If you have been following my blog for some time, you may remember my previous article about Furry Puppet Studio. I stumbled upon their website and was amazed by what these guys were creating. Recently, I had an email conversation with Zack Buchman, the Creative Director of Furry Puppet Studio (New York) and he showed me some of their recent work and I was blown away by what these guys were doing, and this all happened inside the time frame of 3 weeks!

The Brooklyn based Furry Puppet Studio has recently been working on a slightly unusual project. Their spunky design team has collaborated with Peco electric company to create a series of electricity eating monsters, helping convince people to rid themselves of their energy guzzlers and trade in for some more efficient wares.

Furry Puppet Studio, headed by Creative Director Zack Buchman and known for their original approach to traditional puppetry, has taken lifeless appliances like a dishwasher, refrigerator and a boring glass window and actually found a way to bring them to life. The end result is a superb combination of creative design and well-executed craftsmanship.

I love this stuff! There are always things you can learn from other creative arts and crafts. So, out of sheer curiosity and intrigue I asked Zack a few questions that I could post here – have a read below at what he said.

Q: How do you find inspiration and develop your ideas for the puppets and everything you guys create?

Answer: “I think I find a lot of my inspiration from the view of a window overlooking the street, or even just a seat in a subway car – New York is brimming with beautiful, memorable characters, and in all manners of shapes, sizes, and colors imaginable. You could probably fill a sketchbook just riding the subway in the morning – and maybe even two sketchbooks if it’s on the weekend when it makes local stops. There definitely isn’t a shortage of source material here.

But as far as style goes, I’ve always been inspired by the pixelated adventure games of the nineties, and, in particular, the brilliant work of artists such as Steve Purcell and Pierre Gilhodes. The designs and characters they have created for those games are just brilliant, full of imagination, innocence and magic – and that is despite the fact that the medium was very primitive and limited in those days.”

Q: What is the creative design process for creating your puppets? Does it start out with sketches and develop on from there?

Answer: “I prefer to use actual, physical materials whenever possible, so yes, most of our characters are born as pencil-drawn, marker-colored sketches. It’s only later on during the creative process that I scan them and finalize the colors and finish on Photoshop.

When I first start on a new character, I’ll do a sort of “free-write” and sketch out any neat ideas that pop into my head. It isn’t until I have a variety of sketches to choose from that I finally distance myself and ask: “What most captures what we are looking for?”
at this stage, I am trying, together with the rest of the creative team, to identify the essence of the character, that core quality we want to preserve as we develop the character further.

It’s this essence that we’ll turn to time and again as we start to construct the physical puppet, which is crucial as there are a number of other considerations to keep in mind at this point as well. For one, the 2-D sketch is now becoming a 3-D foam sculpture, so we have to make sure it makes sense in real space and looks appealing from every angle. We also have to make sure the puppet works practically, and that it allows the puppeteer to show a wide variety of emotions while also maintaining a strong, defined expression.

Another consideration is that we want to make sure the new character fits in with the rest of the cast – the ensemble is really a singular artistic vision, and our new character has to fit in with this vision while still maintaining its own unique dynamic. That’s why it’s so important to understand the essence of the character early on in the development.”

I think all good designers should absorb inspiration from everywhere, and by looking over the fence every once in a while at your neighbours in another side of the creative industry you might just learn something, and find new inspiration that you can translate into your own work.

A few more shots of some of Furry Puppets work:

Where do you find your inspiration from? Or do you have a process for helping you find inspiration?

Related articles:

1. Custom Puppets from Furry Puppet Studio
2. Brilliant creativity by Vasava Studio
3. Vasava Studio: 55DSL XV Years Vinyl Toy

If you have ever studied design at College or University, then you will have experienced a design critique. Back when I was studying, we had a few formal critiques per semester, and informal critiques every week between our peers and our design lecturers. These critiques played an important role in the ongoing development of our design projects.

