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Skine.art is an awesome blog of moleskin contributors from around the world. Of note are some awesome illustrators from Sweden and Brazil.
There is definitely something to be said about a slow burning design. At least from where I’m sitting. I started redesigning the ‘Kode last week but the deal I made with myself was that I would limit myself to doing one small thing every day. One element of the design. Be it the typography, or [...]
Continuing my illustrators you should look at theme comes the awesome work of Jake Parker. I really like his pen and ink stuff more than his painted work, however both are all shades of great. Definitely going to pick up that little illustrated book of his.
Ian Kim based out of LA is definitely a rising talent to watch in the illustration work. His stuff does have that James Jean quality to it.
I saw the PATH graphic novel in the comic book store the other day, but the cover design left a lot to be desired from. However I am all over the artwork on the inside. I’ve got to say that those are some of the funkiest character designs I’ve seen in a while and the [...]
Earlier this week I attended a talk with a manufacturer who was giving us a brief rundown of the differences between British/European standards (BS, IEC) and American standards (NEC and NEMA). I came into that talk with a host of mostly founded preconceptions however I left with a changed view for the emerging design philosophies [...]
The latest Banksy art is a stonker. I’ve not seen this up close yet, but I’m definitely going to be going down the road and checking it out. One Nation Under CCTV is an awesome feat of getting something done undetected in this city. I get pulled on camera something like 300 times a day! [...]
FontStruct is a website that lets you create fonts using an EXCELLENT flash interface right from within the website. You don’t have to start from scratch as it’s even possible to clone another font that has already been created and modify it to your needs. What I love about all of this is the option [...]
Don’t forget the first issue of Warren Ellis’s Freakangels debuts later on today. Got a good feeling about this. Here’s the RSS feed for everyone.
You Sucjk at Photoshop. You do, you’re awful, and that’s why you’re here. Absolutely brilliantly funny series of photoshop ‘tutorials’ from Donnie. There are 4 tutorials at the moment. Hopefully he’ll continue these because they are pretty good.
Fake Steve Jobs accepts one of those crunchie awards. Absoultely awesome video. The guy’s just as funny (probably more funny) in person than as a blogger to be honest, although I do read his stuff occasionally. And while he’s doing that thing he does so well, he also raises some really valid points as well.
A lot of people have been asking me about what I think about the new WordPress admin that’s coming for version 2.4. No actually I am telling big fat porkie lies. No one has asked me what I think, but I’m not going to let that stop me. Lets talk the new WordPress admin [...]
Oooohhhh right, now I get it.
So my mac mini arrived last week. Three seperate boxes, one for the mini, one for the wireless mighty mouse and another for the wireless keyboard. What made me laugh was the fact that Joyce, arguably the smallest person in the world was carrying them to give to me. [...]
2008 Pirelli calendar is up. Stunning use of colours. Also really great collection of the previous calendars. Anyone have any idea of how to get one of these?
So I got a load of help from the previous post about where I should look for more information about what kind of Mac I should go for. Unfortunately for me, I mentioned this to Graham at work, who’s a big computer hardware nerd…the man has got more computers in his house than spoons (and [...]
New Si Scott creme-your-pants-work. It’s been a while since I was thoroughly impressed by a new artist (in the same way I am with say James Jean). Si has been getting extremely good and his latest collection of work called Resonate is an awesome collection of work.
World Press Photo 2007 Winners. Unbelievable collection of photographs collected from the past year. I guess it’s that time of the year when all these lists start coming through.
A brieft message. Obviously I missed the launch of this little gem. It’s a website of 200 word essays and thoughts on design that are accompanied by illustrations that change the look of every post. Awesome execution. While it borrows heavily from Khoi’s own Subtraction (in the comments section), it is great and inspiring to [...]
New Sony Bravia advert. Unlike the last couple of times this one has got bunnies and plastesine. I’ve got to say, it only gets really good and actually worthy of the legacy of the previous two adverts towards the end, so be sure to watch it all the way through.
So this last week I was in Princeton for my ‘little’ project in Egypt. The highlight of the trip without a doubt however was actually meeting Michael Graves. He was very busy looking at all sort of stones and mural paintings and whatnot for this other project that their office is knee deep into, however [...]
