I said yes without a moment of hesitation. I had no idea what to expect, except that we would be transforming the genius director and visual artist, Rob Roth (check him out!!), into a character called Wolfboy for his most recent experimental dreamscape, Nightvision 2.

We arrived at The Wild Project, NYC ready for the transformation from man to Wolfboy to begin. Courtney is an amazing makeup artist, fiercely creative, and breathes art from every pore. I couldn’t wait to watch her in action and soak up as much knowledge as I could.

Rob arrived with a mountain of supplies that included a box of hair/fur, a package of Staten Island style Lee Press-on pink and whites, some black nail polish, adhesives, adhesive removers, a custom prosthetic nose and ears, and of course, the hackle. I had never seen a hackle before, but was scared. I am a bit of a spazz and a board covered in razor sharp long metal teeth looked like a really bad idea. (You will see in a minute that I was right.)

The first thing we needed to do was to blend the fur colors to create a palette that Rob wanted and untangle some of the fur. That’s where the hackle comes in. I was on hackle patrol while Courtney applied the prosthetic nose began to paint Rob’s face for background coloring beneath the fur. After only five seconds of “hackling” I proceed to (of course) drop the hackle, teeth side down inches away from my flip flop covered foot. Rob’s response: “Don’t do that again.”

After Rob’s face was prepped with color, it was time to start applying the hair. Applying the hair was actually much easier than I had imagined. First, you cut one end of the hair at an angle so that it lays naturally on the skin. Then, apply a thin layer of Spirit Gum adhesive and go for it. I had watched Courtney do a few sections before she looked at me and said, “OK, you’re doing the other side.” I don’t know why didn’t think I’d be doing any makeup, but I guess I just thought I’d be assisting (i.e. setting up, cleaning up, and occasionally almost amputating my fingers and toes with a hackle).

The first section was a little scary, but after that, it was pretty easy. The most challenging part is making sure that the hair looks like its growing in the proper direction and that the coloring looks natural and in the desired pattern that Rob had wanted. Funny enough, my years working with dogs had come in handy for the placement of the hair and knowledge of canine anatomy.

After the fur was applied, Courtney applied the ears, and began pinning the hair. I painted the ears using a chromacake and added sparse amounts of hair to the base. From there, everything else went fairly quickly. We repeated the process on. Rob’s arms and chest until the transformation was nearly complete. We got to work on the nails. Rob sculpted them into a claw like shape, we painted them black, and applied them with nail glue. (All while singing the Kiss Everlasting French jingle repeatedly… I think we may have inhaled too much spirit gum) Rob inserted his pale blue contacts to add more contrast for the night-vision camera.

By this point in the transformation, we were completely covered in glue, fur, paint, and I even had a little blood on me from another hackle incident. Each time Courtney would have a cigarette, we couldn’t help but notice the smell of burning hair.

After a few changes to the fur styling and color, Wolfboy was ready to take the stage. I had such an amazing time with this project and am very grateful to work with such talented people. I can’t wait to see what my next jo

urney into special FX makeup will be, but I’m hoping it involves a lot of blood (not from a hackle).

Our Favorite Photoshop Keyboard Shortcuts

carjackd — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Our trusty sidekick - Photoshop, has tons of keyboard shortcuts to help us designers improve our workflow and keep us moving forward… We’re sure you already know a few, so here are a few of our favorite hidden gems.

Over the course of any given day, we here at Paper Tiger spend countless hours in front of our favorite Image editor… Photoshop. Being the de facto program for designers since 1990 (!) has given Adobe the opportunity to tweak features and add hosts of tools to streamline our processes and save ourselves time (and sanity). One of the biggest time-savers for us are keyboard shortcuts - and while individually, they aren’t time-saving juggernauts, taking time to learn some of these tools has saved us countless hours and helped us stay focused on the work in front of us.

Quick Keys for our most used tools:
V for Move OR COMMAND for Move while using another tool
M for Marquee
B for Brush
[ & ] to change brush size
OPTION to use eyedropper

Quick Opacity change with number keys
Use 1 thru 0 to change the opacity of the current layer

Quick Fill Selection
OPTION + DELETE- Fill with Foreground Color
COMMAND + DELETE- Fill with Background Color

Keep your Guides Pixel Perfect
Hold SHIFT while dragging your guides

Create a New Layer and move it thru Layers
SHIFT + COMMAND + N to Create a new layer
COMMAND + [ to move it down OR COMMAND + ] to move it up

Select and Group Multiple Layers on the Fly
Hold COMMAND + Right Click to select layer
COMMAND + SHIFT + Right Click to select mutiple layers
COMMAND + G to group layers

Quick Clippping Mask
SHIFT + COMMAND + G to create a clipping mask from the layer below

These are just a few of the tools we use everyday to improve our workflow.
Have any to add to this list? Tell us your favorites in the comments!