Typically, a critique would involve us walking over to the wall and sticking up a printout (or sketch) of a logo or poster. Then we would step back, and the class would take turns to comment on the work and our lecturer would contribute to the discussion too. It was quite a difficult thing for me to get comfortable with at first because people are basically standing around passing comment on your work, which you may have poured your soul into for a few weeks. Once you get it though, the experience is ultimately a really positive one.

When you are in such a thriving close knit design group it is easy to get immediate feedback on your work. But when you are out of that environment and floating about in the real world for a while you can very easily fall into the trap of working in isolation. I’m not necessarily talking about working on your own – you coud be working in a busy team and still technically be working in design isolation (in my opinion).

What I mean by design isolation is you may not be actively seeking feedback on your work from your design peers. Seeking feedback from a Sales Manager is not the same as seeking feedback from another designer.

Regardless of how skilled and experienced you may be, you can always benefit from getting constructive feedback from other skilled designers.

You may see where I’m going with this now – dribbble. I have been using dribbble lately to get some feedback on logos, and it has always helped me better my work. However, you don’t necessarily need to be using something like dribbble to get feedback, even just asking a few people on twitter or other designers you know to take a peak at something for you can be helpful.

Even if you can’t disclose your work to anyone else due to privacy issues, then you could still work on little fun projects to keep your skills fresh and seek feedback on that work to continue to better yourself.

Recently I was getting feedback on a logo from Graham Smith, and Catherine Azzarello. And when you have the privilege of getting a critique from designers with 25+ years of experience… be smart, and listen. This feedback is the most valuable you can receive. Graham enjoys sharing his wealth of knowledge and experience, and he has just launched The Logo Clinic for designers to submit their logos to him for feedback and advice.

A few of the other designers I regularly receive feedback from are Chris Johnson, Guido Schetters, and Pete Lacey. And my network of designers is continually growing.

Do you value constructive criticism and actively seek feedback on your work?

Related articles:

1. Do you really need a degree to work as a Designer?
2. Misconceptions about Web Designers
3. Web Designers who can’t code anything?

Recently I had this idea for a little pet project – to create a tweet aggregator site with a novelty theme. One of my main motivations for wanting to build this site was to have a chance to experiment with some CSS3 sorcery. When you make a website for yourself you have more freedom to be bold and experiment further than you would on a website for someone else.

Tweet Moods was built with the Monitter framework – a jQuery aggregator that pulls in tweets from the twitter API using JSON. On it’s own the framework isn’t anything exciting, but that gave me an idea to take it and see what could be done with it to make it more interesting.

Why Tweet Moods? A lot of people tweet their moods on a given day of the week, and there are the obvious trends of happy tweets on Fridays, and depressed tweets on Mondays. I thought it would be interesting to have a site that would let me see what people are saying. Once someone mentions a day of the week and the word “mood” then their tweet will appear in the tweet feed for that day.

For the look and feel of the site I wanted to apply some colour theory to my pages – associating different colours with the moods and days of the week. The most obvious one being the Monday blues. As you move through the week days the colours change, getting more vibrant towards the happier end of the week. And once we hit Friday it’s red “danger” time for the weekend.

The typeface used throughout the site is the stunning Franchise Bold from Derek Weathersbee. “Franchise is a powerful new display typeface meant to communicate your message quickly and with power.”

If you are a type lover, then you will love Franchise bold. And best of all… it is totally free, which meant that I could use this to embedd in the website using the CSS @font-face property. The typeface is in .ttf format by default, but I converted it to a .eot format to serve to IE users. Web font embedding is the way forward.

When you view the site in Chrome or Safari you will see the lovely CSS3 transitions in the site, but if you view it in Firefox you will see some of the CSS3 features, but not all. And if you stroll onto the website in IE then you will see the lovely Franchise Bold typeface, and some of the site loveliness, but none of the fancy interaction features. Afterall, it is an experiment and aimed to target the best browsers using the best current technologies.

