Design

The Design Conspiracy, noticed a growing trend for silly, irrelevant and often unpronounceable names brought about by expensive re-branding exercises. They created a corporate name generator so you too can have a silly brand name, just like Accenture and Consignia

I checked with a friend and they said there definitely is a rainbow effect in photoshop, why did you tell us there wasn’t one?

This gem along with a gazillion others can be read here. This truly is the holy grail of stupid client quotes guaranteed to make you laugh, cry and then feel depressed because I’m sure many designers have heard the same shit before.

Damn you stupid clients!!

Yes it’s Melbourne Cup day! Yay! My company sweep allocated horsies are Tumeric and Schumpeter. I have absolutely no fucking idea how to pronounce either of them, but they’d better do very well indeed.

On another note, a major-ish web site redesign I spent countless hours designing and coding with clients, project “managers”, programmers and QA people, went live yesterday. I have some very mixed feelings towards it. A lot of my judgments regarding the design were overuled by the powers that be. Countless revisions and changes were made, from small text changes, colour, useability issues, interface design, icons etc. I spent a hell of alot of time working on these but in the end apparently all that mattered was what the client wanted, whether there were more efficient, appropriate approaches, techniques and conventions or not. And what the client wanted, was a rip off of their competitor(s) with their corporate colours slapped in place and rounded edges everywhere.

The aspect of the redesign that I am the happiest with, (but by no means imply that there isn’t room for improvement), are the icons. This project afforded me with a chance to create/illustrate/stylise a small set of icons which are now happily finding their way across this companys’ other sub-sites. Illustration is something I’ve wanted to do ever since I can remember. It’s this interest/passion that got me into design in the first place and is what I want to do.

No the client didn’t go with my preferred design, colour scheme or header and footer treatments, but the icons were the part of this design that both myself, (and my company entourage) and the client, (plus their many, many, many, many layers of red tape and stakeholders) could agree upon. This was the part of the design process that I enjoyed the most, and that kept me going despite the internal politics.

Go Schumpeter and Tumeric!

The TokyoFlash watch site is full of bizarre, amusing and beautiful Japanese watches.

Trip the Light Fantastic by Pimp is an LED display with a unique method of displaying the time. And the all the little coloured lights are pretty to look at.

The Matrix Binary is the perfect gift for the geek in your life. Or a great way of combating that annoying co-worker who asks you the time every five minutes, with one of these babies asking them to see for themselves just once would be worth it.

The part of me that is attracted to glowing blue lights wants a Fishbone LED.

The Emily The Strange website is ghoulishly cool, with an incredible amount of merchandise. You don’t understand, there’s like a gazillion shirts, skirts, dresses, books, bags and patch work dolls, wrist bands, stickers, key chains etc, etc. All adorably, black, red and catty, and I want them ALL.

Mindfield Media are offering a lifetime supply of web hosting to anyone who gets a tattoo of one of their cartoonish company mascots

Kelly creates lamps from stiffened women’s undergarments. She’ll even make you a lamp from underwear supplied by the client — scary

Natural Selections: Colors Found in Nature and Interface Design is a concise article on what is possibly my favourite design element — colour. (For those of you who are not designers/artists of some description, and quite possibly some who are this may sound a bit mad). It’s also an element that clients are very wary with and almost always go with the *safe option, ie blue grey and predominantly white — maybe a smidggen of orange or red.

When clients come to me asking for a new web site or interface they have such bold ideas for being fresh and eye catching, something with a personality of it’s own. In the end all they seem to want is what’s *safe or what their competitor has with a slight twist. Colour is not something clients want to stuff up because it has such an immediate and emotional impact on how users see the company.

Yes sometimes safe colours are appropriate, but it seems to me that this IS the sole reason they are often used, leaving us with some bland unmemorable designs, almost indistinguishable from one site to the next.

*Safe, ie neutral light colours that won’t offend and in many cases don’t impress either.