Awesome illustration from Christian Ward.
So I’ve started looking at my blog feed reader and it hit me that I don’t really read all of my feeds as much as I skim them to see what new stuff might be happening in the world. The issue is though that I’m finding it harder and harder to find something that I [...]
The Phiculator is a great little application, that you can download as a flash file as well (don’t know but I love applications that come as flash files). It calculates Φ (phi), the golden ratio. To put things into a design perspective, if you’re trying to make a website that is 850px wide, it gives [...]
Tales from Earthsea by Goro Miyazaki (the son of Hayao). File this under “I hadn’t heard anything about this until yesterday” sections. This movie seems to have all the right ingredients. It’s an adaptation of the great Earthsea story (which I’m a huge fan of). It’s being done by Studio Ghibli, who are to me [...]
I rarely pimp the company (in fact I never mention the company except in my contact page) but you can find 72 pages from the much larger Arup Design Yearbook 2007. There’s also a sampler of last years book which has got some pretty cool things to look at as well.
Update: Seems the website is [...]
Amazing advert for Epuron, easily one of the smartest adverts I’ve seen in a really long time (via Frederik Samuel’s always excellent blog). As if that wasn’t enough in the comments someone pointed out another excellent advert for the Dove self esteem fund. Excellent viewing all around.
You know when you’re in the dark about something and then someone wakes you up and you get that realisation that things could have been better, you just didn’t know any better, because nobody bothered to tell you about it?
What am I talking about? I’m making less sense than normal? I’ll tell you what I’m [...]
I’m looking at javascript libraries and it’s honestly proving a bit of an arduous task. We’ve got Moo.fx and Moo.fx2. The first has been superceeded by the second (obviously). Both it would seem can be used with prototype.js (or the lite version), however Moo.fx2 can be used as part of Mootools, and this is where [...]
I honestly have no idea how I happened to get this togglegoogle on a couple of my machines (well not my machines but random machines at work, on my dad’s PC etc) but it’s a great little tweak to google which I actually honestly thought was part of their constant updates. For some reason it [...]
Kyle’s just launched his Organix redesign of Warpspire. It’s easily one of the most comprehensive redesigns I’ve seen in a really good long while. Great attention to detail and some very nice implementations of using javascript to bring content to the foreground without the initial clutter.
Just sorting out the html and slowly hacking the css file. The idea is to slowly chip away at the actual code slowly but surely. I’m not in much of a hurry as I’ve got SOO much stuff left but I find that I enjoy writing more by actually having this new evolving design live.
Geeze that took a long time but I can finally report that I’ve actually sorted out the Kode’s version 6 mockup. Now you might say:
“How the hell is this relevant you lazy fuck? Sort out the full implementation of the site instead of telling us about the damn mockup”.
Ah patience young Padawin one, [...]
Well it’s been a bit too long coming, but I think I’ve found a theme that I can get to grips with relatively easily. I’m going to be hacking Depo Clean, adding parts of Fauna and some K2 in for good measure. I had a look at Sandbox and I’ve got to say that I [...]
Rian Hughes interview on newsarama. Easily one of my favourite designers in the whole wide world, if you read comics you’ve definitely seen his handiwork as the man has created more logos than I care to remember and had an awesome run on the covers of Wildcats version 3.0, which needs to be collected in [...]
Interesting developments over at Six Apart. Lets dig up some of the things I said back in the day about this shall we. For all those in the dark, MT was the defacto CMS you would choose if you were in the market to get yourself a blog with comments setup on your [...]
So I’ve decided on the final design (after something like 19 iterations all of which I will show everyone in due course) but I feel some of the html that I have been using on my site is slightly out dated since to be honest I have definitely not been keeping track of the comings [...]
The new London 2012 branding was unveiled today and seriously, it’s very funny how the organisers have got this soo spectacularly wrong. I don’t even know what the fuck this piece of shit is actually meant to be (also check out the absolutely heinous website) - Update: Seems they’ve launched the site 4 days early [...]
Now see that is bloody interesting. A month ago I kinda asked about whether or not people actually look at design or not. Since that time I kinda have this inprogress site design going on and have noticed my readership and hits to the site seriously fall by half.
So for all those thinking to themselves [...]