A few code samples…

Some CSS code to do the left menu transitions:

And to do the sleek colour fade in-out on the links:

Smooth internal page scroll to hashlinks:

The feedback has generally been really good, and I haven’t really got any negative responses about the site bar a few people commenting on my use of the CSS3 effects. But the whole point of the site was to test how far I could push it visually, and to test the limits of the browsers with these new technologies.

I did actually push it too far at one stage and Chrome and Safari couldn’t handle some of the CSS3 div rotate transitions when using a fixed position so I had to adjust a few things before launching. So I certainly learned a few things along the way, and had some fun while I was at it. So in that sense, I guess it’s a mission accomplished.

VISIT TWEET MOODS

What are your thoughts on the site? Have you played about with any CSS3 transitions yet?

Related articles:

1. New website launched

When I’m asked what I do, I wouldn’t always say the same thing to everyone. Often because I’m often not sure how to best describe it myself to those that are asking. I have always maintained I am a bit like Chandler Bing from Friends… my friends don’t fully understand what I can do. But there are reasons why I wouldn’t always just say “Web Designer”. This article will explain some of my thoughts.

On here I would denote that I am a “Web & Graphic Designer”, because that does pretty much communicate what I am. But if someone in the street asked me I would sometimes say just “Graphic Designer”. It really depends on who it is asking. Different people have varying viewpoints on what the roles mean. Some seem to think that “Web Designers” are like IT wizards and know everything about computers – clearly this is not the case.

There are people who believe that a Web Designer simply builds a website like assembling a garden shed or piece of furniture from IKEA.

This viewpoint makes me feel that there is no real appreciation of the creativity that a good Web Designer possesses. I think it is more a lack of knowledge than sheer ignorance, so I guess people can’t know what a Web Designer actually does unless they are enlightened by one.

Some print designers can have quite a negative view on Web Designers too (in my opinion). I have been in a situation before where I felt that because I was more technical than some of my print design peers, that I was being looked on as less creative than them, as if any strength I have technically can deducts from creativity! Before anyone jumps down my throat on this one, don’t forget that I still do, and always have done both design for web and print.

Logo design was always a passion of mine, and one of the disciplines that I always excelled at most. However, some people would have you believe that a Web Designer wouldn’t be as good a logo designer as a print designer. Pardon? Yes, believe it or not these opinions are out there floating about. So… it might make sense to brand ones self as a “Graphic Designer”? But that can potentially leave yourself open to another batch of misconceptions.

If you are branding yourself as a “Graphic Designer” in this day and age, then you do run the risk of being labelled as someone who can’t code, as discussed in a previous article. So, realistically if you do a mixture of design for web and print, then “Web & Graphic Designer” sounds like the ideal title to brand yourself with. Or, you could just settle for “Web Designer”, and accept that people may not fully appreciate the full scope of what you can do.

I know I’m not alone with my views on this subject, because a lot of Designers must feel the same.

What are your thoughts? Do you understand where I’m coming from?

Related articles:

1. Web Designers who can’t code anything?
2. Do you really need a degree to work as a Designer?
3. Brilliant creativity by Vasava Studio

Have you ever wanted to just write something and not have to worry about being distracted by new email notifications? Or have you ever just got frustrated typing out that article in the restrictive little “compose” window? Until I discovered Ommwriter, writing articles was not always a pleasant task, and often I found myself battling to control interfaces, and generally getting distracted from the sole objective of my task, which was writing a good article.

Extract from Ommwriter website:

A wise man once said “We are all at the mercy of our wild monkey minds. Incessantly swinging from branch to branch.” With multiple windows and applications all vying for our attention, we have sadly adapted our working habits to that of the computer and not the other way around. Ommwriter is a humble attempt to recapture what technology has snatched away from us today: our capacity to concentrate.

Ommwriter is a simple text processor that firmly believes in making writing a pleasure once again, vindicating the close relationship between writer and paper. The more intimate the relation, the smoother the flow of inspiration.

