I want to give you previews of the things I’m working on but it will have to wait, keep an eye on my dribbble for now. Exciting stuff has been happening and I was even asked to be the featured alumni for the LCC MA graphic design course. I’m honoured!
So much going on at the moment, and so much to look forward to! But first, I am skipping out. Holiday tomorrow, in fact depending when you read this post I am making my way out to Ölüdeniz (Fethiye, Turkey – you can see it in the header image above, paradise!) with Mr Wiscombe. 5* luxury hotel, infinity pool, jacuzzi in the room… and I feel I have bragging rights because this will be my first holiday since 2006.
Yup, it’s fair to say I have earned this holiday, it’s been the work year from hell and everyone needs some downtime. Especially as the MA stuff is about to be kicked into overdrive, with lessons starting the week I get back.
Final project work is ahead of schedule, I’m up to date with freelance work for some magical clients, planning is in motion for my self-promotion stuff for when I graduate. But I have just one week before my timetable starts to go a bit crazy again, so this holiday couldn’t have happened at a better time!
“Without content there is no form, so without form there is no content…” the famous words of Paul Rand, and something I have had to look into for the final MA project. Hasn’t every designer had to study Paul Rand at some point?
I actually can’t wait to show you the outcome for this project, but it’d be a huge mistake to go ahead and talk about it before I’ve shown my tutor… juuust incase he tears me to shreds.
Having said that, I might just get impatient and sneak it to you anyway!
Found this Paul Rand retrospective video over at Vimeo, made by Imaginary Forces, they say: For Paul Rand’s posthumous induction into The One Club Hall of Fame, Imaginary Forces created this short film, combining original animation with a videotaped interview of Rand himself, that encapsulated his unique and timeless contribution to the design community.
Gorgeous vegetable calendar by Victoria Macey. It visualises the best times to grow/plant a selection of different vegetables. The calendar flips vertically for different halves of the year Summer to Winter.
Only bugger is that it’s for growing veggies in California. Someone should really make one for England then I might actually be able to keep plants alive!! …maybe. Posters can’t work miracles, Charlotte.
Awesome illustration by Maxim Dalton, rock legends poster made from all his favourite guitar heroes. See if you can name them all! (Or cheat because I’ve listed them below…)
Frank Zappa, George Harrison, Slash, Jimi Hendrix, Keith Richards, Jimmy Page, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Eric Clapton, Mark Knopfler, Brian May, Johnny Ramone, Jack White, The Edge, Chuck Berry, Angus Young, Pete Townshend, Tony Iommi, Eddie Van Halen, David Gilmour, Ace Frehley, Ritchie Blackmore, Duane Allman, Kirk Hammett, Carlos Santana, John Frusciante, Yngwie Malmsteen, Kurt Cobain, Mike Bloomfield, Jerry Garcia, Ry Cooder, Bo Diddley, Jeff Beck, Tom Morello, Brian Setzer and Peter Green.
Check his site for details on how to get your mitts on a copy. Only $40 plus $11 for shipping to US and Europe, bargain! I’m turning into a bit of a poster peddler on here aren’t I!?
Was sifting through my ‘likes’ on Vimeo recently and no idea why I didn’t blog this sooner but realised this might be really useful for a few friends on the MA looking into the subject of digital/tangible reading. If any of you are reading, I hope this helps!!
It is a prototype for a UI how one might read and interact with digital magazines in the future.
Weirdly, this came out before the iPad was announced, the horizontal to vertical switch of the spreads is almost like those clevercloggs at Bonnier R&D had their mitts on an iPad prototype. So bloody clever.
Completely different from anything out on the market at the time, like the Kindle, which with its non-glare screen may be great for reading reams of text in comparison to the iPad, but not exactly ideal for pretty editorial layout.
We have all heard of the website Clients from Hell so we know it’s all too easy to whine about bad clients. I thought I would cut it out, and instead outline how to avoid ending up on that website, someone’s twitter stream – or someone’s bad books – and instead identify what makes a good client?
I’ve encountered my fair share of beastly clients while freelancing as a graphic designer and before landing the dreamy jobs and magical contracts everyone is bound to get atleast one! So I thought I would compile a post identifying how to be a good client… maybe even a great client! While there are many ways you can become the apple of your designer’s eye, I have tried to keep it fairly straight forward.
1. Know what you want first – including budget!
you might know that you want a website, brochure, spread, packaging… but what do you want it to include?
If it’s a website you want, then what do you want on the pages? Designers can’t get a design finalised unless we have all the info about what content we have to allow for. The more specific you are the more accurate the outcome will be be. Have any inspiration or ideas in existing material? Let us know. Be organised, be ready to go the moment the job is agreed.
2. Time is money friend
The “easier” you make it for us, the less time it takes and the less money you pay! That said, make sure you agree a budget before work starts. If the budget is unrealistic for the amount of work required then the designer can let you know what is achievable. Nobody wants to get half way through a project only to run out of money.
3. Good design takes time
I cannot stress this enough. If you rush a designer, then it will show in the end product. This involves saying stupid things like ‘this should be fairly straight forward’ or ‘I have some quick amends for you’, because there is nothing more infuriating than someone telling you how long they think something should take, when actually, they have no idea.
Observe the quote “You can have the project done on time, done on budget, done properly. You can only have two.”