Well for the first time ever, I’m actually going to be going through the live redesign process. Fuck it man, I’ve been playing around with countless photoshop mockups and NONE of them are really jumping out at me, so I’m just jumping into this with two feet and see where it all goes. I know [...]
Is it just me, or has the yearly ‘reboot’ phase kinda gone down like a bit of a whipper this year? I’ve read one website that I actually read participate in this year’s event. No the ‘Kode hasn’t really jumped into it this year, although I’ve been working on a redesign for a little while. [...]
I’m going to post a collection of one liners that are rattling in my head, probably going to make it into a regular sunday evening thing:
The Offspring Greatest hits album dualdisc is pretty damn good listening. Reminds me back to when I was 13 and was about to take on the world. 30 was a [...]
Google Reader Theme by Jon Hicks. Awesome doesn’t even begin to describe this. I wish someone would do something similar for Gmail, because there is just soo much cruft and rubbish in gmail. The code is great and the functionality is great but google couldn’t design themselves out of a paper bag in most cases. [...]
20 must have firefox extensions. The usual suspects are all involved, however I didn’t know about the showcase plugin which I think is pretty slick.
Massive shout out to Jos Buivenga over at Exljbris for the truly excellent and awesome fonts he’s got on offer for free. When he says “Quality Free Font Foundry” he’s seriously not lying. Excellent stuff. I love Delicious and Fontin are both fonts that I’m going to definitely try and use in a future [...]
Great little interview with Jakub Steiner and Andreas Nilsson over at Gnome Journal. The most interesting part of the interview was this little side project, Art Libre Iconset. An integration of Gimp, Inkscape and Scribbus would be great, not that I use Gimp (but that’s another post for another time).
Blender 2.43 was released today. To my mind (and I’ve said this many times before) is the most professional open source project EVER. This is how open source should be. Every release is golden, and this one is a keeper. From the new website, the excellent release log, feature videos and the list honestly goes [...]
The more I think about this the more embarrassed of myself I feel. Basically I sat down today to take stock of what I should be doing in my free time (yes I have to have to be doing something in my free time, I bore extremely easily). I decided earlier last month that I [...]
Interesting article on the Guardian regarding the new UK mac adverts, some valid points while others seem like their there to goad people into a reaction.
Let me start off by saying that Inksmith is what I view as my biggest online failure, after a fashion and this is what this particular post is about. Whenever I announce a project or something I usually deliver, notice I said whenever I announce a project. I may be a blabber mouth an I [...]
It’s been a truly exciting time for Habari on the design front (not that it’s not been exciting on the code front, but I can only really properly comment on all things design to be honest). Since the last time we talked, Michael has been a busy boy with absolutely everything under the sun. All [...]
This is the first (hopefully) weekly instalment of the comings and goings on in the Habari Design Community. As this was our first week ‘out’ it was obviously a pretty wild and exciting ride with an immense amount of interest from all people around the world. What’s fascinating to me is that the people at [...]
Gotta thank the guys at Smashing Magazine for putting the Kode on the list of dark sites you should’ve seen list. Dunno if they were partly responsible for bringing the site down for a couple of hours yesterday but it’s an honour to be on the list.
It’s been one hell of a couple of days since we first talked about the Habari project. There’s been a slew of reaction to the news all over the internet (go to the pingback section of that post) and to be honest it’s far exceeded all expectations I could have had because I honestly don’t [...]
Well Chris broke the news about, Habari, a new open source blogging CMS platform. While he didn’t want feel it correct to mention in the post who was involved, I’m going to step forward and put my hand up as the designated pixel pushing monkey of this motley crew.
What I find amusing is that as [...]
I started writing a best of 2006 about a week ago, however I’ve had to break that down into several posts because it got far too large and I didn’t feel that I would be doing each topic justice, if I bulked all of them into one post. So for the first topic of conversation I’ll talk about the best of the Net for 2006. Word of warning, there’s a lot of images in this particular post just to bear it in mind.
Mandolux, easily one of the single best implementations of a good idea for wallpapers on the net. Take some nice high quality photographs, halve them so they’re abstract enough provide them as wallpapers in different sizes. Genius.
