benwatts.ca » process

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.

The Death of Me: Content in Mockups

Ben — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 01:36:21 +0000

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.

An Abstract Wallpaper (Process)

Ben — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 02:02:09 +0000

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.