Posts filed under "design-nation"
Continuing with my year end review, I talked about blogging in general, now I get down to this site in particular and creativity and projects in general.
Website
Regarding this website, very little was done in 2010. I tweaked the design ever so slightly and updated the engine to the latest version of Habari, but apart from that I honestly haven’t done that much. That’s not true, I added some @media queries and did a bit of updating when it comes to trying to give the site some responsive design. Sadly it’s not really there yet, or at least it doesn’t render the way I imagine it to render on my iPhone, but that’s only because I’ve not done enough testing and reading around the subject.
I keep wanting to update with a lighter version, but I keep coming back to the darker colours and staying put. I know I will probably go for a slightly lighter motif pretty soon. Also I’d like to clean up the code finally as it’s a bit of a mess really. That’ll be the first thing I would like to do in January 2011. The design will pretty much remain the same, the underpinning will get lighter, the colours will change and I’ll probably add more doodles and images to places.
I guess I’m definitely of the mind to continue with the evolution of the site rather than a complete revolution. It works for me and it’s lasted the longest since I launched this site.
Creatively
Creatively this year has had some immense highs and some very long creative-less months. The main peak of creative activity as you can imagine all happened during my sabbatical months. Sadly that wasn’t meant to last as shortly within those months I had to start planning my change of life and country. Having said that I still managed to do a few things. First of which was this drawing for my cousin, using my lettering style which I developed a few months earlier for another little pet project.
Then there was this little drawing, which then got made into a glass painting which I get to look at every day.
I managed to make a few logos, some of which were actually used in the physical world, which again I thought was fantastic to see.
As if all of that wasn’t enough I got to complete my first draft and having been slowly hacking away at the second draft. It’s not as far along as I want it to be, but then again when was it ever going to be? Being this far along is reward enough. At least I’ve not given up on the dream. Given up on the dream, I’ve not worked this much on it ever. I’m waking up every morning and actually moving the process along.
Then finally, out of nowhere, I’ve even started off and created a little new robot character. I know I have a love for these things. It was completely by accident and it was inspired by me wanting to use my iPhone for something other than just consumption. I wanted to use it for creating. I am in the process of drawing a small backlog of pages so that I can start soliciting it on a weekly basis, which should be a nice distraction from all the other stuff that I’ve got going on at the moment.
When put like that, the output doesn’t seem too bad. There are a ton of projects I didn’t get to start, which I put the idea down on paper but never got around to. Ultimately however things actually were completed.
One of the things that I’m going to try and do next year is put rough deadlines. Even if I don’t meet these deadlines, at least I’ll push myself in the general direction of actually doing the work. Yes I might get a bit stressed while I do it, but that’s ok, it means I can look back on the year and be happy for what I completed. Actually completing projects is what keeps me happy. I’m also definitely going to buy this book.
Well that was not what I wanted to happen. Three posts made their way into the RSS feed that were not meant to be posts since they were emails….
Thankfully they are not that bad and hopefully we won’t be seeing that sort of thing again.
Back to our regularly scheduled programme….
Typomaps - Incredibly beautiful posters. Love the attention to detail and the colours chosen. This shall be mine and on one of my walls.
DBA Pen - Love this sort of thing. If I could buy something like this I would. The truth is, I finish ALL of my pens off, so my only concern really is the non biodegradable plastic. Potato based plastic you say? Interesting. I’m totally there.
Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2010 by Jean Nouvel - Last year’s Serpentine gallery was pretty bland, it’s good to see that things are going back to normal in terms of the extavegance. This is almost as amazing as the Frank Gehry installation from a few years ago.
http://www.brokenkode.com/serpentine-gallery-pavilion-2010-by-jean-nouvel
V&A signage by Troika - This is excellent. Love the typography, love the neon blue.
Search Google - Truly amazing work from Philipp Antoni. I’ll definitely be using this in the future. It’s basically what google would have wanted to do, but didn’t know how.
Urbanized - The new documentary by Gary Hustwit (Helvetica, Objectified). You know it’s going to be great.
User Interface Design Framework - Although I don’t use Illustrator (too heavy), this is most excellent.
You probably haven’t noticed but now the ‘Kode comes with a completely responsive shiney design, and by responsive design I mean it responds to the size of your screen, well by responds to the size of your screen, I mean if it’s less than 480px (size of your iphone/ipod/blackberry?) then you’ll still be able to read very clearly (without scrolling horizontally) my AMAZING writing, and the brilliant commentary that I provide to you on an extremely sporadic nature - what can I say I’m feeling in a sarcastic mood today.