This “little” Eboy poster is so apt for capturing what I’ve been experiencing for the past year and a half as I got more into the internet in general. What’s great about the poster is that you actually notice more and more stuff on second and third viewing.
Blue Dragon from the fine folk at Mistwalker. Dammit, they’ve actually got me considering getting an Xbox 360 as it’s what I expected Final Fantasy 8 to look like (7 was and is the only Final Fantasy game I’ve played, but when I mean played I mean bought a Playstation just to play…(thanks to Aurum3 [...]
Broken Kode Season One the dead tree version of Broken Kode is finally ready for general consumption. I talk about decisions I’ve made regarding the book and what you can expect to find between it’s covers and I talk about the Lulu process briefly.
Standards Reboot. In a way it was inevitable, following these pretty shocking results. Seems we do actually have a way to go before the majority of sites are standards compliant.
I’m currently in Greece for a full 2 weeks. I’ve been looking forward to this break for well over a month now, hell I’ve been looking forward to this break for at least 3 months. I didn’t go anywhere during the summer period, which was probably the worst thing to do for my psyche to [...]
Check out the new Sony Bravia Paint Advert. I’ve got to say that these adverts are taking over the same status as the Levis ads of the mid 90s. You know the ones that would propel music artists into the limelight and just make little contributions to pop culture. Even more flamboyant than the bouncy [...]
Flickr Cards. What makes this strange is that I only sorted out my flickr account yesterday (yeah I’ve been resisting this for a while now). I love print as well.
And just because I can’t get enough of fonts flying around, here’s another 10,000 for everyone to choose from. Dunno how much this would slow my system down, but I gather a hell of a lot really.
Finally my wishes for a mobile that actually provides me with what I want have been answer with the latest Sony Ericsson M600i.
I honestly don’t care that it doesn’t have a camera, as I find that feature a bit superfluous for my liking in a mobile phone anyway. It’s also fantastic news that mobile [...]
There seems to be a bit of resurgence in the design and web development UK market. This is a very good thing as it’s been pretty poor the last year or so. When I cleaned up my room a couple of weeks ago I kept looking at my old magazines like I do and there [...]
I’ve been playing around with the Gimp a bit more. Yes I know, I’ve got a massive post about this and other Ubuntu goodness. To make things slightly nicer on myself I’ve downloaded this little theme that integrates the new Tango icons from the upcoming (and has been upcoming since October of last year) version [...]
The last week has seen some movement on a couple of the open source projects I’ve been involved with in the past couple of years. I’ve already spoken about the first one but now I’m going to talk about the other project that I had such high hopes for which have been washed away and [...]
One of the nicest adverts I’ve seen since the Sony Bravia advert. This is for Sky’s new HD service. Also on the Bravia advert, did you know they’re prepping up a brand new one as well? This kind of reminds me of the mid/early 90s when Levis held the fort for adverts that were more [...]
Grid Systems by Kimberly Elam (published by PA Press) is required reading for ANYONE even thinking about jumping into graphic design of any description. I blasted through this book in a week and it’s definitely one of those books you refer back to again and again as it’s a reference book as well as a [...]
I was talking to Kyle a couple of days ago. He was expressing how he liked the summer and then we got a bit geeky and started talking operation systems. He’s recently made the jump from Windows to the land of the Apple, while I have dumped my windows box for a shiney new ubuntu [...]
While looking around the net for font viewers I stubbled across 6000 free fonts to download (scroll down a little bit). Still can’t find a decent font viewer for ubuntu though, any ideas about this and font management in general on Ubuntu?
I’ll probably do a more proper review of the latest version of Flock at some point when it’s slightly more mature, but v0.7 Beta is a good stage to look at it more seriously. Also mad props to my boy Veloso for a really nice implementation of the new Flock website, very cool.
Seriously one of the best adverts I’ve seen on TV in a good long while. The advert was aparently done by Mother (does anyone have a link for this ad agency, definitely one to look out for).
I’m going to ramble on a bit more about Shuttle, simply because it’s been a pretty big part of my life the last year and loads of things I’ve wanted to talk about on this blog have been waiting for this moment in time. Everytime I would think about something cool to talk about relating [...]
Before you read this I suggest you go and have a look at the 20 mockups showing the future of WordPress.
