Hi there, I'm Shaun. I make things happen.

The Creation of a Brand: Internet 2012 Bus Tour

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| by | Design Portfolio, Graphic Design, Marketing |
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Final Design

My friend, and fellow Internet lover, Alexis Ohanian, hit me up a few weeks ago about a new project he was working on with a few other Internet superstars (including Eric Martin, aka the “Reddit General Manager”).

Their goal is to have a 10-day “Internet 2012″ campaign, via bus, across the country in order to talk with local startups, college students, politicians, media, and grassroots organizations about the promise and power of the open internet. It will kick off at the First Presidential Debate in Denver, CO and will conclude at the Vice Presidential Debate in Danville, KY.

(For more details about the project, as well as an opportunity to contribute to its goals, check out their Indiegogo page and read up!)

Creating a good logo/brand is no easy task. In order to wind up with this one, we went through several revisions and processes. At first, my goal was to combine the obvious aspects: (1) A bus, (2) some sort of Internet imagery, (3) some sort of patriotic angle, (4) try to make the typography pleasant, despite being so wordy.

Continue on for the play-by-play revisions of the brand!

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Illustrating in Law School

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| by | Design Portfolio, Graphic Design, Law Blog, Life in Law School |
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1L Anxieties

An opportunity presented itself recently to do illustrations for my school’s paper, The Courier. As a 1L, I’m obviously a bit hesitant to commit to anything that might interfere with priorities (read: studying), but having a creative outlet to escape from the day-to-day analytical overload is a great way to keep both sides of my brain happy.

Here are the first two illustrations for the upcoming edition. The first will pair itself to an advice column for 1L’s, written by a 2l; the second will pair itself to an article about the fears and overwhelming nature of being a 1L.

Read on to check out the illustrations!

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Improved Patent Search via Google →

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| by | Intellectual Property, Law Blog |
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Google recently updated their patent search engine with a couple fantastic additions:

  1. European Union patents are now included in their results, as well as automatically translated.
  2. The new “Prior Art Finder” button allows users to automatically search multiple sources for existing prior art.

As expected, however, it is far from perfect. In a brief review from Patentlyo.com, Dennis Crouch writes:

Google has implemented a new prior art search button that attempts to identify the ten most relevant prior art documents in its search database.  In my 10–minute test, the identified prior art did not appear to be directly on-point. Of course, my criticism likely suffers from the Nirvana fallacy.  Every prior art search methodology suffers from major deficiencies.  The proper question for Google’s tools is whether the new system has a role in the patenting process.  At minimum, it is likely an improvement on the quick pre-filing “sanity check” searches that are often conducted by patent applicants and patent attorneys. In its press release, Google indicated that the company will “be refining and extending the Prior Art Finder as [it] develop[s] a better understanding of how to analyze patent claims and how to integrate the results into the workflow of patent searchers.

Dissent of Judge Kozinski

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| by | Intellectual Property, Law Blog, Life in Law School |
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Judge Kozinski

J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times

It feels only right that I make the first post on this blog a quote from one of the first cases I discovered in law school. This is an excerpt from Judge Kozinski’s dissent in White v. Samsung Electronics America, Inc., 989 F.2d 1512 (9th Cir. 1993):

“Something very dangerous is going on here. Private property, including intellectual property, is essential to our way of life. It provides an incentive for investment and innovation; it stimulates the flourishing of our culture; it protects the moral entitlements of people to the fruits of their labors. But reducing too much to private property can be bad medicine. Private land, for instance, is far more useful if separated from other private land by public streets, roads and highways. Public parks, utility rights-of-way and sewers reduce the amount of land in private hands, but vastly enhance the value of the property that remains

“So too it is with intellectual property. Overprotecting intellectual property is as harmful as underprotecting it. Creativity is impossible without a rich public domain. Nothing today, likely nothing since we tamed fire, is genuinely new: Culture, like science and technology, grows by accretion, each new creator building on the works of those who came before. Overprotection stifles the very creative forces it’s supposed to nurture.”

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