Design for life

To be honest, these WordPress updates are starting to annoy me. I have at least seven sites running WP and going from 2.3.1 to 2.3.2 on each and every one of them is a bloody annoyance.

But there… DFL is now running 2.3.2

Keeping up with my reading suggestions, rather than artcticles, here’s something interesting I found on “A list apart”, about the future of HTML.

…In a small package. Some comic strips are just like that.

And so it is with this particular issue o “Litte gamers”. This is an inspired strip and one I totally agree with. You must read it. Go on, click.

PS: yes, it is about design.

Since I’m not swimming in time to write stuff, here’s something else somone wrote and you should read.

In this instance, that someone is Bruce Mau, one of the most successful, prolific and indeed insightful designers of our time and the text you must not miss is his “incomplete manifesto for growth”.

Take a deep breath and read it. It should, at the very least, make you think a bit. Here’s the link.

Ben Terrett of Noisy Decent Graphics has written a brilliant presentation early last October which I just stumbled upon and read to the very last syllable. You should go over there and read it yourself.

I for once like the conclusion: I’m a designer, use me better.

I understand a brand needs to be nice and ours certainly is. Emoticons, however, need to convey… well… emotion. So I have the pleasure of being allowed to make a completely pissed-off version of the frog mascot of SAPO.

Really, it’s criminal how much fun I have sometimes.

As I continue to explore higher detailed icons, I’ve been having some fun redoing old emoticons. These are the representatives of the three main Portuguese football clubs: S.L. Benfica, Sporting C.P. and F.C. Porto. They are essentially the same frog, wearing the club colors in the shape of a scarf.

As with the Batman emoticon, I started out with a FreeHand drawing, imported into Photoshop as a smart object. Not much of the original vectorial is left as I redraw everything in Photoshop.

I believe in the flexibility of vectorial drawings, however, FreeHand is rather limited in what comes to gradients and so I’ve been exploring my options in Photoshop.

I know Illustrator is vastly better at gradients, with its mesh gradient tool. Sadly, my company has not bought me CS3 yet. I use the word ‘yet’ with some hope, you will notice.

Design for life has been upgraded to WordPress 2.3 “Dexter”. WP finally has a tag system!

Exploring resolution independence in Mac OS Leopard applied to emoticons. Here is the bat… frog!

Cower in a corner! Basic shape drawn using FreeHand and imported into Photoshop as a smart object for some hardcore tweaking.

This is when my job is really fun:

Photo camera, based on an old Pentax SP1000 my father had (and I’m now keeper of…). Freehand base drawing and Photoshop fiddling.