Archives for category: graphics

OpenSchedule for Android

April 11, 2011 //

Back in mid-February, I was offered the opportunity to create some graphics for an Android application called OpenSchedule. It’s an application which lets you view and manage information on upcoming conferences and events registered with the OpenSchedule web app. This tied in nicely with the Linux conference stuff I’ve worked on (more on that in some upcoming posts), so I was glad to help out.

I had done a little bit of Android graphical work a while back for the ILF App which consisted of coming up with some background images and an icon. This was a little big more involved in that I needed to create the launcher icon, tab icons and promo images for the Android market.

As usual I learned a few things along the way:

Eclipse can seem like a mystery inside an enigma wrapped in a straitjacket to the non-developer like me. I jumped through my fair share of hoops to get updated resources to show up properly in the emulator. This mobile development thing is not something you come at likely. Full respect to those who do it well.
Guidelines for the creation of Android launcher icons can be found here.
Guidelines for the creation of Android tab icons can be found here.
Likewise, a good description of the promo image requirements (as well as other graphic requirements) is over here. And lastly,
Daniel Frey (the creator of OpenSchedule) is one patient bastard. I peppered him with a stream of newbie questions related to point #1 and he didn’t flinch. - Thanks Dan!

So I ended up creating this launcher icon:

And for the Event, Schedule, and Venue Tabs, the following icons (selected and unselected versions as per guidelines):

And once that was all out of the way, Dan pointed out that there were some optional promo/feature graphics. These show up when you see the app’s market page on your phone and what you see on the web market page as well. Again, sticking to their requirements, I came up with the following two versions:

180px x 120px version:

and a 1024px x 500px version:

All in all a very enjoyable little project. Thanks for the opportunity Dan.

If you want to try out the app, you can get it here, or hit the QR code below with your Android phone:
qrcode

Categories android, design, graphics, inkscape, web

Bitter Designers and Where We Need To Go

August 4, 2010 //

The recent Smashing Magazine post “Designers, ‘Hacks’ and Professionalism: Are We Our Own Worst Enemy?” is an interesting one. I urge you to read it. It brings up several different issues but one that struck a chord with me was the whole feeling about the commoditization of design.

With sites like 99designs.com which leverage design contests and with logos coming to istockphoto.com the apparent cheapening of the graphic design profession is unrelenting. On one hand I understand the ‘world going to hell in a handbasket’ sort of view, but the pragmatist in me tries to step back and see how this is not unique and not at all unexpected.

There is the sentiment that any fool with some graphics software and half a brain can hang his shingle out as a “designer”. Whether they will be successful or not is another matter entirely. There is also the view that design work becomes undervalued and commoditized when clients see that they can get an acceptable logo for $50.00 instead of the $1000.00 the top grade designer may want to charge. Do you want to buy your shoes at Payless or head over to Gucci? Well if the buyer can’t tell the difference (which is the designer’s job to describe), then hell yes I’d expect him to head over to Payless. This is not ideal, but completely expected.

It can be a difficult rationalization. Why should graphic design escape the same sort of trend as desktop publishing, journalism, writing or photography for that matter? What makes graphic designers so unique?

We have seen photography flourish as of late and yet there are still great photographers - in fact I’d say many more of them. Is the photography business as lucrative as it once was? I’d think not. Photographers have to work harder, be more creative and up their quality to survive. I find it great that so many more people are interested in photography - if I was a professional photographer I think I’d probably hate it.

And so it is with graphic design. I love the fact that design concepts start to enter the mainstream. It is no longer a black art. Sure, it would be more romantic if it was, but it’s not. Is it hurting things for professional graphic designers? Sure. But again, I value the proliferation of skills over the health of an industry.

Granted I am not a professional graphic designer nor am I a professional photographer. It’s easy for me to hold these views. And since I’m a shit programmer by any measure, I could just as easily say the same thing for programmers as well (and writers and desktop publishers). Progress and technology lower the bar. That enables more people to participate. I think that’s a good thing, but that dilutes the market for those who’ve been in the pool the longest. I feel bad for them. Sincerely I do.

I am lucky in a way that in my own profession (structural engineering) there is greater liability. When I design a structure I am legally responsible for that design and its performance over the life of the building. This affords us signficantly more protection against the democratization of structural engineering (ha - now there’s a far-fetched idea). This sort of liability is rarely there for software designers, and probably even more rare for graphic designers. I don’t see that changing.

So where is the positive in all of this for our little FOSS corner over here? We already have a community built around voluntary contribution and knowledge sharing. We can take this time to weep about passing industries and shrinking job markets, or we can take a bunch of people who are already part of the Libre Software community and who are passionate and eager about design and teach ourselves great things so we can create even better things.

I think the first step is to admit we have a lot to learn. And perhaps we should just take that statement as fact since we may be the worst people to judge our own skill levels (as John Cleese put so well). Many would also say quite rightly that as far as design goes, Libre-land has nowhere to go but up. So let’s start climbing.

Some things to chew on in no specific order:

We need to learn to provide quality criticism, how to accept it and how to use it. No more ‘put up or shut up’ nonsense. Listen to criticism, evaluate it, discuss it, elevate it.

We need to stop thinking we know everything about design when we clearly don’t. We are smart. We can learn these things.

We need to encourage designers**, but hammer on basic design concepts. Audience, goals, colour, flow, etc.

We need to treat design seriously right from the start of our projects and stop treating it as a suit of clothes.

We need to look at the ‘why’ of good design going on outside of FOSS land. Why is something good? What is the concept at work? Not copying, not being unique for the sake of uniqueness. Let’s try to understand the ‘why’ of good design and apply that.