Ironically, I have actually written this article in Ommwriter too (view screenshot). It’s just so beautiful and peaceful. The idea behind Ommwriter is not to replace Word, or your default document publishing application, but to act as a tool to help get the creative juices flowing, and focus on what is most important – the words you are writing. Once I finish writing my articles I save them as an Ommwriter file, then as a simple .txt file, and either paste it into Word or straight into WordPress. Your Mac (still only available for mac) will already have a default spell checker built into your OS, so you can spell check as you write your article.

“If you are a scriptwriter, blogger, journalist, copywriter, poet or just someone who enjoys writing, welcome back to concentrating.”

Ommwriter recommends that you put on headphones when writing so that you are truly isolated and fully immersed in the experience. As you type there are peaceful, ambient background sounds, and you can customise how much you hear. There are also options to have little soft noises as you tap your keys. That word “awesome” is truly overused on the inter-webs, but in this instance I think it is worthy of usage when describing such a superb application.

If you are using a Mac, and you do any form of writing at all, then you should download Ommwriter. Did I mention this is totally free?

What are your thoughts? Would you consider using it?

Related articles:

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2. Microsoft: A Glimse Into The Future
3. I’m now microblogging on Posterous

I needed to go back to my minimalist roots – where I was always most comfortable.

Over time, my previous site started to get a bit cluttered – my own fault really. But the more things I discovered about WordPress, the more things I wanted to include in my site – big mistake. One major concern of mine was that the non-web savvy visitors may not fully appreciate the new minimal design. But then I asked myself… do I care if they don’t? And in short, my answer was no.

The goal of this re-design was for me to develop something minimalist, technically solid, and beautiful to give my blog readers a much better experience on the site.

Not everybody views source code, but I know there are a lot of people that visit my site that do. I am a Designer that can code, but in my last site the markup was starting to get untidy. But now, under the hood the code is valid, and as pretty as possible. I spent a lot of time handcrafting this site. If you take your time to explore the design you will find the little bits of jQuery and CSS3 loveliness that make the user experience that little bit better.

If you are viewing this site in Chrome or Safari you will be seeing the loveliness of the CSS3 transitions on the navigation in the header and footer. And if you are viewing this site in Firefox, you will see most of the CSS3 loveliness including rounded corners, but not the CSS3 transitions. But… if you are unfortunate enough to be viewing this site in Internet Explorer, you will be seeing things a little less refined, but it will work nonetheless. I’m all about progressive enhancement – my sites will always work in all browsers, but the better browsers will show the fancy interface enhancements.

I love typography. And I spent a lot of time working on the site typography getting it just right. On any website, the typography is one of the key things that can have a real impact on the way the users perceive your site (even though they may not be conscious of it). I’m using Typekit to serve up the gorgeous heading fonts, which are Proxima Nova, and Gesta (for navigation).

I could probably write all evening about this (I may blog about this again and go into more detail about the technical side of things), but I wanted to keep it short and sweet – I have about another 10 blog posts in the pipeline to write, so I wanted to just get this one out there!

I know I’m a lot happier with it, but what are your thoughts?

Related articles:

1. The Tweet Moods aggregator
2. Web Designers who can’t code anything?
3. Misconceptions about Web Designers

This is something I have been thinking about a lot lately. This article is not just specific to Designers –  it also applies to Developers (I just shortened the title for the sake of the article promotion). If you asked me this same question a few years ago, my answer may have been very different to now.

Back when I was studying my degree I was operating in the frame of mind that the degree was everything. How else could a student get motivated to spend hundreds of hours doing all that work? If you are studying a degree, and you see the degree as trivial, then chances are you won’t be too worried about passing it.

I was a self-taught Designer before I started my degree. But, I am always uneasy about stating I have X numbers of years experience because some people don’t consider undergraduate years as valid experience. For instance, some jobs ask for a minimum of “2+ years post-graduate experience”, which makes you feel anything you done before that degree is worthless.

