Simple

As much as I love tethering to a big screen like the 27” Cinema Display, there is just something magical in this minimal and light setup.

I guess fine-crafted aluminum machines sit on massive wooden tables like both were made for one another. It just feels right.

Of taste and persistence

Do you know how sometimes you feel something and think in a certain way, but you just couldn’t write it down, because you’d have to get more specific? But then you would someday read an essay and it would all just make sense.

This is it:

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me.

All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not.

But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit.

Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work.

Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

— Ira Glass

Orion

I’ve been playing recently with blacks, magentas, violets and spacey purple haze. This is what came out and I’m happily using it as my primary wallpaper on all of my devices.

It’ll fit the 27” Cinema Display and everything smaller, so give your eyes some treat when you show the desktop.

Desktop (2560x1440) | iPad with Retina display | iPhone 5

CodeArtists identity (The Process)

It was about time! Time for what? To make a visual identity for our group that’s making products that is.

This is the final result.

I’ve been struggling with what to do in terms of iconography and meaning. The brand name itself has two pretty juxtaposed words you could say. Code and artists. But the point here is that we combine both aspects into a beautiful whole. The identity should thus reflect this.

This is the avatar, the square, the icon in different shades.

The process

In my mind I was playing with the idea of an artists brush, maybe drawing 0’s and 1’s in some pattern, but those ideas quickly faded, because it would involve some drawing which I’m just not any good at.

Also my style has always been utterly simple, clean and primarily typography based. You can see that clearly showing on the DoubleRecall, TimeKiwi and my own personal identity.

So one day, I woke up and I said sans-serif and serif! Huh, not much of an epiphany, eh?

But what I had in my head, visually, was a strong and technically set word Code and then sort of beautifully, maybe italicized Artists. To me this was the embodiment of both words.

I later of course refined the idea to use a monospaced font for Code and started playing with various brackets after Patricija reminded me of this subtlety.

All that was left now, was the color scheme. I already knew I wanted to use a shade of black for Code and some bright, a little crazy maybe, artistic color for Artists. I was looking through some of the color palettes that Illustrator comes fitted with and after giving up on Impressionism and Baroque I stubmled upon Pop Art.

But I wasn’t satisfied with this. I wanted maybe something more stylized, so I tried playing with Futura as the Code font and got into this square, circle thingie :-D

It sucked. I wasn’t impressed and I’m sure McKayla wasn’t as well.

So I first went for a change of color, when I explored the Pop Art palette as a joke. I actually quite like this iteration. It’s solid.

And the georges serifs of the Justus type don’t hurt. Couple of problems here though:

• no idea how to do a logo/icon
• T-Mobile wants magenta just for themselves (seriously, read about it)

So I finally add the (round) brackets and start playing with them. I wasn’t satisfied.

Then I put curly brackets in the game and a semicolon and things started to look right. I also switched the magenta to a more not T-Mobileish.

I settled on the latter, but you already know that from the beginning of the post. Mostly because I had better options to do the icon.

I’m happy with it now and as a bonus, typographic logos such as this one can be always written anywhere like code { artists }, which doubles the fun.

Be sure to let me know what you think and visit our brand-spanking-new site http://codeartists.com.

Time + Kiwi = Timekiwi

I recently completed the work on our latest endeavour: a multi-platform timeline called TimeKiwi.

It’s features are that you can create a beautiful timeline of things that are happening around you, based on the data pulled from various social networks and blogging platforms.

If you haven’t tried it out yet, I recommend you do and while doing it, do provide feedback for which we’ll be eternally grateful.

One of the tasks before me was making a simple logo for the service, that we could start the branding process. I went through several iterations of shapes, outlines and colours until arriving at my final destination.

Here are the first drafts in which I was experimenting with the positioning and picked the typography: Futura Light.

Some time later I added an outline as the ‘peal’ of the kiwi and improved on the positioning.

This was the colour scheme I used in the end, it features a bit of greens, nice grays and some brick rednecks.

On the way to the final product I learned how to make animated GIFs in Photoshop and made a custom kiwi spinner image.

To make up for the occasional error or two there had to be an image of a sad kiwi.

The services we’re offering are being partitioned by the different sorts of kiwifruit out there. Currently we support the regular green kiwi and the sweet yellow kiwi.

That’s it. I had to play around with colours for quite some time and I also had some help. Usually you’re on a path to success when you see you’re reducing the number of shapes, colours and other attributes. Simplicity is key.

This is the final result. TimeKiwi welcomes you!

Warm colours

New personal MOO cards

So apparently my Klout score is high enough to get some perks this way.

I don’t give a rats ass about Axe shower gels and perfumes, but I like MOO cards. I’ve used them for our current startup DoubleRecall and the mini cards are superb. The quality of print and paper is top notch and everybody upon receiving them says, “Hey, nice cards!”.

Here’s what I came up with for my personal cards, reflecting my minimalistic personality, design preferences and my online presence majx.org:

DoubleRecall biz cards design

The time has come to get some english US centric biz cards for our company. The hardest part was settling which provider we’re going to use. We were all waiting for some time to try out MOO.com, which is unavailable in good old Slovenia. They have a reputation of good quality, fair prices and ease of deployment.

The pricing could be discussed, but quality and ease of deployment was great.

I love not being forced to deal with people, telephone calls and/or email threads just to set up a print. Being a technical person, this is just so much faster.

The design was taken from the original corporate identity I crafted back in november 2010. I just had to modify the designs a bit, since we wanted also the mini cards for some of us.

I love our logo (weird because I made it). I think it has a strong visual character, especially in combination with our signature devil red.

That was basically the driving force behind the decision to make one side of the cards completely red with a prominent devil D.

For the first time in 20 years, there are less homes with TVs

Now look at this. A brave new world.

Gizmodo says “Nielsen says that TV ownership in homes has dropped for the first time in 20 years. This year, 96.7 percent of American households have a television set versus 98.9 percent last year. Two possible reasons (and both very believable!): one is that low-income homes may have struggled with the switch to digital sets and the other is that kids who grew up with computers are getting their TV from the Internet as opposed to buying a TV when they move out.”

Check out the original article

How to turn off slices in Photoshop

Every now and then you’re going to get a web site from a designer, nicely packaged layers inside a Photoshop file. And every now and then this file will be pre-sliced for you, so that when you want to export it with the “Save for Web & Devices” it will always save it to a folder of images.

So damn irritating.

The solution? Simple, once you discover it: View -> Clear slices.

Ahh, much better.