The idea of redesigning the WordPress administration panel began believe it or not in December 2004. For over a year and a half myself, Michael Heilemann, Joen Asmussen, Chris J Davis, Joshua Sigar (later joined [...]
Go buy the DVD version of an open-source movie? Open source as in you’ve got full access to all the elements that went into making the movie. I know sounds completely crazy but very cool at the same time. I’ve been waiting for this for a good long while, ever since I heard about it [...]
The real reason why I decided to reboot to something more simple this time round hopefully is becoming more obvious with the latest change in the background on the front page. As the section implies the background (which occupies the most real estate on the site) will be used to throw the spotlight on specific [...]
Guy Howard emailed me on Tuesday asking me whether or not I wanted a free LG Chocolate phone to test out. So off I went to see what this promotion was all about.
From the site itself:
They realise that consumer-to-consumer recommendations carry a higher trust factor than virtually all other forms of advertising, and that word [...]
James Jean explains the process behind the new cover work for Calexico’s latest album. I’ve really got to stop visiting that guy’s site, it depresses me too much how much talent that guy has.
Ok I’m officially in love. Claire Wendling (the site is in French, so now you know where she’s from as well) is the most amazing artist I’ve seen in a bloody good long while. I’ve got two of her art books here in front of me and each page oozes with inspiration. In many [...]
Neuralbrand Vector giveaway. Which reminds me I should have a little poke in the mind of Veloso’s playbox as well (it’s the 2004 archive on the right hand side). Go grab that as well for inspirational goodness.
Well I did actually like the whole documenting what was on the table to be completed during any particular month it did actually keep my mind focused on the task at hand.
So recapping January I didn’t complete everything I had on that list of things to do, the main one was Shuttle. My intentions [...]
When I’m not talking much on the Kode, it usually means I’m up to something. This has been a pretty long weekend for me. I didn’t go to work on Friday because I was pretty determind to finish off several of my projects. You’d be amazed at the amount of progress someone can get done [...]
If you’re looking for the ultimate in modern art, I direct you no further than one of my favourite artists out there, in any medium. His name is Banksy and he’s a graffiti artist. However he’s a little more than _just_ a graffiti artist. The man is also a genius of his form. Reading Computer [...]
Not many people read The Guardian, compared to other fine publications like The Sun (which apparently has got the biggest circulation, something seriously wrong with this statistic in case you missed the sarcasm, but anyway).
I’ve never been a newspaper person myself. Just never seen the point. Which is kind of strange, considering that growing [...]
Saida has been listed on several sites:
CSS Importâ„¢ , CSS Drive , CSS Mania
LifeHut Go check it out, then come back and thank me for pointing it out to you.
Bran Man. This is a pretty cool idea. You either get it or you don’t.
CSS Reboot Fall 2005. Well BK4 will be out long before then, but still pretty cool.
forgetfoo is this crazy blog that takes AJAX to the next level. I absolutely love what he’s done with the functionality. Not so keen on the overall design (liquid and all) but it’s a spectacular effort.
I’ve spent over 24hours straight on my computer in the last 2 days. Truthfully speaking this really was a long time coming. I didn’t go anywhere (except to the supermarket) and just spent all day ‘drawing’. Now I’m inverting it because I’m very traditional when it comes to my classification of artwork in general. My [...]
My god for a second there I thought I’d actually forgotten what it was like to be truely inspired. I draw a lot of inspiration from graphic novels and graphic design in general. The thing is though it’s been a while since I’ve been truely inspired to do some kick ass work in the past [...]
Gather round children while I explain why I’ve got an online presence at all.
See now this is a pretty interesting little project that I’m surprised the usual culprits on the web haven’t really talked about. Mike Davidson has just released sIFR 2.0: Rich Accessible Typography for the Masses. It’s a smart little method to actually enhance your typography without killing accessibility.
A flash file is created, but not [...]
So I went into central london (as I generally do on a Saturday) and grabbed some comics. While we’re on the train, Stathis tells me we should go via Old Street to grab my prints from Constandinos. I actually got a small tingle in the back of my neck when he said this. Words cannot [...]
Well that’s depressing. I’m a MASSIVE Flash fanatic. I love how the program is built, the interface, the freedom it provides. All these things make Flash one of my favourite programs, except for the past year or so I’ve got to say I’ve only really used it for colouring in and completing my images. [...]
