Sadly this comic strip describes the hazards of being a designer so well I had to post it. Just recently I had a small project I was doing for a friend put to a halt for similar issues. That issue got resolved in a friendly manner but it honestly does make you fantasize about changing careers to “give sponge bathes to the elderly” (via The Oatmeal)
I think I’ve encountered every one of these situations…and while I’ll professionally stay as calm and collected as I can be, at home I’d be fuming at the ears and start punching pillows. (Hey, I’m delicate)
Check out the rest of the site by the way, The Oatmeal strips got a lot of funny ones there and some great illustrations.
There was a 2-alarm fire at a house not more than 70 yards away from here. I saw the tips of the flames peeking above a neighbor’s rooftop this morning and watched as tons of firetrucks and police vehicles came flooding in. Luckily they got it under control and I understand everyone got out. Tough day for that family today.
Makes me want to reflect a bit and be thankful that everything running relatively ok for me these days despite some pressures here and there:
Last week a friend of mine posted a tweet from the BBC that demonstrated the level of work they went through trying to come up with a new website look.
Take a peek…it’s pretty interesting the level of detail and work that they went through. Now the next time you approach a designer and ask for something “easy”…keep in mind that it’s a lot of work to achieve that.
Personally, I think it was a little overkill in this case. The end result, while nice and clean, wasn’t something that floored me. Not that a news organization like the BBC needs to have fantastic graphic design, but I guess I think the end-result could have been accomplished with a lot less planning (get to the part where they’re counting the pixel grid?)
I get it, sometimes when you’re working with a team, this level of planning is necessary to get everyone working uniformly, but having seen many column and grid websites before it’s not like they couldn’t have based their grids off of any number of pre-made CSS templates and just built from that?
Well, in any case, it looks like it was a successful project and I love reading about how creative teams go through their process.
Stumbled across another pretty good design-focused website today called Abduzeedo. Here you can find links for inspirational material, neat Photoshop and Illustrator tutorials and even wallpaper for your computer desktop.
Quick glance at some of their tutorial collections I was pretty impressed and inspired. I’ve been a bit bored lately by some of the tutorials I’ve been seeing on some of my magazine subscriptions…it’s like you see the end result and think, “why would I ever want to do that?”
Today’s bit of inspiration comes in the form of video made by Philip Bloom. I’ve mentioned him in the past before with some beautiful shots of the Bay Area.
What’s most interesting to keep in mind about what the photographer did in this case was to sit there with his camera for 24-hour periods capturing this stuff. I don’t think I’d have the patience for that unless I really was getting paid for it.
I’ll be bringing my camera with me on my next trip to Hong Kong. While I’m doubtful I’ll come back with results as good as this…I’ll certainly be trying! (via Gizmodo)
I found this little psychedelic funky packaging on a gem of a website I stumbled across today called “So Much Pileup” - which collects graphic design artifacts and inspiration from the ’60s – ’80s.
This little number was apparently done in the ’70s by a studio team of Frazier and Hauge.
One of the common complaints that had been going around with iPhone and iPads (that name still brings me a little chuckle) is the lack of Flash support.
During the last big reveal of the iPad, Steve Jobs was quoted to have said that they had no plans to adopt Flash for their devices because he thought Flash was buggy and that it would get replaced with HTML5.
Whoa, did I just go over your heads? You know, for a majority of people I meet on a day-to-day basis, this will probably be meaningless to you as well. I think the average Joe I meet looking to have their 1st website, cares little about what Flash or HTML is. I’m going to try not to add to your confusion. There are enough articles about what this is about. Discussions from people who support Flash, and discussions about how Flash might disappear because Jobs said so. It basically comes down to figuring out if your website looks as it is intended to your visitors, or if they end up seeing plug-in errors like the blue lego.
Personally, I think Flash will stick around for a little while. It’s being used on some of the biggest sites out there. But don’t dismiss the fact that a few million iPhone users and what soon may be a whole slew of mobile tablet readers (e.g., iPads, Kindles, Nooks), will definitely impact what can be used on your websites. And if this HTML5 alternative really does pick up as a standard, it just might make a huge dent against what once was a huge Flash-loving industry.
My money is on trying to avoid Flash on websites as much as possible for now unless there’s no other option. Looks like there just might be other options coming around the corner. Good riddance.
Hey I’m still here and alive. Just treading water a bit with a lot of stuff to do and not a huge amount of time to do it. Tax season’s here, Kingston got a little sick last week, got some projects sitting in unintended limbo, etc.
Over the last week I discovered a little error on my website here. You guys see that little “include_data” thing at the top of the site? One day everything’s fine the next I see that. It’s been bugging me, I’ve tried everything from trying to refresh the MySQL database files to exploring the templates. Chances are I upgraded WordPress and there’s something in the site template that’s incompatible.
That’s the thing with software I suppose, every upgrade brings upon the chance that it’ll bring down something else. That’s why I sometimes advocate to my clients, “If it ain’t broke, don’t screw with it”
Well, I think that’s a sign to redesign the site a bit anyway if I can. Expect some overhauling within the next week or two. So if you see some oddity with the site sometime…. it’s probably me screwing with things trying to make it work.
Meanwhile Chinese New Year’s around the corner and I probably need to get a new newsletter out to my subscribers. EEEP! Gotta keep business moving!
Yesterday I thought, “What the heck” and decided to look for ugly things as a alternative to finding things that inspire me. I came across a pretty funny collection of “Bad Logo Designs”
I broke out in a little bit of a sweat hoping that one of my own designs didn’t show up on this list. Thankfully not. “Whew” (via LogoDesignerBlog)
Owner of Honolulu Burger Co stuck to his word. Comped our whole meal even. That's a super nice gesture. Count me as a permanent fan.11:15:35 PM September 06, 2010from TweetDeck
