I'm a Christian, a designer, and a gadget fan who lives in Cheltenham, UK.

This is my blog, a creative outlet to mess around and play with as well as a place that logs my thoughts and inspirations.

Category: Design

I for­got what the whole apply­ing for jobs process was like, hav­ing to update pro­files all over the web on var­i­ous dif­fer­ent web­sites which adver­tise jobs in the cre­ative indus­tries. Start­ed to breathe some new life into my Dribb­ble account and actu­al­ly start mak­ing use of Behance.

Art Direction for the Web Using CSS Shapes — Smashing Magazine ›

Sad­ly, you won’t find many inspir­ing exam­ples of web­sites which use CSS Shapes. That doesn’t mean that inspi­ra­tion isn’t out there — you just have to look a lit­tle fur­ther afield at adver­tis­ing, mag­a­zine, and poster design. 

I’ve been think­ing about my own web designs late­ly, and real­is­ing how often they can lack vari­a­tion in the shape com­bi­na­tions I use. This is a great intro­duc­tion in to using bet­ter art direc­tion for the web, CSS shapes isn’t a tech­nol­o­gy I’m over­ly famil­iar with, per­haps its time to do some more learning.

One of my favourite chairs

The weath­er in Chel­tenham the last few days has been glo­ri­ous, it has a big effect on my men­tal health when the sun shines and I can have the big doors of my liv­ing room open to let the sum­mer air in to my flat. It can also have a neg­a­tive effect though, with the sun shin­ing so bright­ly see stuff that I’ve not cleaned for a while and it makes me want to fix that.
This after­noon the sun caught one of my chairs in such a way that it showed up so much dirt I was hor­ri­fied. I undid the cov­er to check if it had wash­ing instruc­tions, it did, and prompt­ly put it in the wash­ing machine. While that was in the wash I gave the frame a bit of a scrub as well, it’s get­ting a lit­tle worse for wear and could do with some more atten­tion but it’s not in bad condition.
It got me think­ing about how old the chair is. I’ve had it for some­where in the region of 15 to 20 years, so it’s no sur­prise the frame is a bit rough in places. The chair is an IKEA Poäng and if I’ve had it that long it got me won­der­ing how long IKEA have been sell­ing it for. Turns out, accord­ing to this Fast.co arti­cle, the design of the chair is over 40 years old. I guess you could call it a bit of a design clas­sic. The frame of the ver­sion I have is a lit­tle dif­fer­ent to the ones you buy today, but the design is essen­tial­ly the same, and it’s kind of com­fort­ing to know that time­less design pieces are still being pro­duced and loved by mil­lions around the world. It’s also nice to know, that in a world of throw­away prod­ucts, some rel­a­tive­ly inex­pen­sive things can last a long time. The age of my chair is noth­ing com­pared to the one that the founder of IKEA has.

The Bulletin Board ›

I’ve been read­ing Austin Kleon’s blog since Jan­u­ary, I find the way that he speaks about his note­books and how he uses them very inspir­ing. Today’s post is about his bul­letin board and how he pins images, clip­pings, index cards, and var­i­ous oth­er bits to it for inspi­ra­tion while he is writ­ing a book.
The ana­log nature of lots of things that Austin does has real­ly caught my atten­tion. I love tech­nol­o­gy, but as a design­er I also love objects and paper. When I was a stu­dent I cov­ered the wall of my room in halls with bits of graph­ics that I liked. The whole thing turned into one giant col­lage of inspi­ra­tion. That’s some­thing I would like to get back into my cre­ative life, some­thing tac­tile and away from a glow­ing rectangle.

New Logo, Identity, and Packaging for PT’s Coffee Roasting Co. ›

For me there’s no bet­ter com­bi­na­tion than a cof­fee and design. The two seem to go togeth­er per­fect­ly. They both require pas­sion, pre­ci­sion, and craft to get the best results. I could­n’t resist link­ing to this Brand New’s show­case of a new logo, iden­ti­ty, and pack­ag­ing for PT’s Cof­fee Roast­ing Co.. This is one thing I would love to do, a com­plete brand­ing for a cof­fee roaster.

New Logo and Identity for Dartmouth ›

Brand New fea­tured the New Logo and Iden­ti­ty for Dart­mouth Col­lege designed by Orig­i­nal Cham­pi­ons of Design.
I real­ly like the whole design, from the ori­gins of the type used in the word­mark and the his­to­ry behind the pine emblem. The exe­cu­tion is real­ly well done and very con­sid­ered in it’s exe­cu­tion, espe­cial­ly when you con­sid­er the num­ber of depart­ments and areas with­in a col­lege the size of Dartmouth.

Adobe’s iOS App Failure ›

Over on Six Col­ors Jason Snell speaks of his dis­ap­point­ment with Adobe’s iOS offer­ing. I’ve long been dis­ap­point­ed with Adobe’s approach to the plat­form and I couldn’t agree more with his comments.

But it’s frus­trat­ing that Adobe has failed its core design cus­tomers to such a degree—and it’s also a big risk for Adobe. Pho­to­shop com­mands a lot of space in the brains of many cre­ative pro­fes­sion­als, but a lot of those peo­ple want to use iOS. If Adobe pro­vid­ed them with ful­fill­ing tools for iOS—ones that are as capa­ble as what’s avail­able on macOS and Windows—it could keep its cus­tomers loyal. 

As a design­er the iPad has always appealed to me as a means of cre­at­ing. It seems like it should be the most intu­itive way of lay­ing up designs and draw­ing out ideas. The iPad Pro and Apple Pen­cil only served to enhance this idea for me. Yet Adobe con­tin­u­al­ly fail to acknowl­edge that we could do seri­ous work in an iPad. They keep serv­ing up “mobile” apps instead of actu­al­ly con­sid­er­ing how an app like InDe­sign or Illus­tra­tor could function.
It took Microsoft years to bring Office to iOS, and in that time apps arrived to fill the gap they had left caus­ing Office to lose mind­share. That’s now start­ing to hap­pen to the Cre­ative Cloud apps, Affin­i­ty Pho­to is excel­lent, and more than capa­ble of grow­ing in to the gap left by a lack of a ful­ly fledged Pho­to­shop. My hope is that oth­er apps will rise up to fill the gaps left by a lack of full ver­sions of Illus­tra­tor and InDe­sign or that Adobe gets its fin­ger out and cre­ates them.

Big Screens, Even Bigger Lessons & Learning to Make Tough Calls ›

This is a real­ly insight­ful look into the process behind mak­ing an iPad app from an estab­lished iPhone app. As a design­er I have some knowl­edge of design­ing for dif­fer­ent screen sizes, but the behav­iour of an app is very dif­fer­ent to the behav­iour of a web­site, albeit with some sim­i­lar­i­ties. Before I begin any future web design projects I’ll def­i­nite­ly be giv­ing this piece anoth­er read or two.