Create an automatically updated XML sitemap with ExpressionEngine

marcdebiak — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Have you ever submitted a sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools and realized six months later that it was probably horribly out of date? With ExpressionEngine and a couple of simple steps, your sitemap can stay up to date with little or no maintenance on your part.

I put this together rather quickly, so feel free to post any errors, additions or ommisions in the comments.

Step 1: Generate The Sitemap

1. Go to http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

2. Enter your site URL, change frequency (Daily is usually nice), and last modification. Click “Start” and the script will generate your static sitemap.

3. Download “sitemap.xml”, open it in your text editor and copy the contents.

Step 2: Setup the template in ExpressionEngine

1. Go to Design > Templates > Template Manager

2. Create a template called sitemap in whichever group makes the most sense for you. I created mine in the SITE group.

3. Important… make sure you choose XML as template type!  4. Paste in the results from the XML Sitemap Generator

4. Paste in the results from the XML Sitemap Generator

Step 3: Add your ExpressionEngine tags to the channels which will update frequently.

1. Don’t worry about wrapping static pages or the document information. Leave that as is.

2. Delete al but ONE of the urls for a section. For example, this:

Should look like this:

3. Wrap the <url></url> in your ExpressionEngine tags for that particular channel. Here’s what my code looks like for this:

{exp:channel:entries channel=”blog” orderby=”date” sort=”desc”}

<url>

<loc>http://www.wearepapertiger.com/blog/{url_title}</loc>

<lastmod>{entry_date format=”%Y-%m-%d”}</lastmod>

<changefreq>daily</changefreq>

</url>

{/exp:channel:entries}

Now visit the URL where the sitemap is and presto! The sitemap is serving up all the latest content on it’s own.

Check out ours: http://www.wearepapertiger.com/index.php?site/sitemap

Now you can submit the sitemap link to Google and you’re all set.

IMPORTANT… make sure to include index.php? even if you’re using .htaccess to remove it from your URLs.

5 Cool CSS Hover Effects You Can Copy and Paste

jasondebiak — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0400

5 Cool CSS Hover Effects You Can Copy and Paste:

Looking to dabble with CSS3? These are some pretty great copy & paste effects we’d love to take a stab at using.

Introducing: Water Cooler Olympics

marcdebiak — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Paper Tiger is very excited to present our latest and greatest global initiative: WATER COOLER OLYMPICS

Q. What are The Water Cooler Olympics?
A. The Water Cooler Olympics is a monthly creative challenge posted by Paper Tiger. It can be anything that requires creativity, as long as it’s fun and different from what we “normally” do here. At the beginning of each month we’ll announce the challenge, and at the end of the month we’ll post the entries. It’s that simple!

Q. Why are you doing this?
A. We love our jobs, but we do a lot of design and development for clients. We love our clients and we enjoy the work we do for them, but we like to stay sharp by doing creative work for ourselves. Sometimes work can get busy and we forget to nurture our personal creativity.

Q. Who can complete the challenges?
A. Anyone! The management staff at Paper Tiger will always complete the challenge. However, we welcome and encourage our blog readers, friends, family, etc. to join in!

Q. Is there a winner?
A. Nope! We’ll post up the entries every month and we can discuss them in the comments, but it’s not about winning. It’s about doing something!

SXSWi 2011 ExpressionEngine Meetup

marcdebiak — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 15:27:00 -0500

Headed down to Austin this year for SXSW Interactive? Are you an Expression Engine developer? What about a lover of beer? Perhaps you just have nothing else to do on 3/11/2011. Well… come mingle at this year’s ExpressionEngine developer meet up with your new friends at Paper Tiger!

Here are the details:

Venue: Red 7
Address: 611 East 7th Street - Austin, TX
Time: 8pm
No badges or RSVP required.

MORE INFO:
Facebook: http://on.fb.me/gXESE5
Plancast: http://bit.ly/hs493r
Sched: http://bit.ly/i14yty

For more info, email info@wearepapertiger.com.

See you there??

Ten Things I Have Learned - An Essay by Milton Glaser

jasondebiak — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Ten Things I Have Learned - An Essay by Milton Glaser:

Check out this brilliant list by one of the greatest talents in graphic design. My favorite quote within this essay: “One of the signs of a damaged ego is absolute certainty.”