Amongst a mailing list thread about Ubuntu's alpha/beta wallpaper design, there was some lamenting about how it takes too long to agree on a wallpaper. And while I admittedly know absurdly little about the inner workings of the distro and its administration, I found the following comment quite funny:

"I do agree that it takes waay too long to choose a wallpaper.  We should organize a third-level subcommittee to fix this."

Hopefully, a third level subcommittee consists of one guy alone in a room choosing the wallpaper.

Proof that if you spend your idle time sketching typefaces and logo wordmarks on enough scrap paper and notebooks, and if you leave enough notepads and pens lying around, there is a small chance that things will rub off.

We've had a great holiday season so far. Hopefully everyone else has too.

ps. Criticize the lettering forms if you must. But realize that as a father I cannot be deemed anything remotely close to unbiased here. Every counter, ascender, descender, and tail is absolutely positively perfect!

A little over two weeks ago, I got an email from one of the developers of a project called OpenPilot asking if I'd be interested in creating a logo for the project. OpenPilot is an open source project developing an autopilot system for model aircraft - interesting stuff. Always looking for a creative challenge to focus on, I accepted the offer. It was an interesting challenge and I thought I would post a little about the process I went through.

Before I get started I must thank Troy Sobotka for doing his usual best and being a great soundboard for ideas and great creative discussion. It's good to have someone around who's willing to encourage but also throw out some really honest opinions on things - even if you don't ask for them!

I emailed the developer back and asked for some background information on the project. Its primary use was on model aircraft, so the audience for this would most likely be aircraft enthusiasts. Also figuring that they'd be more technically minded, I knew I wanted it to be simple, but interesting. The goal was to give the project an identity that was modern, and which expressed a feeling of quality and accuracy. After all, would you want to risk your expensive model aircraft by using an autopilot system consisting of duct tape, and a few bungee cords?

I first frittered around and sketched a few things. The first idea I had involved a sort of 'horizon flyover' concept:

A quick trip to Inkscape yielded this:

That initial quicky mockup felt devoid of any character to me - and it looked a bit too thin and wispy. The bottom line was that I didn't like it, so I dropped it and decided to pursue other ideas.

More sketching yielded this sketch of a sort of takeoff flight path:

While I thought it had some potential, it looked like it would end up too complicated for a logo. So I simplified the concept somewhat and came up with these:

The lower one really caught my fancy as something that had real potential so I chose to pursue it. First I attempted a traceover of the sketch in Inkscape but immediately realized that I'd get the perspective all wrong, so I dropped that and decided to model a simple square path in Blender to get it right (the initial part of the path is semi-transparent so that I could see the shadow beneath):

I took the result into Inkscape and traced that. An initial mockup gave this:

This really had potential. Unsurprisingly, I made my usual mistake of going a bit far with gradients and shadows. This was too complicated and fiddly for a logo. Troy suggested stripping it down until it broke - and that didn't take long.

I found that without the gradients I lost the feeling of slope in the path. And without the drop shadows.. well, let's just say it broke - big time. I had to try playing with the path more to get that elevation feeling without the drop shadows and gradients.

I found that by crossing the path over itself, I could ensure that the path moved 'up' in elevation. Even better, I found that by adding some subtle breaks in the path I could even give the feeling of a shadow at that crossover:

At this point I also had to confirm how this would work in monochrome options as well:

Two things became apparent. First, I had the happy accident of getting the letter P in some of those orientations. Second, it was so much better to have the plane going up instead of heading down. Even with the paths crossing, (arguably) inferring increasing elevation, the overall direction of the plane is downward. And that can't be good.

So the next iteration involved horizontally flipping one of the options and coming up with:

In addition to rotating the logo slightly to better achieve the 'P' effect, and squaring off the dark grey background pill, I also decided to have a play at the text. While I hadn't been terribly disappointed with it, I wanted to try something different just to see:

I felt I was almost there. Troy suggested I man up and create a simple style guide for the logo. This would better guarantee against misuse of the logo (stretching, colouring, bling-ifying etc) and may teach me a thing or two about how these things should actually be done in the 'real' world.

Also useful is that creating a style guide can surface issues you hadn't initially considered. In fact at this point I had to come with a horizontal orientation of the logo for potential uses as a wider format web header graphic. I simply hadn't thought of that. Of course Troy had to stage a mock conversation between a few swarthy Italian-Canadian web designers over Google chat for me to understand how this situation might arise. If you don't believe me, I'll post the chatlog.