** I am conflicted about design contests. I understand the problems with them - if you don’t, I highly recommend reading this post. But I still think there needs to be a viable way for those eager to build their design skills to work on meaningful things. If you have ideas in this regard, let’s hear them and get a proper discussion going.

Tags librescope

Categories blogging, design, graphics, linux, technology, Uncategorized

Ubuntu’s Visual Identity Guide

April 30, 2010 //

Did you know that there is a visual identity guide for Ubuntu? I didn’t. But perhaps I never looked.

It’s currently at revision one, and you can find it here. It’s nice to see this aspect of the design taken seriously. I wonder how many other Linux distributions have one.

There are a few things of note on the second page of the guide. It’s a decent attempt at being inspirational and higher-minded, and those are not bad things in my book. Imagine that, trying to get your product to generate emotions, who-da-thunk it.

With all this whining I’ve been doing lately about audience and goal, I almost chuckled aloud at the last line of the first paragraph,

“We stand for the very best operating system in the world, created by the expert few for the global many.”

I think the ‘global many’ is about as nebulous as you can get in terms of audience. And just try and tell me that ‘the expert few’ remark isn’t going to make a large contingent of the Ubuntu ‘community’ howl that this is further evidence that it isn’t being valued - When was the vote held on the content of this style guide anyway? Let’s hope it wasn’t.

Hmm.. reading along some more… what’s this? Apparently the guide is meant to help people create a consistent identity that will communicate Ubuntu values. And as of revision one these values are: FREEDOM, COLLABORATIVE, PRECISE, and RELIABLE.

I’m no linguistics expert but maybe it should be Freedom, Collaboration, Precision and Reliability. And no mention of Light, or Lightness at all. The previously described concept of light doesn’t seem to fit inside any of the above four. Maybe that’s a value for the wordmark and logo, but not for Ubuntu itself - my head hurts.

But let’s remember - revision One.

I went through the rest of it and a lot of it is spelled out quite nicely for a starting point document. I do wonder how strictly it will be followed by those outside of Ubuntu proper. There are a boatload of people out there who like to create Ubuntu-related visuals. I think a guide like this only helps them. But the “Free-means-I-can-do-whatever-the-hell-I-want” community contingent will likely spin this one off as too restrictive without thinking about the greater benefits of consistency and the potential for real, tangible forward progress.

I’m happy to see this document. With a little more focus and a well-defined [cough] audience [cough], that page Two could be a real zinger - almost dare I say it, a rallying point. Let’s hope they push this out into the community - not onto.. but into. It will be interesting to see what happens.

Let it languish and it’s wasted effort.

Tags librescope

Categories design, graphics, linux, technology

Target Your Art

March 23, 2010 //

During this past week I was on vacation and started reading Seth Godin’s latest book “Linchpin”. One particular passage was very apropos to what I’ve been harping on about recently and I thought it would make sense to quote it here. In Linchpin, Godin defines art as a “personal gift that changes the recipient”, and based on this definition, art can encompass all sorts of design work, visual or otherwise. He also states that “most of the time, most of us make our art for an audience.”. He then goes on to give two reasons why it’s vital to know who that audience is:

The first is that understanding your audience allows you to target your work and to get feedback that will help you do it better next time.

The other reason? Because it tells you whom to ignore.

It’s impossible to make art for everyone. There are too many conflicting goals and there’s far too much noise. Art for everyone is mediocre, bland and ineffective.

If you don’t pinpoint your audience, you end up making your art for the loudest, crankiest critics. And that’s a waste. Instead, focus on the audience that you choose, and listen to them, to the exclusion of all others. Go ahead and make this sort of customer happy, and the other guys can go pound sand.

I thought that advice was spot on for so much that goes on in libre software land. We have a tendency to want to please everybody, even when the power of Free Software is built on the concept of being able to tailor software to a specific need. By taking the risk and focusing on an audience, the result is bound to be stronger for it.

Tags librescope

Categories design, graphics, life, linux

Hand drawn outline font… or true love.

December 29, 2009 //

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!

Categories design, family, graphics, life

The OpenPilot Logo

December 12, 2009 //

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.

Tags librescope

Categories blender, design, drawing, graphics, inkscape, Uncategorized

The One Word You Need to Think About Today

November 25, 2009 //

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.

Tags librescope

Categories blogging, design, drawing, graphics, linux

Nitpicking, Design and The Fact That It Ain’t Magic

October 31, 2009 //

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 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 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 could play should they ever really get focused, figure out 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. 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 “I think it’s ugly”.. I’ve decided to actually try to suss out exactly why I don’t like it - at least get that conversation started. And let’s not try to couch it, this is 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 how the button text is supposed to work 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 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?

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

The items in the toolbar along the bottom of the screen appear to be cramped. It looks very amateur. There is so little padding around the various items that it looks cartoonish. In fact the icons, clock, batter 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?

The icons and text in the places package are bigger and more distinguished. In fact to me they look 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? It’s barely noticeable, but there are some vertical grooves. Whether they actually 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 thought into visual hierarchy.. how to guide the eye so to speak. KDE is 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 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.

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.

Free Software developers 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 art and design? Why is so little attention paid to the already well-developed knowledge base of art and design? Why do people have to consistently shout about finding an audience and why does it fall on deaf ears? Why do classic design principles take a back seat to almost everything else? I for one think it’s actually quite easy for Free Software to raise it’s game design wise. Even baby steps could yield big improvements once it’s really taken seriously.

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

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.

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.

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.

Tags librescope

Categories design, graphics, linux

Timeless Principles. Simply Explained.

October 3, 2009 //

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.

Tags librescope

Categories design, graphics, podcasts

And One More Time With Feeling

September 17, 2009 //

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.

grabhold600px

Categories design, graphics, life