So if you’re reading it on your feed reader, I guess you could visit the site properly to have a look. The main area i’m pretty happy with is the fact that even the images resize to accommodate (like in the illustration section).
The truth of the matter is, the current version of the ‘Kode is soo simple that doing this was pretty painless, and took an a few hours to read up on how to actually do it. The best resource as you would expect is found at these two A List Apart articles:
Then of course there are the prime examples to look at how this is achieved. Jonathan Hick’s for example has gone ALL out, with stylesheets for the iphone, ipad, 600px resolution, smaller, bigger whatever, it’s crazy - who the hell’s got the time? The general plan for the site is to keep doing general maintenance on the site and adding little things like this and generally bringing the design tighter together, trying to stay abreast with what’s going on the web (rather than being ahead of the curve).
Obviously, I could give a shit if it works in Internet Explorer.
So I’m there minding my own business, just checking my feeds and I see a familiar sight. Manji was mentioned on Devlounge as one of the single column themes of choice.
That’s pretty cool actually, seeing as it was designed over 4 years ago and hasn’t really been modified since. What’s interesting to me really is that there does seem a severe lack of super simple themes out there. Super simple is fucking hard to do and make stick - but that’s a topic for another time, which I fully intend on exploring.
Oh and btw, this is officially Broken Kode’s 1500th post.
Ragnarama - Dunno how I missed this, but Ragnar’s new website. Just started looking at his book Big City and it’s a tour de force of just page after page of amazing art in creating his story. Amazing stuff. If you can get a copy, definitely flick through it.
Geomancy Typeface - Free typeface that’s worth having downloading. Easily of the same quality as all the excellent free fonts found at Exljbris Font Foundry.
Rian Hughes’s of London Logo Proposal - This is by one of my favourite designers of all time, Rian Hughes. Shame it’s never going to be used, as it’s amazing.
Inspired by Coudal, I’ve decided to have a Page 2. It’s basically everything that doesn’t fit into my minimalist design. I’ll have to go into this design a bit more to be honest, because it’s basically longest running design. Every time I try and make it ‘better’ I always end up coming back to the same thing, only with a minor tweak here or there. I’ve not really talked about it, because it never seems all that interesting. What is interesting is that I’ve got over 15 iterations of the current design as I experimented with layout always coming back. I’ll have to post them in a gallery at some point.
New Bus for London - Hopefully should be out when I next visit London.
Didi - While still on the whole World Cup kick, excellent typographic tees with the major players for each team. Most excellent. I really want the Argentina one.
Soccer Aid World Cup 2010 Poster - By Trebleseven Design, this is an excellent poster for the World Cup. Which I’d seen this before, because I would have definitely got this for the house.
Redesigned Wikipedia - Honestly I hadn’t noticed until today. I instantly look at the content, as for years I’ve ignored everything around it. This, the latest ‘Vector’ theme is actually extremely elegant and a great transition for the site.
National mascots - Don’t know what to make of the new London 2012 Olympic Mascots. What I do know however is that I love the comparison to the Prime Minister and Deputy.
Can they cut it? - Fantastic venn diagram of the proposed budget cuts from the various parties and how they aim to tighten up the UK economy if they get elected. Lots of ideas, excellent presentation as always by the Guardian website.
Earlier on in my sabbatical, my parents decided to sort out the house down in Lebanon, where I was going to be doing my creative drawing and writing. However, I did a couple of side projects as well. A couple of logos and decided to do my first large scale art project, a door of stained glass.
This was to fill a hole the size of a door into the living room in the house in Lebanon. The reason for filling it in is mainly to do with layout, but needless to say we’re not using that door so having something that represents the family is more than a welcome addition.
To understand what this image means you have to know a little bit about my family history. My parents and I were born in Lebanon. We all migrated to Greece shortly after I was born, and five years later my brother was born in Athens.
This history is represented by the cedar tree (Lebanon) at the bottom and the three fish swimming up towards an olive tree (Greece) where a little fish is waiting.
So once the guys got it, they printed out and then began carving it out.
And here is the finally finished stained glass family portrait installed:
And here are some details:
So what do I feel about the final product? I think the carving process was superb, second to none. I think however that the colouring could have been done in a better fashion. There are mistakes and the final colours were not exactly as I had imagined, or chosen. The thing is that no matter these minor quibbles, it’s nothing compared to the sheer joy I get when I look at it changing colours throughout the day, you forget everything else.
Appear - Graphic Design Bureau. Seriously sweet website, because it’s all done in javascript, no flash required.