Last night I came across a new post on stuff and nonsense entitled Could you be a dick? in which Andy Clarke challenges the world to come up with a spoof business card for a private investigator.
I was rather amused by this proposition and set to work on my own idea which has now been uploaded to the Hardboiled card flickr group. The nine best entries (as judged by Mr Clarke himself) will go on to feature in the pages of his forthcoming book “Hardboiled web design” to assist in the explanation of CSS3 selectors.
Last night whilst catching up with twitter I saw the following tweet from Remy Sharp…
Snap Bird is essentially an enhanced twitter search application that Remy has built to find archived tweets which are more than seven days old. I liked the idea and also liked the name ‘Snap Bird’ and I then began to wonder what a snap bird might look like if it where real creature. Before I knew it, this day dreaming had spawned an impromptu design session and moments later I’d cracked out Fireworks and had begun creating an illustration of a snap bird.
From this simple character I continued to develop a logo/brand and before too long I had created an entire layout for the Snap Bird home page.
I was quite pleased with how this design had turned out and decided to email Remy a link to the design to see if he was interested in using it to replace the largely unstyled version that he currently has up. As yet I have had no reply, although judging by further tweets from Remy today, it seems that he has already begun work on his own design.
I look forward to seeing what he produces.
EDIT: Find out what happened in this follow up blog post
I was recently asked to help out designing a website for a new online marketing consultancy called Firehorse Digital. The original brief asked for a template design with a left column for navigation, a central column for content and a right column for additional information. The company already had a logo but wanted this expanding into a fiery brand for the website template.
The image below accompanied the brief in order to better reinforce their vision.
At first I came up with two designs. The first featured a lot of red and orange and had a left aligned navigation which joined the currently selected page to the main content with a white highlight. The second had a lot more white space and used a right aligned navigation with a subtle color change to show the current page. In this design I also lifted the right hand column off the page with a background colour and a bottom shadow.
In both designs I decided to remove the background colour and surrounding box from the logo and make it white. I felt that this made the logo look more modern and stand out better in the fiery colour scheme. To reinforce the brand further I also used the horse’s head element of the logo in a decorative manner. In the first design it features as a semitransparent watermark on the header and in the second it is used as a footer image in the right hand column.
Feedback from Firehorse was positive and a third design was requested combining their favourite elements from designs one and two. Concept three was based on concept two with the following alterations.
- The horse’s head watermark from concept one was added to the header.
- The navigation was left aligned and the current page was given a more prominent highlight to give a stronger visual tie to the main content
- The left column was given a pale grey background to match the right column. This colour change was needed in order for the navigation highlight to work.
Concept three was nearly there but Firehorse was sad to have lost the fieriness of concept one and was also worried about the amount of vertical space above the main content. For concept four I removed the dark borders on the header and footer and reduced the padding around the central content to ensure that more text could be seen above the fold. I also reintroduced the orangey-red gradient from concept one.
The Firehorse Digital website is currently being built and will hopefully be going live in the near future.
I would like to give a special mention to Regolare a fantastic Italian photographer whose photo many directions where to go I borrowed to use as an example image whilst mocking up the Firehorse designs.
Some time ago I learned about the Firefox 3 T-shirt Contest which was being used as part of the promotion for the new release of Firefox 3. Quite excited by this prospect I joined the flickr group, opened up Illustrator and started working on some ideas.
By the time the closing date arrived there where over 1,700 designs submitted which the team at Mozilla HQ then had to narrow down to their five favourites for the grand final. The top 5 designs where then announced to the public who had the opportunity to vote for the overall winner. Despite being well received by the flickr community my designs sadly where not selected and the winner of the competition was egirluk whose design (which I voted for) you can find out more about in the Mozilla store blog.
Several weeks later I received an exciting email from the comments form on my old website. It was an email from Mozilla HQ asking for permission to use one of my t-shirt designs (pictured below) to give away as the prize for their next competition. Naturally I was delighted and shipped the original Illustrator files off to Mountain View, California straight away. I understand that the screencast competition was a big success and I have since received my very own complimentary T-Shirt courtesy of the gang at Mozilla.
Thanks Mozilla.
If you would like to buy one of my T-shirts then you are able to do so at the Mozilla community store.
Halo Public Relations is London based PR company with a rapidly growing client base. As a young, start up company I had the exciting challenge of helping Halo to develop a new brand from scratch. The first challenge was to come up with a logo.
For the Halo logo the client was keen to use an actual halo, and the buzzword when we discussed the branding was ‘maverick’. After various ideas and lots of iterations we eventually settled on a concept which used both an angelic halo and some devil horns (the maverick element). Some of the fruits of my labour can be seen below, the final design is the business card mock-up right at the bottom.
For the website design we went with a narrow single column layout and a large decorative background. The background image used combines explosive, meandering vines and radiating beams of light all of which originate from the Halo logo. This image was created in Illustrator CS3 on the mac.
The website was developed using the codeigniter PHP framework and a MySQL database. Particular challenges included the creation of a content management system for Halo to manage the client area of the site and a password protected press area for journalists to download exclusive high resolution promotional photographs.
The site continues to grow and evolve as Halo add more clients and features.
