Ira Glass On Good Taste and Creative Work

The entire series of clips is worth watching.

Hornall Anderson Blog

We relaunched the Hornall Anderson blog I designed last week. Read my post about it here.

Create Your Rainbow

Really enjoy the concept, content and execution behind this site for Radiohead. I just wish my connection was faster.

The Grid System

Antonio Carusone, designer, blogger, and RPS customer, has just launched The Grid System. An "ever-growing resource where graphic designers can learn about grid systems, the golden ratio and baseline grids."

I love resources like this one, that focus on one topic, consolidate as much information as possible about that topic and filter it down into an organized, easily digestible structure. Nicely done!

Weekend Shows

Friday night Joe and I attended a fashion show by the Northwest Film Forum, Blackbird, Rue, La Rousse and Lambs Ear at Pravda Studio—which is a great venue for parties by the way. It was kind of amazing to see an actual catwalk, with actual models walking up and down the runway, and people applauding at the exceptional attire the models were wearing, in Seattle! The location, the people, the clothes, the music, all made me feel like I was in another city.

Please forgive the crappy iPhone pics, but I didn't have my camera (which I now regret)!




Saturday I went to an art opening at the Wonderful Union Gallery featuring art by Don and Ryan Clark of Invisible Creature. They created a collection of fantastic Mid-Century Modern inspired illustrated prints juxtaposed with the realities of domestic life. Definitely drop by the gallery to see some really great work.

I'm really glad to see events of this sort of scale and focus happening in Seattle. The aforementioned boutiques and Demetre and Greg are doing something really great for the local fashion and art/design community respectively.

Cards

Printed by Evolution Press, whose new identity and collateral were designed by Tara, Kevin and Kelly at Graphiti Associates, who are also redesigning their own collateral. Designing collateral is fun.

Design Book Collection

Today I exported all of the design related books in my Delicious Library and uploaded the book covers to my Flickr account. Cataloging stuff is addicting. Next up, my shoes!

FWA Book

About a year ago, I started working with Rob Ford, the founder of FWA, to get an FWA Annual published.




I've posted the page layout designs I did on my flickr account.

Long story short, we never found a publisher, and the book remains a long lost dream for me (that will happen some day hopefully). I prepared a design explanation of my thoughts for Rob, for when he pitched to publishers the idea and design of the book. This was my explanation verbatim:

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Design Explanation

General Notes:

* Only white, black, grays are used. Only the screenshots, wallpapers and the occasional SOTM, SOTD, PCA banner would be in color – like the site.
* Links are reversed out like selected items on the site – if your on the page, it’s like you’ve selected the item
* Interviews, wallpapers, and articles should be interspersed throughout the book to break up the monotony of all the site page layouts. They serve as visual rest for the eye and will help with pacing of the book.

Page Layout Explaination

Page 1-5: SOTM
Page 1 is a vellum sheet with the SOTM banner and some short copy as to why it was chosen as SOTM, that that overlays page 3, containing a screenshot of the website. Pages 4-5 contain the website description and various screenshots layed out in a grid. No page numbers exist, and black is used as the background color to enhance the importance of the SOTM, as most SOTD’s will be on white. This will help to break up the monotony of white bg pages.

Page 6-7: SOTD Full Spread
If there are sites which were exceptional SOTD’s, a full spread can be dedicated to them to show off more of the work. The page layout grid is flexible, so depending on the design of the website, the grid can best show off the different states of the website. Page numbers with chapter title appear on the outside lower part of pages for easy thumbing.

Page 8-9: SOTD
Most of the book will look something like this, with adjacent SOTDs. Again, the grid is flexible so the size and position of the descriptions and screenshots will vary. Pacing is very important in a collection book like this (all the content is basically the same) so varying the layout is important to keep things interesting. Page numbers with chapter titles (For Placement Only – FPO) appear on the outside lower part of pages for easy thumbing.

Page 10-11: Wallpaper
Full bleed wallpaper with URL of the artist and URL to download from FWA. The position of this can changed based on the design of the wallpaper.

Page 12-15: Interview
Page 12-13 is used for pull quotes (you do this for all your interviews). The full bleed black bg with the white copy centered serves to give the eye a rest from the all the screenshots – it helps with the visual pacing. A deliberate insertion of calm space. To further the rest from all the screenshots, no images are used on the interview spread (14-15), so there’s just text. The FWA URL to the article is at the header of the page.

Dock Idea
I’ve been thinking about how to incorporate the idea of the dock from the site, and how you can use it to basically bookmark a bunch of sites, articles, interviews, and wallpapers. So I thought it might be cool to have a page of stickers that people could peel off to and afix to the edge of pages to add something to a “dock.” The stickers could be color coordinated or just have labels on them, that they could use to wrap around a page or just hang off the edge like sticky notes. It might be expensive to produce, but I think it’s a pretty cool idea, especially if we’re talking about a 550 page collection book.

This idea really goes back to the original design goal of The design of the book should somehow reflect the dynamic nature of the site.

Finishes
It would be nice to do some spot varnishes or gloss to really bring out some of the screenshots or type. For example, putting a varnish over the screenshots in the Jumpman23.com would make the black site really pop off the black page.

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