I worked quite a few places as a Designer before I graduated – I was never a lazy student. My degree was 4 years long, and for my 3rd year I worked for Intel in Dublin as an Intern. Outside of the US, the Dublin site is the 4th largest in the world, with 5,000 employees. During my time there I worked on everything from Web Development, to Logo identities and Branding initiatives internally. It was an invaluable experience seeing how the corporate world works. I wouldn’t necessarily want to experience it again any time soon though. But… if we were to go by some agencies requirements, that whole experience I had there doesn’t count? Huh?

Over the years I have encountered a lot of really talented Designers and Developers. And guess what? They didn’t all have degrees. Pardon?

Yes, that’s right… a lot of them were self-taught. Personally, I think someone who is a self-taught Designer/Developer should be more appealing employment wise because it shows that they have had the tenacity to learn a profession without being spoon fed information in a classroom.

When you go to a job interview the reality is you will be grilled about what you have done, and what you can do for the company. That is really what it comes down to.

Most Universities don’t teach Web Design too well. Often because a lot of the academics teaching the subject have been in the academic bubble for quite some time, and aren’t in tune with what’s going on out there. There are exceptions, of course. I found the Graphic Design part of my degree to be taught really well. I learned loads from my tutors, who were all successful Designers turned Lecturers.

I think it is great to have a degree, but looking back at my own experiences, and people I have connected with over the past few years, I view things a little differently now.

Talent should be recognised regardless of any barriers to entry. If you’ve got the skills, you’ve got the job. That’s the way it should be.

What do you think?

Do you agree with me?

Related articles:

1. Misconceptions about Web Designers
2. Web Designers who can’t code anything?
3. I am a Designer… Not a Construction Worker

Having not read many books in quite some time, I recently made a decision to start reading again. The first book I invested in was Logo Design Love by David Airey. Considering how much pleasure I get in reading David’s blog, it was the obvious choice.

I have been holding back from buying books because I never seem to find the time to read them. I received Logo Design Love on the Friday, and had it read by Sunday. That is how much I loved it!

I do not want people to read this review and think to themselves “Oh no! Not another kiss ass review!”, because that is not what this is. I’m writing this because the book was immense, and full of tips and advice that would otherwise have taken me years to learn by myself. David shared a wealth of knowledge from his years of experience working with clients from all around the world.

Some of the other reviews I read about Logo Design Love mentioned that the cover may have been a little flimsy and those people would have liked to have seen maybe a hard back cover. I disagree. Although the cover may be lightweight, one of the things that really set it off for me was the embossed logo on the front – David knew those little details would set it off. And one thing I haven’t seen anyone else mention is how gorgeous the composition was in the book. It was obvious to me from first opening the book that David poured a lot of thought into the reading experience.

A few of the stories David shared in the book really hit home with me, because I could identify with those same scenarios that I had been in over the past year. And I found myself almost getting angry thinking back over those nightmare client situations. One of which was the “design by committee”. I won’t delve into any more specifics in case by some chance a client of the agency stumbles on here and reads this. But in a nutshell, a lot of my work has been previously mauled by clients.

Logo design was always a passion of mine, and would have been my niche under the design umbrella. But over the past year some of that passion has been sucked out of me due to awful clients. Don’t get me wrong, I do love my job at the agency I’m working for. But… due to some of the clients I have had to design logos for (and their lack of respect for what I do), some of that spark that previously animated me was reduced. Until now.

This book has reminded me how much I love designing logos.

I intend on reading the book for a second time, and going through each of the chapters highlighting key points that stood out for me the first time. This book really is like a perfect guide on how to design logos that work. I cannot emphasize enough how useful some of the tips were that David shared. David would be an excellent mentor to have access to, and I think he would make a very good design lecturer. I love the style of logos David produces, and his development process which leads to those stunning identities.

A few of my favourite quotes:

David Airey:

“Designers who advertise a list of predetermined prices for x amount of concepts with x rounds of revisions are attempting to commoditize a profession that by definition cannot be commoditized.”

Paula Scher:

“It took me a few seconds to draw it, but it took me 34 years to learn how to draw it in a few seconds.”

