Day in the life
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: Kingston is doing fine. I think he’s got the ability to walk by now...
read moreBBC website
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...
read moreAbduzeedo
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?”
read moreSky Video
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...
read more70’s artwork
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.
read moreFlash vrs HTML5
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...
read moreErrors oh no!
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...
read moreBad Logo Designs
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)
read moreFlying again soon
We’re probably going to be taking Kingston on his first trip to see his maternal grandparents in Hong Kong around April. Nothing confirmed yet. It’s making us a little nervous given that it’s our first trip with Kingston….16 hours for that matter. I’m already searching for tips on how we might travel if a 16month old. Got some good tips here and there. Oh God….chances are we’re going to become one of THOSE parents with the crying baby on the plane.
read moreMy wife sent me in to get some iPads
I guess for anyone that cares, they’ve already weighed in on the Apple iPad that was announced by Steve Jobs last week. Here’s my take…I’ll wait and see. First, I’m not underwhelmed about the product. I think it fits snugly as a Amazon Kindle competitor. I wouldn’t be surprised if the 3rd or 4th generation of this product might eventually find itself in the hands of a lot of school kids. Every college student faces hundreds of dollars each semester buying textbooks that are ridiculously overpriced…if...
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LoweStudio Inc was founded by me, Raphael Lowe, a Honolulu based illustrator and web designer. I presently design and manage a few dozen commercial websites, but my main focus these days is acting as the head developer for Kapiolani Community College and teaching