19Apr
Recently I’ve been searching for ways to improve as a designer and obtaining a little more feedback on what I do from others in the community should definitely help. For most client work it’s not possible to get feedback like this early in the design phase but a project I’m doing for a friend seemed like a good opportunity to try something out.
Below is an early stage of a design I’ve been working on and essentially I’m going to describe a bit of the thinking behind the design and hopefully get some feedback to help make it even better.
Continue reading “A New Design: Part 1″
1Apr
When the BBC first released the beta version of the new BBC homepage a couple of weeks ago I was initially disappointed. On first impressions it just didn’t seem a radical enough change and some parts just didn’t look balanced anymore with odd padding’s and margins. All this plus the clock was gone, sure it served little purpose but I loved the retroness of it. Sure the BBC gave a suitable response describing the changes they had put in place but this hadn’t answered my concerns. Something simply wasn’t right.
But now I’ve figured it out, they promised me so much more.
Continue reading “I’m sorry I don’t like the BBC Beta”
29Mar
It’s always been a problem of web design that it’s not always so easy to come up with an original idea, can any idea actually be considered totally unique anymore? In the absence of talent and inspiration some designers will simply steal someone else’s work and pass it off as their own. Yet after reading Brad Colbow’s recent post it got me thinking about the thin line between what is inspiration and what is stealing.
It’s amazing when you think about the things that we don’t consider stealing that could be claimed as such. Is Google Buzz stealing the idea of Twitter or Facebook stealing the idea of Myspace? Because they’re simply ideas we don’t think of it as stealing, so how about the original ideas in web design. Was the second person to use the letterpress style stealing from the first, and at what stage did it become a trend rather than stealing?
Continue reading “When does inspiration become stealing?”
9Mar
It’s frequently the first thing mentioned by a client when commenting on a new design and it quickly leads to a designer crying into their hands. On the face of it it’s really not that big a change to make but the reasons behind a client requesting it and the frequency in which a designer receives such a request is what makes it such a big problem.
In the past I’ve had little comeback for clients with such a request because I simply wasn’t able to communicate effectively a reason to not change the logo size. Why exactly would making the logo bigger ruin be a bad thing. Often I could see it unbalancing a page but this reason just didn’t do anything to convince the client. So instead I’d just make the change, too battle scarred to fight, and get into a stinking mood while doing it. After two requests from different clients yesterday I decided to have another look into it and see if there was a good reason out there that even the client could understand.
Continue reading “Can you make my logo bigger?”