I could have made this blog post a hell of a lot shorter by JUST writing that quote alone, because if there were ever a rule to observe then this one is the holy grail.
4. A camel is a horse designed by committee
When you get a draft of the work, at any stage, PLEASE try to remember that you hired us for a reason. “My secretary thinks we should make the text red it’s not bold enough so give it a bigger drop shadow”… “My colleagues son didn’t understand it” and “it needs to appeal to Joe Average” Trust us. Start asking ten or so different people for their advice and you will end up with a Frankenstein of a design.
5. Pay invoices on time
Luckily for me I’ve only ever had one consistently later payer (and they don’t read this blog) but thankfully as I have multiple freelance clients who are absolute angels and pay me on time, month-in month-out, it’s never been a problem, but that doesn’t mean it’s right.
If we as designers work on a brilliant design as efficiently as we can so we can meet your deadline then why shouldn’t you make the effort to pay us on time? Fair is fair.
Standard payment deadlines are 30 days from date of invoice, but if you pay consistently late then designers are perfectly entitled to add late payment charges (with prior notice of course) As clients, you have to remember this is our income and everyone has bills to pay. If you know you are going to pay someone late give them a warning in advance, it’s just polite.
I read this article a while ago on why “there’s no such thing as a bad client“… it is partly rubbish. There are millions of bad clients out there and just because you learn a lesson from dealing with them doesn’t mean they’re not a bad client.
However, I do agree that you learn some lessons by dealing with bad clients that then, in turn, help you decide who to take on as a client in the future. I mean, why do you think I’m writing this post in the first place?
Designers can excercise some common sense to avoid getting stuck with bad clients, but hopefully any prospective clients out there will be able to enlighten themselves on the do’s and don’ts, learn how to be better, even if they just change one thing, before they end up on Clients from Hell
So I woke up on Friday and I had eight emails from Google saying my site had been flagged for having malcode… visited my site and ah yes, there was the horrible Google red page of death.
Now what? Ignoring the prompt and continuing to my site I could see the style sheet had been disabled. My beautiful site! It was so ugly.
My Mr’s site had also been taken down… and all the other sites that used WordPress on our server had also been infected and taken down, including sites that merely linked to us. Upon noticing this we both emailed MediaTemple who said that they “couldn’t do anything to help us”.
Fine! To be honest I had no idea where to start, but using the SOSWebscan I could see that 5 of my js files had the dodgy code, and upon logging into my site I could see that another admin account had been added. The name? Johnny A.
Deleting the code from the js files, and then also the user account and all the posts that had been created, worked to fix the problem. But upon Googling the exploit, I found this SupportBase article…
Very useful, exactly what happened to me and the other WordPress sites on our MediaTemple server but not to mention a bit irritating. It clearly states that “We believe it to be both a WordPress 2.9 vulnerability as well as a vulnerability in MediaTemple’s Grid Server Accounts.”
Irritating because MediaTemple had made sure the first thing they said to us in their support request was “we have done a deep analysis of the (gs) Grid-Service and found that our infrastructure is secure and is not a source of website vulnerability” Quick to jump to their own defence, of course, but we forwarded the SupportBase article to them and later recieved this response:
“We understand how frustrating getting your site exploited can be. At this time what we have done is scanned all the domains on this service removing all exploits from your files. I have also removed the redirect exploit that was injected into the database wp_posts table. All original files have been backed up. If you are still having issues with Google Malware alert. You can submit your sites to be re-crawled by Google. If the sites are found clean they should remove the warning.”
Oh. So they had initially said they could do nothing to help us, and then when they had said that it was nothing to do with their infrastructure… they then decide to help??
I have to admit, this was awkward. But atleast it was finally fixed and a valuable lesson has been learned. Always update to the newest version of WordPress, having an insane 15 digit password numbers and letters doesn’t always matter… oh and don’t host your sites with MediaTemple.
I love this song and I can’t help it! It’s the song playing in my head all day and I can never get it out. If someone so much as utters the word “bang” I get this song trapped in my head… so I have decided to embrace it! I mean congratualtions to Mark Ronson for making such a damn catchy song, the way it steps up is what does it for me.
The video is awesome, I can imagine listening to this song in my hover car in the future, Spock eyebrows and day-glo all in one tracksuit are what I’m wearing.
Don’t hold back… let the song stick in your head too, you might quite like it?
Finally. The documnetary on Joaquin Phoenix entitled “I’m Still Here : The Lost Year of Joaquin Phoenix” has a release date… and now a poster.
The film follows the esteemed actor on his downward spiral out of the Hollywood spotlight. Rumor says we’ll see Phoenix trying to launch a rap career. Maybe it will explain the last 12 months of crazy and wash away the memories of his tragic late-night television appearances and public meltdowns.
“Joaquin, I’m sorry you couldn’t be here tonight.” Classic.
He’s a brilliant actor and I’m sold on the documentary because I’m intruiged. But to be honest I am more interested in the design for the movie poster. Never has there been a picture which sums up such a large level of insanity, and to top it off I love the typography.
Found some cute illustrations over on ffffound (but I’ve lost the direct link) that depict an ideal world where nothing goes wrong!
These pics show idealisms like a pencil that you can sharpen without the lead breaking off and stickers that peel off clean from surfaces. It’s the little things, that would make the world a wonderful place.