The final logo with alternative horizontal layout turned out like this:

I'm proud of the style guide as well. Not proud that I used Inkscape instead of Scribus to do it. That's kind of like using the back of the pliers to hammer in a nail. It works, but it's far from the best way. In any case I plead newbieness for mistakes like that. It's all a learning process.

Here's the completed style guide if you want to have a look.

OpenPilot Logo Style Guide

This was a fun project. I'm proud of the logo because it took a lot of work (at least compared to most things I've worked on in the past), it proceeded rather logically, and I feel good about the result. As usual I learned a lot of useful things along the way which can't be a bad thing either.

Cropped from a photo I took at a community centre we're renovating. I know it's a place for learning or at least not causing trouble.. but jeez, you've just taken away 80% of the fun!

Besides, the bench can't be all that bad can it? I'd be willing to risk it.

Who said YouTube comments can't be inspiring, uplifting and deep?

A recent comment on one of my early Inkscape screencasts that I posted to YouTube back in the day:

...can u use this as photo-shop? cuz i have it? as well but im compleatly lost at it, like i want to put the background like of city view behind me, then just like make the smokes stand out if im smokin and all that, so if u got tips fo me or atleast somethin, hit me back, thanx , nice vid tho 5/5

I'm almost tempted to make an image based on this.

As an aside, I wonder if Ricky from the Trailer Park Boys has recently discovered the internets. (note: aforementioned link contains plenty of offensive, and hilarious language).

Are you creating something?

Maybe it's a blog post like this one. Maybe it's a logo, or a desktop wallpaper. Are you writing a piece of software? Maybe you're helping to create the next great Linux distro (HA!). Maybe you're busy crafting an email to a prospective client or developing your own video podcast. Heck, are you busy writing a tutorial on how to best prepare a grilled cheese sandwich? (if you are, I recommend this method).

If you're doing almost anything creative - and it's hard to find people on the net who are not - I implore you to consider the following term:

Audience.

Write it down. Stick it on the side of your monitor, or write it at the top of your page. And if you're not sure who your audience is, stick a big fat question mark beside it and make it your goal to erase that question mark.

Once you do, once you define exactly, and succinctly, who it is, you'll arrive at a better, more rewarding result when the proverbial day is done.

And that exactly and succinctly part ain't easy. If the word "everyone" appears anywhere near your audience definition, double back and redefine it - you've obviously done it wrong.

I'm not here to preach. I'm here to learn. And as I do, I intend to share what I manage to soak up. Sure, there is a lot more to creativity and design than just audience (a LOT more), but I can't think of anything more important. If you're looking for a starting point for your creative endeavour, audience is it.

Who is the audience for this post (and hopefully others that will expand on this subject)? People of the Free Software ilk who are interested in discussing and learning about the concepts behind creative design.

You honestly didn't think I'd arrive at this point completely unprepared did you?

The impetus for this post comes from a good friend who very recently pointed me to a three (yes three) year old mailing list reply from Havoc Pennington. Do yourself a favour, get a beverage and head over to his posting. It's definitely required reading.

A few weeks ago I decided to use the spare 50GB partition on my laptop to install Ubuntu Karmic. And while Crunchbang is still my main desktop at this point, I can say that Karmic is seductively gesturing at me to switch. I like the look of my Karmic desktop. It's pretty much bog standard although I have switched to the Dust theme and also use the Humanity icon theme:

Thoughts? I like the warm feel of it. There are those who will forever hate the brown, but I think this is a strength to which Ubuntu should play if they ever really get focused and figure out exactly who their audience is and design accordingly.. a little more on that in a minute.

But what about checking how the other half lives? What about KDE? Maybe I should have given 4.2 or 4.3 a chance? I've never been a KDE user, and frankly I've never liked what I've seen there in the past. But hey, it's been a while. So here's a KDE screenshot from the kde.org site:

Impressions? Not good. It makes me feel uneasy. Not exactly run-screaming-from-the-room uneasy. More like a not-in-a-million-years type of thing. Rather than just say "Ugh, I think it's ugly".. I've decided to actually try to suss out at least some reasons why I don't like it - at least get that conversation started. And let's not try to couch it, this is really not a KDE-only discussion. Gnome has its fair share of problems too.

Here is a quick overview of some problems I see with that KDE desktop screenshot:

Attention to Detail

I don't understand the thinking on alignment of the button text in KDE. The text on the buttons is not centred vertically. There is very little padding around the text, which means that the button label with hotkey underline is centred (see that Select button?) But the "To" fields have no underlined hotkey so they're thrown visually off centre vertically. The small amount of padding only accentuates the centering problem.