About 3.5 years ago I was scared of computers. Well not so much scared, as just didn’t really want anything to do with them. This I guess was due to my brother, who when we brought a computer back in 93 or whenever, decided to methodically trash the thing, and install viruses on for shits [...]
While on the DO forums (that’s Designate Online), the topic of recommended design books came up. The one that caught my eye straight away was this little book called Freewave. I read the amazon review, thought about it for like 10 seconds and quickly ordered. Yes Amazon is very lucky to have people like me, [...]
How exactly did I miss this one, the second it came out? Go over to typographica and have a read of a pretty good interview with Rian Hughes, desigener, illustrator and typographer extrodinaire. I’ll be sure to check out that little catalogue they mention at the bottom.
I wish I could buy affordable prints by the [...]
It’s been a while since I posted one of these, and this is definitely not a slant on all you beautiful people that have been slaving away on your superb Manji designs it’s just that this one as I’m sure you’ll agree truely does deserve a mention.
2 With Spirit
It belongs to Catonya and Rick, [...]
Found the link for this on the Designate Online forums. The following is taken from the Building Letters page for the Tsunami Relief effort:
http://www.buildingletters.org/edition3.html
As a core element of this issue, Max Kisman suggested to ask type designers, designers, artists and illustrators to produce one flower each, that will be published in the magazine as [...]
Damn. I’ve been stuck in front of my computer for too long I think. I mean, I’ve been back in Greece for 2 days and already I sorted out at a conceptual level the logo design I’ve been promising Alfie for like 2 months. It’s incredibly simple and yet has everything we’ve talked about all [...]
Over a year ago I went the then newly located to London Rana to an art exhibition by one of my all time favourite designers in the world. The man is seriously brilliant. I later find out that a great deal of the design (mainly logos) for a great number of comics I used to [...]
Update: Oops, erm didn’t realise I’d closed the comments, erm if you’d like to add a comment please feel free to :).
Been a pretty productive weekend to be honest. I’ve really hammered through a load of ideas that have been floating in my head for a while now. The good news is that I’ve completed [...]
I went to get measured for Yasmine’s wedding next week. Since I was in the Oxford Circus area I decided to actually walk around and take in the pre-christmas atmosphere. Decided to buy a Mocha from Nero, it was without a doubt one of the worst coffee’s I’ve had in a long while. Expensive and [...]
Radio silence for the next 5 days. I’ll explain all once I get through everything, needless to say it’s very exciting news. Part of the reason is also that I’ll be in Milan over the weekend, although that has nothing to do with the exciting news. Watch this space though, and yes there’s a [...]
Another fantastic find from our friends over at pixelsurgeon, this time out it’s for this fantastic design outfit operating out of England as far as I can tell called Magnetic North. Check out the link called Imagination, really brilliant, I loved it.
Slowly but surely I’m starting to find more and more hidden treasures on the net. This is one of those. Greyscale.net. Thanks to drunkfoundation for the heads up. Beautiful stuff.
One of my absolute favorite designers in the past few years is Robert Lindstorm from Sweden, he is Design Chapel. I absolutely love his work, and is someone I actually look up to in terms of what I can achieve and what I can do in the field of design and contemporary illustration.
I wish [...]
Go have a look at the stuff this guy has on his site. It’s brilliant, soft and vibrant. Definitely worth watching. I really like finding treasures like this on the net.
David Lanham
I’ve got a lot to get off my chest right now.
I’ve been reading Computer Arts for a while now, over 18 months and counting. Recently they had a change of editor-in-chief. Now while the last one Vicki Atkinson wasn’t a babe, she did her job WELL. She kept pushing the design of the [...]
This is my latest creation. That is my font, iliosnap. I used a free copy of Font Creator given with the computer arts magazine, pretty amazing what you can do with freeware and open source coding.
[FLASH]HTTP://www.brokenkode.com/wp-content/images/iliosnap.swf, 568,400 [/FLASH]
So after god knows how long, actually probably something like 3 weeks I finally did a bit of designing, other than for this blog. I’ve still got loads of little things I need to sort out for this blog, but I’m working on that as well. Just completed a logo for a charity organisation for [...]