Some tactical advice to my younger self

Here’s some stuff i would say to myself when Cindy and I got married. I.e., when we started our household. The following might seem like I’m trying to look like a present day angel. This is pretty far from the truth so let’s just call this “aspirational”.

So there’s this narrative of the invisible mental load in a household. Part of that narrative is that you’re not really helping by asking the mentally loaded person, “what do we need, or what do you want me to do?”, or “can’t you make a list?” I suggest that maybe one way to escape this is with one small bit of advice:

Do the groceries.

The idea is that once you do this one thing, you might just naturally take on a bunch of related tasks to make the groceries go smoothly. This’ll ultimately have you owning the whole vertical slice in the kitchen. (“Vertical slice” is corporate for the sort of chain of tasks from the beginning of the process to the end.) By owning all of it, there’s less problems with the handoffs (the person doing the dishes won’t resent the person making five pots dirty).

So here’s the bunch of tasks that you may want to do, when you take on the groceries.

Continue reading “Some tactical advice to my younger self” →

A mathematically-impossible, hexagonally-tiled world map

A mathematically-impossible, hexagonally-tiled world map

hex_tile_projection
The world, on hexagon tiles.

In interior decorating, hexagonal tiles are really hot right now. For instance, here’s three examples in my workplace alone:

hex_tiles
My office at Catalyst 137 Kitchener, decorated in 2017.

Let me tell you some thoughts I have about placing the continents of the world on reconfigurable hexagonal tiles.

Continue reading “A mathematically-impossible, hexagonally-tiled world map” →

Artistic cartography: creative ways to peel the globe

On October 28, I gave a TEDx talk at TEDxUW 2017. A transcript and some slides from my prepared (as opposed to delivered) talk is below.

The experience was fantastic. The organizers did a great job putting on the event. I especially found the time we (us speakers) spent with the speaking coaches (Speaker Labs‘ Eric and Eli) very valuable.

And here’s a link to the video which was posted March 2018.

Continue reading “Artistic cartography: creative ways to peel the globe” →

Home in the Summer

home in the summer

Here is a new art piece by my brother Michael Swart and I. It’s an equirectangular drawing, drawn with no photography, stitching, or computer modelling. Set in a place that’s meaningful to me: my home, outside, in the summer.

You can read more about the techniques in my earlier blogpost here. What’s special about this one is two things.

  1. It’s especially detailed. To do the pencils, I bought a large (14″ x 17″) pad of paper.
  2. It’s a collaboration with my brother Michael! I did the pencils, and we scanned it and he did the inking for that comic book look.

Below is a rundown of how this drawing progressed. Continue reading “Home in the Summer” →

“Variety”: A Christmas Card Adventure

img_20161222_150332

Heya! My name’s Evan, and I’m D.M.Swart’s son! You might remember me, as there were photos and mentions of me in the previous blog post about a woodcut known as “Frog”. Speaking of which, we’re here to tell you about our other woodcuts (and linocuts) we’ve done over the past few years. First things first, this is not going to be a how-to – just a plain and simple recording of our trials. Here are some of our other cards:

Now, this blog post is about our latest card. When I say trial and error, this definitely has to be one of our most error-y cards yet. You may wonder why this post is titled “Variety”. It’s because we got a variety of “quality”.

Continue reading ““Variety”: A Christmas Card Adventure” →