Blink Gallery

Blink.  This is a design I thought about doing more than 10 years ago.  I had a photo of a stop sign, and I thought of this idea to have it say ‘Blink’.  I did the design below in Inkscape, but it didn’t look right with the type, so I moved on to bigger projects.

Here’s that original design before it was changed later in 2022 to its current form:

When I was sick from early 2022 to just the beginning of 2025 with my botched wisdom tooth surgery, broken jaw and other surgery late in 2024, I had time to work on all these old designs I had laying around.

Blink was one where I wanted it to be a take on the act of seeing itself.  You probably blink all the time, but aren’t conscious of how many times you do it in a day.  Even writing this to you, I became conscious of blinking, but its so fast you can still maintain attention.

Blinking is so fast you don’t even notice and it just happens automatically.  When you forget about blinking and think of something else, your body will still do it again for you.  It got me to realize how in art you try to control everything like how everything looks, but in so doing I realized we human beings are in way less control than we realize.

You don’t think about how your left toe next to the big one feels unless you think about it.  But stub it on something or cut it by accident and you’ll receive a pain signal to your brain.  You also don’t have to tell your heart to keep beating or your kidneys to filter out toxins from your blood.  This all happens automatically, so how much in control of your life are you again?

When I walk my dogs, I just take walking for granted and do it automatically.  Even my dog Huey I had to train to climb up stairs when he was very little.  Now he can jump over the same stairs or run up them if he’s really excited.

So, Blink was meant to be a take on you looking at any of my art in a gallery.  You look at it, but you have to stop to blink every now and again.  When you start again, my work will be right back there again for you to see.  That is what I meant for Blink to be.

When designing this it was very easy, I just used Inkscape and made an 8 sided polygon like a stop sign.  In the final version, I just made it less rounded on the edges on the one above.  I made a black thick line around it to make it show up easily on light softstyle t-shirts and transparent stickers.

The green background was to contrast well with the red sign as green and red are complimentary on the color wheel.  It really is a subtle fade from the dark green behind the sign to a lighter green on the outside edges.  This is easy to see when you have a Blink AOP t-shirt or poster.

The octagonal stop sign symbol was used with the word ‘Blink’ as its pretty much a universal symbol for stopping in your car.  In this case you have to stop seeing for a fraction of a second, so it just works.