News & Blog

.Net Magazine is currently running an article on their site asking if there is such a thing as a perfect web design app — and if there isn’t, why not. Writer Craig Grannell asked a few web design practitioners for their input, here’s what I had to say in regards to web design and typography:

Other designers pick up Pitman’s point about existing design tools from Adobe being rooted in a bygone age. Tom Muller, director of helloMuller Ltd is hugely into typography, which many web designers are finally waking up to. Web fonts now enable websites to include more than a tiny handful of ‘safe’ typefaces, but existing design apps turn type into a minefield. “There’s always that development hurdle — it looks good in Photoshop, but will it translate to code,” complains Muller. “With @font-face, Typekit, Fontdeck, Google Fonts and so on, we have far more flexibility when it comes to type, but there’s a barrier at the graphic design stage: while I can download a Google Font and use it in Photoshop, it’s still different from an in-browser render.”

The full article raises a few interesting points, which — as always — primarily focus on the transfer between turning a flat design into a working model, and if we’re reaching a stage where some steps should be cut
from the process as technology on one side (the development) is starting to outrun the other, design-focussed side.
I’ve worked through phases in my career where at least 50% of text in my web designs were rendered as images, to avoiding non-system fonts at all costs and using tricks like Flash and sIFR to again try to approach
a more interesting graphic language online, not mentioning using chunks of flash movies to embed headings and site navigations wholesale. Personally I’m excited to see the rise of web foundries, and juggernauts like Google advocating font embeds properly — even though I haven’t had the chance yet to implement this in my own work (more on than another time).

Of course, as I said in the .net article there is still a gap that needs to be filled between designing pixel-perfect screens in Adobe Photoshop and slicing images and writing the CSS for the text styles compensating for the differences. By and large we’re moving in the right direction, but it would be nice to see companies like Adobe take the hint and develop ways to integrate these new advances in the web design workflow.

And then, Adobe releases Muse and kicks us back 10 years. More on that later.

My contribution to Join The Dots, a project by DixonBaxi where they invite friends and collaborators to create a single dot, aiming at creating a series of 100 unique dots. So far, 50 dots have been unveiled: Part 1 | Part 2

A little summer press update for you: The current issue of Web Designer (nº185) focusses its Design Diary spotlight on the new website for Source which I designed whilst at Studio Output. The article features comments and insight on the project from myself and SO’s Head of Digital Dave McDougall alongside the team from Tobias & Tobias who were responsible for the UX and IA evaluation and testing.

Moving from the printed press to online — design magazine Core77 has published an interview with yours truly where I mainly talk about how I ended up designing comics, a love for custom fonts and other nerdy stuff.

Since leaving Studio Output 2 months ago I have been lounging in the sun sipping Mojitos steadily taking on work for a range of new and existing clients worldwide doing design consulting, art direction and a fair share of brand and identity work.

Recently I helped Extreme Music-Sony/ATV Music Publishing in the design concept stage for their Hype Music initiative with MTV and collaborated with Its Nice That on the design of an identity suite for one of their clients (which will hopefully see the light of day this summer). Aside from those jobs I’m still knee-deep in 3-4 other design projects locked behind cast-iron NDA agreements that are and have been shaping up to be really cool if I say so myself.
More news on that probably around September.

The biggest news was dropped earlier this week on Design Week as I have recently joined Conran Singh where I’ll be contracting for the next 6 months or so on one of their accounts.
Looks like its going to be a very busy summer!

I have been invited to speak at Insites (Follow them on Twitter: @insitestour) — organised by Elliot Jay Stocks and Keir Whitaker — a “A series of informal evening talks in July, held in Manchester, London, and Bristol, with web folk sharing their experiences and the secrets no-one talks about.” (Which I find slightly funny, because I don’t really see myself as a pure web person, but I digress)

I’ll be one of the guests on the London leg of the tour on July 19th at the Engine Group Studio along with Natalie Downe & Simon Willison, and Denise Wilton — should be a really interesting evening of talks.

Tickets are available at £29. Hope to see you there!

Following up on my previous image-led entry showcasing some of my favourite classic (i.e. 70s & 80s) Euro Sci-Fi comics, I thought it was only logical to list, in no particular order, some of my favourite (Sci-Fi) film titles. I have consciously avoided the expected choices everyone usually recalls (Star Wars, Alien, Tron, Altered States… to name a few) and narrowed down the (obviously incomplete) selection to only the films — and titles — that have stayed with me (and gone on to, in some skewed way, inform my design tastes) since I first saw them.
See if you can spot some of your favourites!

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CARSON #1 cover

While studying design in the mid-to-late 90s, there were two things that made a considerable impact on me and my work: Emigre Magazine and the work of Carson — insofar that I once copied the cover design concept of Cyclops wholesale for one of my projects with horrible results (aside from being caught out). I grew out of my ‘Carson phase’ by the time I graduated (but not before having both the End of Print and 2nd Sight signed by the man himself) but I have always kept a soft spot for his work, so the announcement of CARSON magazine didn’t pass me by. Thanks to a temporary offer giving people outside of the US the domestic shipping rates I subscribed to the announced 6 issue run.
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Its just dawned on me after having bought the fantastic Weapons of the Metabaron graphic novel from Humanoids Publishing that Science Fiction comics are still a rather fringe affair in the American comics landscape — that is if you’d factor out superheroes, which do fall into the grander SF schema. No, I’m talking about the “classic” SF fare: time travel, space operas, robots, science adventurers and their ilk. The best example would be Humanoids themselves who seem like a bit player in the US market (publishing amazing books nonetheless), when they are the American counterpart of Les Humanoïdes Associés, the legendary French publisher responsible for unleashing Métal Hurlant into the world, giving us Moebius, Jodorowsky, Druillet, Bilal amongst other, influencing a generation of writers, artists and film makers in the process and birthing their equally influential Americanised Heavy Metal magazine.

Growing up in Belgium I was equally feeding off US superhero comics and reading Belgian, French, and other European SF comics which seemed (and still do) cater for all ages and are a large part of the European comics landscape.

All of which to lead you into a slightly arbitrary, and personal, cover selection of books I grew up reading in the 70s and 80s:
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Almost 7 months after I completed the work I received clearance to add the ZONZA to my public portfolio. As you can read from the description on the project page, ZONZA is a web-based distribution platform — and one of the bigger projects I have worked on. I committed to the project a year ago, just before I would start at Studio Output, and worked steadily on the various aspects of the project until November last year when all the branding and design work was completed. I worked closely with both external developers Cantemo (who brought me into the project in the first place) and the lead technical people at Hogarth WorldWide, who created the platform.

I was tasked with the creation, first and foremost, of a ‘reliable, solid, and trustworthy’ brand identity for the service. Looking at immediate competitors like Beam.tv etc it was clear that the way to go was to develop a modern, clean (devoid of any web/tech 2.0 visual trappings) mark that is flexible enough to extend beyond the graphic mark and can become part of the written company vocabulary — ZONZA / \\ — without losing its character.

This brand identity was then extended and applied to the user interface of the site, for which I designed at least 50 page templates and configurations for all possible states and functions — including all the GUI elements, icons, and what have you. This process was as you’d expect very intricate and I worked closely with the project team at Hogarth to make sure that everything adhered to the specific technical requirements of the site, sometimes working from skeletal structures, other times building pages on the fly as we went along.

A massive and demanding project, but also immensely satisfying from a creative perspective —
building & designing something new and innovative from the ground up.

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