David Airey:

“Iconic designs that stand apart from the crowd have just one feature to help them stand out. That’s it. Just one. Not two, three, or four. You want to leave your client with just one thing to remember about your design.”

Logo Design Love has prompted me to order more similar books straight away to keep the fire burning. I have already ordered and received Brand Identity Now, which I have here sitting on my desk to the left. I have been looking through some of Logo Design Love’s recommended books and have added some to My Wishlist on Amazon for ordering soon.

Can any of you recommend a good design book not in My Wishlist yet?

And more importantly, did you enjoy my review?

Related articles:

1. Logo design and Flyer Artwork for Three
2. I am a Designer… Not a Construction Worker
3. The Audiotherapist at Jika Jika Poster design

In an effort to keep my blogging as active as possible, and yet still maintain a solid degree of quality post content on my blog here, I decided to engage with Posterous – the perfect solution.

Initially, I was drawn to Posterous by the beautiful minimal default layout. With only a little customisation and editing, I had myself a ready to go Posterous blog. I plan on using it as a middle ground between my twitter, and my main blog. Usually, when I tweet something I want to share with people, it gets quickly washed away in the sea of tweets. But now, when I post something on my Posterous, it automatically shares it with twitter – so at least there is a point of reference for people to go back to revisit and maybe even add their comments.

» Visit my Posterous microblog

Related articles:

1. Web Designers who can’t code anything?
2. Firerift… a completely new breed of CMS
3. Misconceptions about Web Designers

Over the past few weeks there have been riots in blogland, which all kicked off from this tweet by Elliot Jay Stocks.

Elliot said:

Honestly, I’m shocked that in 2010 I’m still coming across ‘web designers’ who can’t code their own designs. No excuse.

To further clarify and explain what he had meant by the tweet, Elliot published a blog article to fully explain his views. Blog riots followed, and countless designers and developers published their own blog articles both attacking, and supporting what Elliot said.

One of the reasons I like having a blog is because it lets me share my opinion on topics that affect me. That’s why I’m writing this.

Elliot did retract what he said (to an extent), and said something like “okay, designers do not have to be able to code, but they need to be aware of it”. I think he may have got lynched if he didn’t come out with some sort of statement like that, in all honesty. There are some hardcore Designers out there, you know.

Mark Boulton said in his response article he that generally he felt Designers didn’t need to know how to code, but needed to at least be aware of what it does. Fair point.

But, there is one major issue that stood out for me that was not really touched on. How employable are Web Designers that cannot build a basic website?

I am a Designer that designs for Web and Print (Web & Graphic Designer), and have learned to code XHTML & CSS quite well. Being able to code the interface you design is empowering, and will give you a great deal of satisfaction from your work.

There are brilliant User Interface Designers out there that probably cannot code a single line of CSS, and still deliver awesome work, which then is built by a Developer. And I understand that, and salute them for being brilliant at what they do.

However, my point is this - if you are a young Web Designer starting out, and you cannot code any of your own designs into a basic working website, then you will really limit your options for employment.

It is easy for Designers at the top end of the industry to say that Web Designers don’t need to know how to code, when they do know how to code. I wouldn’t say that to any young Web Designer that’s just starting out. With a bit of time, and effort, it is possible to learn XHTML and CSS to at least a basic/intermediate level, and doing that will make life easier when going to job interviews.

In harsh economic times employers are wanting more bang for their buck, and are expecting candidates to be able to do more stuff. I’m not saying it’s fair, because it isn’t, but that is the how it is – especially in Northern Ireland where I’m from.

I’m saying that every Web Designer should learn how to code their designs, then at least have the option to choose not to on down the line, and take a step back, and let the Developers do their thing. Having a more in depth understanding of how a website is built will make the designer much better at what they do, and open up more doors for employment.

Do you agree with me?

Related articles:

1. Misconceptions about Web Designers
2. Do you really need a degree to work as a Designer?
3. Firerift… a completely new breed of CMS