I’d seen this particular book in the new books display at the library for a couple of weeks. Even though I found the title intriguing, the cover image discomforted me. Finally, I got up the nerve to pick up the book and flip through the pages.
After glancing at a couple of the images, I realized I had nothing to fear and brought the book home. I decided to interview the author.
Avi Muchnick, the editor and author of When Pancakes Go Bad: Optical Delusions with Adobe Photoshop, and I talked a few days later. I asked him about the book, but also for his opinions on what makes a design good or bad. Muchnick had lots to say about the book and design, but not so much about the objective evaluation of the quality of design. The more I talked with him, the more I understood why, and the more I liked what he had to say.
Muchnick is also the founder of Worth1000.com, a Web site that, as the book explains, is “a highly popular, Photoshop-based graphic design website that sponsors numerous Photoshop art contests, most of which feature humorous, spoof, and surreal images.” The site hosts a panoply of images that have the power to make you wince, moan, guffaw, sigh, gasp or, well, react in some way. It’s also incredibly popular, with 150,000 to 200,000 visits a day and more than 100,000 registered members.
Muchnick started Worth1000.com a few years ago while he was working as a graphic artist. He had created his own site to promote his services when he came up with the idea of a self-sustaining site that encouraged visitors to create the contents. A publisher saw the site and asked Muchnick to come up with a companion book — which is how a book with a picture of a rabid stack of pancakes on the cover came to be a part of my local library’s collection. The book is a compilation of images submitted to the site along with step-by-step Photoshop tutorials that explain how each image was created.
As Muchnick and I chatted, we veered off the topic of what makes a design good or bad — he explained that while he and his colleagues who help run the site exercise some discretion in deciding what images to post, they don’t judge the designs against any standard criteria of quality or degree of difficulty. Instead, for the site and for the book, they look for images that are as original as possible, and they prize images infused with a sense of irony.
I asked Muchnick why so many people turn to the site in a single day, since I know there aren’t that many professional graphic artists or other Photoshop users who, in one day, surf the Web seeking knowledge. “They’re bored at work,” he said simply, and I laughed because I knew he was right.
Muchnick wants you to have fun with the images and fun with Photoshop. He emphasized that Pancakes is not a trade book, i.e., a book written for people in a particular profession. It’s a fun book. The fact that it was commissioned by Thomson, a textbook publisher, and is categorized as a professional trade and reference book has thrown some people off, he explained. I guess this confusion was inevitable given that no bookstore or book publisher I am familiar with has a “fun book” category — but maybe they should.
If you read some of the amazon.com reviews of the book, you get a sense of the confusion the book had engendered in some people. Muchnick mentioned one review in which a high school teacher derides the book because he didn’t feel it was suitable for teaching high school students how to use Photoshop tools. After seeing the book, it was clear to me that the teacher missed the point of the book entirely.
If you’re looking for a thousand new Photoshop tips and tricks, you’re going to be disappointed by the book and the site. You’d be better off with any one of the dozens of trade books on the market that deal with the software. The book and the Worth1000 site are resources that help crack open your creative mind and drive boredom out of your professional soul.
Have a Drink at the Creative Juice Bar
Talking with Muchnick got me thinking about the value of merriment as one of the ingredients in the mix that helps artists fuel their creative impulses. We all know that inspiration isn’t enough, and that we need skills to help make manifest our creative visions. Skills alone aren’t enough, either. Knowing all there is about image editing and composition won’t help if your creativity is bone dry.
It’s okay to have fun. Think of fun as a lubricant that makes the cognitive gears mesh better. Go ahead and cook up some pancakes that bite back. Fight professional ennui by dressing a squirrel up in a gingham sundress. Suspend your critical judgment for awhile and do something cool with a Renaissance masterpiece. Think of Salvador Dalí mixed with a good measure of Robin Williams (the comic, not the book author!); throw in a dash of Andy Warhol and a soupcon of Douglas Adams. Muchnick would be proud.
This article was last modified on December 14, 2022
This article was first published on March 24, 2005
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