45° Motion Blur <3
Yes, I guess I am getting carried away.
1680×1050 download at Flickr. The sweet bokeh-style circles in the background: here.
Yearly Archives: 2009
The Death of Me: Content in Mockups
Situation: you’re briefed on a site redesign project, existing content is being used.
Up until today I thought being able to use existing concept in a mockup was kind of like winning a contest; having french and english content at the onset of a design is more akin to winning a lottery. It’s much more satisfying to design with real content because it provides a constraint to a design problem; the more that’s known about a problem, the easier it may be to solve. At the very least the solution may be more creative.
Obviously as a designer you’ve got to create a design that is flexible to support varying conditions, particularly if a site is bilingual. At some point seeking to control every scenario that may arise will result in a compromise in design integrity.
With that being said, I learned a very valuable lesson today which completely turns me off of the idea of using real content. It’s a situation where the client becomes so caught up in the content you’ve chosen that it literally skews their entire view of the design.
That was a disconnect I didn’t foresee. Balls.
Sunflowers, Spirals, Flash
Recently a project came up that had the potential to use an abstract sunflower as a lovely motif. After looking into it a bit, there happened to be an equation describing the arrangement of seeds in a sunflower. The equations looked fairly straightforward, but I’m no math wizard and had no idea to figure out the x and y coordinates of the ‘seeds’, but lucky for me I happen to sit across from someone who knows what the hell they’re doing and as a result I have a simple sunflower generator:
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An Abstract Wallpaper (Process)
This thing is nothing fancy, but it’s one of those things that I think is pretty cool because of how it started out … as a grey background with light grey triangles:
^ I made a triangle, positioned it randomly, repeated this a couple dozen times.
I had no idea what I was doing at this point.
^ At some point I got bored of doing that and started selecting (magic wand), filling, and blurring parts of the triangles.
^ MOTION BLUR! Now we’re getting somewhere awesome.
^ Added type, duplicated the blur, adjusted the colour.
At this point I decided that grey and easter colours weren’t going to cut it.
^ Enter vibrant purple-pink!
That’s about it.
There was tweaking to the type (masked bits of it) and added some texture and warmer colours to get the final result.