Note also that the gap between the second recipient text field and the subject line is almost but not quite the same as the gap between the two recipient text fields. Is there supposed to be a visual separation between the the subject field and the recipient fields or not? It's wishy-washy which then results in a not-quite-polished feeling.

Look at the top right of the information panel in the Dolphin window. Is the home folder icon in the breadcrumb trail supposed to be up tight against it like that? And without much visual separation between functions in that area (info panel/breadcrumbs/toolbar/application menu) it's a mess.

The items in the toolbar along the bottom of the screen appear to be cramped. There is so little padding around the various items that it looks cartoonish. In fact the icons, clock, battery indicator.. heck everything looks like it was placed there and then scaled up 10% without scaling the toolbar itself. There is also very little visual separation of areas within the toolbar (kicker menu, virtual desktop pager, application launchers, active application panels etc.).

Visual Hierarchy

There is very little in the way of hierarchy. Look at the breadcrumb trail in the Dolphin window. The text in that breadcrumb trail is slightly (again indecisive) larger than the toolbar button text. Should it be larger and more important? Smaller and less significant? Or identical? I'm not sure whether that question was ever asked.

Look at the overall KDE screenshot once again. The icons and text in the places panel are larger than just about any other components in the window. It looks like the dominant component in the Dolphin window. Is it supposed to be?

In the mail window is there some attempt being made at horizontal separation of various toolbar functions? There are some vertical grooves, but they are barely noticeable. Whether they actually serve to separate anything is debatable.

And looking at the entire desktop, the differentiation between what is active and what is inactive is weak. Other than that small piece of window title text, which is light grey, the Dolphin window looks every bit as active as the KMail compose dialog.

I think a lot of desktops put very little if any thought into visual hierarchy, on how to guide the eye. KDE looks to be no better, probably worse.

Focus

The problem with any design discussion like this is that it invariably falls apart into a subjective argument between things like light vs dark, cleanliness vs features etc. (I fully expect to be called a hater of some sort or another). But I have deliberately tried to stay away from the actual style or character of the desktop, and only dealt with cold and calcuated design items like visual separation, alignment, and consistency. The discussion should be about design. Not personal preference, taste or style, but design. All that other stuff can only come with a defined audience.

But of course you could take all of the best design items and intentions, throw them together in a pot, but without defining your focus (and by prequisite your audience), whatever you come up with will invariably lack soul or conviction. I've done enough half baked graphics projects to know this full well. To really start down the road of really improving the visual design, the first step is to define the audience.

What next?

Free Software programmers have very little problem asking for, seeking, and using the knowledge of others to improve their work. It happens all the time, "on the shoulders of giants" and all that. Well what about graphic design? Why is so little attention paid to the already well-developed knowledge base of graphic design? Why do people have to consistently shout about finding an audience when it is so intrinsic in all other areas of design, graphic and otherwise? And why do those cries seem to fall on deaf ears? Why do classic design principles take a back seat to almost everything else? I don't think it's unreasonable to expect Free Software to raise its game design wise. Even baby steps could yield big improvements once graphic design is taken seriously.

Clearly good graphic design is not trivial. I should know, I've created plenty of bad design myself. But it ain't magic either. There are rules, theories, and concepts that govern it. We should learn them.

As someone who's interested in design and always looking for good information on the subject, I have happened upon a gem of a resource: The Design Guy podcast.

If you're looking for a wonderfully polished podcast full of great information delivered in succinct and engaging way, look no further. The Design Guy (aka Anthony Rotolo) is your man. The episodes are short and utterly well thought out. An quick hit of quality information if there ever was one.

The best part about it is that his focus is on.. er.. well.. the timeless principles of design, and NOT the tools. If you're looking for the best way to create a website header or how to generate a logo design, look elsewhere. If you're a design hack like me who's always interested in raising his game, then this may be for you.

And while it hasn't been updated in months.. there are 38 fat-free awesome episodes to enjoy. And better yet, the blog posts for each episode (I believe) are direct transcripts of the podcasts, so even if you're not a podcast listener you can still get all the benefits of this great resource.

I've been having quite a few discussions lately about art, creativity and other artsy fartsy nonsense. But you know, if you're going to spend time creating something, a blog post, a photograph, a piece or art, or music, even a programming project; why wouldn't you approach it with a bit of your soul. It's much more engaging that way.

The only trouble with putting your stamp on something is the layers of crap you usually have to wade through to get there.