It’s been a very long time since I’ve posted anything on here. I’ve been pretty busy with all of life’s demands, which isn’t bad, but I haven’t written very much.

Part of the reason for my lack of writing is because ever since I put together my previous design, I haven’t really been pleased with it. I had a variety of goals for it that I felt weren’t really acheived. In the mean time, though, I thing I’ve put together a design that I feel a little bit better about. Here are some things you might notice:

• More thorough typographical consideration. I really love and care about my type. In the previous iteration, though, I didn’t spend as much time as I would have liked working it out. I think this version is much better.
• Use of Clarendon. For better or for worse I’m a huge fan of Clarendon. I discovered Clarendon while in school and really began to love it then. My type professor, however, really hated it. Therefore, my love for it grew. (wink, wink). I have had intentions of using it in public work for a while, but haven’t done so till now. How did I do it? Next point…
• Use of typeface-js. Typeface-js is a javascript solution to embedding typefaces on your website. I won’t go in to detail as to how it works, but I will say I am pretty pleased with how easy it was to install and configure. I have previously used sIFR, but I am glad to leave flash behind for this. (I am aware that Cufón might be a more mature project that works similarly, but I found this one first and like it… I might change later if there is significant reason to do so.)

Some things you probably won’t notice without significant digging, but that I’d like to mention:

• One reason I was able to build this theme quickly (by the way, I was able to build this quickly) was because I found a really helpful, stripped-down WordPress theme that serves as an excellent blank canvass for starting new template developments. It’s called Starkers and it was made by Elliot Jay Stocks.
• I used less javascript. I really like javascript. I really dislike, though, features on sites that don’t significantly contribute to the overall user experience but that still take time to load. Therefore, I cut out some javascript effects I used on the previous iteration of this design. (The only javascript I am using is for the earlier mentioned font embedding.)
• This hardly merits mentioning, but in this iteration I didn’t even bother trying to get things to appear right in IE 6. Very few people view this site and a negligable number use IE. It’s simply not worthy my time or effort.

That’s all. Please let me know what you think of the update. If you notice anything that doesn’t look quite right, let me know–I probably missed some stuff.

Rock on,

Rewdy

» For anyone involved in creative problem solving, this is an absolute must-read. I can’t stress the importance of what he says in this article enough. It’s been so very profound for me.
http://www.andyrutledge.com/complex-order-simple-chaos.php

» About a year or so ago I stumbled upon the blog of a small design firm in Ireland called Contrast. Over the past year they have posted some really awesome stuff on their blog. There are two articles that have been really helpful for me to read in the past couple days.

First, an article about the learning potential in failures and the value of simply creating.
http://www.contrast.ie/blog/fail-early-fail-often-and-learn/

Second, and this is so important in this day and age, an article that talks about distractions, avoiding them, and how to help yourself be productive.
http://www.contrast.ie/blog/killing-distractions/

The last three I have not read in great detail, but from skimming them they look good. I post them partially to share and partially for posterity–so I can come back and read them as I have time. I won’t give intro for them.

Intro to design patterns from 37 Signals.
http://www.37signals.com/papers/introtopatterns/

About the redesign of ABC News.
http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2004/10/abcnews-redesigns

UX Mag writes about the style layer.
http://www.uxmag.com/design/86/the-layers-of-design-the-style-layer

Thanks, peace.

A little note on my selection: these are all things that I regularly use. There are tons of awesome resources that I think are cool, but for whatever reason, I don’t actually use them. I’m choosing to share here just the stuff that I have found myself using the most.

Tools/Resources

jQuery. I first discovered javascript frameworks about 2 years ago. I found mooTools and was completely taken by the accordion. I used that for a while, before realizing that there were a wide range of javascript frameworks to choose from. I tried, from there various others, but when I discovered jQuery I put my use of all the other ones to rest. Without going into any detail at this point, all i can say is that with jQuery I can write far less code and do far more than with any other framework. I use it in almost every project now. It’s amazing.

Fireworks. Adobe Fireworks is an amazing program that I, for one, don’t think gets enough recognition. I use it nearly everyday and I love it. I supports both vector and bitmap graphics; it handles and makes use of alpha-channels in ways Photoshop and Illustrator still don’t; and it’s basic user interface is more intuitive when doing work for the web (you’ll have to try it to confirm that last point). A little note: a lot of people use Photoshop to do preliminary design work for websites. That’s fine, if you that’s what you want to do, but I have found that Fireworks—which was specifically designed for web-destined graphics—works much better than PHOTOshop which was designed for use with (surprise!) photos. If you don’t believe me, download the free trial from the Adobe website and use it for 30 days. You won’t be disappointed (unless you’re stupid.. jk).

Color Picker. When I’m designing, it’s always nice to have access to a little color picker. I use a Mac at home and a PC at work so I have two solutions here:

• For Windows. there is a great little application that I have come to love called ColorCop. It’s really simple. There’s an eyedropper that you can drag over anything on your screen, then it will tell you the hex code for the color and automatically copy it to your clipboard. Simple and lovely.
• For Mac OS. Here’s an awesome little tutorial about how you can use a little AppleScript to write your own. I did it myself. It was one line of code or something. Try it.

Briar Press. I really, really don’t want to share this. It’s kind of been my little secret for a while. BUT, because I love you guys, I will share it. Briar Press is a letter press community that has, among other things, a collection of clip imagery called, “Cuts & Caps”. To get the clips, they take letter press ornaments and initials from old specimen books, scan them, vectorize them, then offer them on their website. Some are free, other are for sale. But, all of them are really cool.

