benwatts.ca » design

Classified

Ben — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 03:33:15 +0000

Every couple of weeks at Shopify we have little design challenges. A recent one involved making what I guess you’d call “word art”. I had just seen Super 8 and decided to do something inspired by that. I couldn’t get the JJ Abram’s style lens flares down, though. Those things are damn difficult to Photoshop from scratch. Heh, that didn’t stop me from squeezing a lens flare into the image, however…

Aw yeah!

Another more recent challenge produced this total cop-out of a graphic below. I got a little too ambitious, ran out of time, and so I slapped a unicorn on the shield I was working on. Ah well.

Oh yeah: I recently switched from Slicehost to Linode and decided to launch a new design to go along with it. I’ve been iterating since uploading it a few days ago. Still has rough edges, but that’s okay! I’m not aiming for perfection… yet.

An iPhone 4 Wallpaper Blitz

Ben — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 02:11:36 +0000

I created a handful of wallpapers for the iPhone recently…

Eye of the Tiger

Ben — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 21:47:45 +0000

I was recently challenged to make an iPhone wallpaper that contained “Eye of the Tiger”, Mortal Kombat, swords, an automatic shotgun, and throwing knives. I knew I wanted to do some kind of whacky photo collage and this is the fruit of my labour.

To be fair, the shotgun in this thing isn’t automatic, the throwing knives are barely visible, and the Mortal Kombat reference has been replaced with a subtle ninja. But come on, it’s still pretty bad-ass.

This 2560×1600 thing is available on Flickr.

Dots

Ben — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 21:30:30 +0000

Hey, this might resemble something …

Only 1024×768. Oops.

Good God, It’s Almost September

Ben — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 01:04:39 +0000

In what feels like an incredibly long time ago (middle school) there was someone in my class who threw a ham sandwich in a drawer in the wall at the back of our homeroom. That sandwich was left in that dark space for months. People at the back of the class started creeping forward, getting as far away from the developing smell as possible (without alerting anyone to the situation). I feel like that sandwich is this site at the moment. How is that for a compelling analogy?

Anyway, in spite of the overwhelming feeling that pressing the publish button is going to somehow take down the server, I’m going to post.

Right, so: this year has gone by much too quickly, particularly since moving downtown (Ottawa). Things have been great downtown so far, though I have to admit: for someone who considers himself a designer, my walls are pretty barren. I’ll get on that… one day.

I was far more proactive about procuring an iPhone 4 on its launch day in Canada at the start of August, though. 7 hours and 24 minutes I waited in a horrible line at the Rideau Centre. I’ll just say it’s a magical device; THERE ARE SO MANY GEEBEES! I decided to make up some wallpapers for that giant-ass 640×960 screen. I was a bit sneaky with one of them, which is obviously the 76design logo — for those familiar with it. It’s posted to a few Flickr iPhone wallpaper groups, so if anyone out there ends up using it I’ll get some kind of perverse sense of satisfaction.

The other one is not so PG. It was after a long day and sometimes it feels great to throw “Fuck” around a canvas.

And here’s something that ended up coming out of a client project. It’s a simple and literal representation of a network in a cloudy space. More might come from this one day, but until then it’s a 2560×1600 image available for download from Flickr.

Time to dust my hands for completing my second intellectually stimulating post of 2010.

Takedown

Ben — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:58:09 +0000

I’ve tried a couple times this year to participate in “Make Something Cool Every Day” (it’s pretty self-descriptive, flickr set here) but despite my best efforts I haven’t been able to do it successfully. There was a time back in February-April where I was getting close to making something every week, but even that slowly faded away. To help get around the issue I thought I’d challenge myself to a one-hour exercise: 30 minutes to sketch, 30 minutes in Illustrator. That didn’t quite work out, but the result was a tentacled monster taking down a ship. Yup.

Oh, I guess it should go without saying that I was largely unable to adhere to my rules. The sketch was done in under 10 minutes — so I shifted the other 20 minutes to Illustrator time. Then came 30 minutes of Photoshop time … which came about after my time in Illustrator was up and I wanted to keep going; I figure switching programs and setting a new time limit is fair, no?.

What can I say, the system isn’t perfect yet.
The process is too lengthy to do one per day. Balls. It’s got to fit into 30-45 minutes.