Lipsum. This is very simple website that generates Lorem ipsum text. I use it frequently when making mock ups. For those of you who use Dreamweaver, “Lorem and more” is a free dreamweaver extention which does the same thing. You can download it here.

Character Codes via Digital Media Minute. Periodically I’ll need an (X)HTML character code for an infrequently used symbol. Here’s a nice list of them all, sortable by a variety of characteristics.

These sources change pretty frequently, but here are my most current sources of inspiration. You’ll notice a common theme, possibly. I’m pretty into type and specifically, I’m pretty into hand-drawn type. I really love all hand-created artwork, the immediacy of the process makes the work feel more human to me. I may write on this later.

Anyway, here are some really cool sources for inspiration. Feel free to add your own in the comments, if you like.

Daily Type

Daily Type is a weblog (kind of) of a bunch of Russian type designers. They post images of type every day (thus, the name). A lot of it is hand-drawn, which, as mentioned above, I like a lot. The other thing that is cool about this site is that most of the type is in Cyrillic. Cyrillic is the alphabet that Russian is written in. Jonathan Hoefler wrote an article where he mentioned Cyrillic and Glagolitic alphabets. Since reading his article, I’ve been pretty into looking at Cyrillic type. It gives me a lot of cool ideas of what can be done with type that I might not always see right away looking at our good old Roman alphabet.

This is definitely a site to add to the feed reader and keep track of. Pretty cool stuff. (H&FJ’s blog is awesome, too, by the way. Maybe my favorite…)

Fiodor Sumkin’s Opera78.com

In all honesty, I know very little about Fiodor Sumkin. I am not quite sure, even, how I found his website. What I do know, though, is that he has some pretty awesome work. Mostly all of his stuff is hand-drawn. My favorite section is his typograhy. His work is kind of edgy, maybe offensive at times, but very impressive.

He also seems to do quite a lot of work in Russian (or another language using the Cyrillic alphabet). Which, as I’ve covered, I’m fascinated by. This is one of those sites I could easily spend a good hour at and not realize the time was passing. Check it out.

Foxie’s Graphic Design

Foxie’s Graphic Design is a Russian graphic design firm. I stumbled across this site yesterday when I was looking for something and accidentally spent a good chunk of time browsing their portfolio. The thing I was impressed with and the reason I’m including the site here is this: In their work, they seem to have a way of creating work that is fresh and unique, without challenging conventions too much. Good work.

Mike Perry’s Midwestisbest.com

Mike Perry is a designer in Brooklyn, NY who (I think) is known mainly for his fun, colorful hand-drawn work. A lot of his stuff utilizes a collage feel and maintains a youthful, fun aesthetic. He has a huge portfolio on his site that will give you quite a lot to look at for a while.

Also to note, Mike Perry is the author of a book called “Handjob”, which is a catalog of hand-drawn type. I haven’t been able to look through the book yet, but a friend of mine recently suggested it to me quite highly. Judging from Perry’s work on his website, I’m going to say it’s probably pretty good.

Flickr

This might be a completely unhelpful thing to list, because I’m pretty sure everyone uses flickr, but here it is. Flickr’s great for finding inspiration. Search for about anything and you’ll get results. My latest queries have been (you guessed it), “hand drawn type”, “type sketches”, … you get the idea.

I’ve found some pretty cool stuff on there. Check it out for yourself.

That’s pretty much all for today. What sources do you use for inspiration? Where do you go when you’re looking for an idea? Let me know…

This December I graduated from college. After graduation, I started working a basically normal work week—40 hours. That is 40 hours of web design per week. While I love it, I have found that much focused time on doing one sort of creative task can be quite taxing on me mentally and creatively. After a month or two of working, I just found myself repulsed by web design. And by repulsed, I mean it made my head hurt to look at websites (and I’m not kidding).

When I was in school, there were semesters when I was taking 3+ studio classes which means I was in the studio working 20 or more hours a week. That was on top of other homework, 15 hours of work, tutoring in a writing workshop, directing design for an online publication, and other extra-curriculars. I was much busier then, but I didn’t feel burnt out, in fact, that was one of the more productive times in my life. So, I wondered, what’s different now?

Well, this realization wasn’t as concise and clean as I’m putting it here, but I came to believe the difference is that in school I was involved in a lot of things, but there was a lot of variation. Now, there is little variation so it’s easy to really get sick of what I’m doing.

So, a month or so ago, realizing this, I started being intentional about keeping my creative output varied. I have tried a few things I’ll show you, but I think part of the success is changing it up it all the time. So, I started with sketching more and I’m moving into some other areas now.

Hand Lettering

My first attempt at this was to start doing some hand lettering. I’m pretty horrible at it, but this has helped a LOT in facilitating creativity. I find just doing something that requires me to think in a way very different from how I think about web design has really kind of freed my mind. Here’s some of what I’ve come up with:

Type Play

The other thing I’ve been doing is taking two things I love—type and patterns—and playing with them in fun ways. My first attempt, I just took a lower case ‘r’ and started playing with it. I began with altering the letter-form slightly. Then, from there, i just started repeating and overlapping it and making some cool images. Here’s what I came up with:

This discipline of creativity, a few weeks after starting it, I have found has been very productive. I have much better ideas now than I’ve had for a while and I enjoy my work instead of it giving me a headache. I suggest it. If you have other ideas as to how to help overcome burnout, let me know. I’m interested in what others are doing.