Culture - Must buy new Rhian Hughes book. Must buy.

Continuing with my year end review, I talked about blogging in general, now I get down to this site in particular and creativity and projects in general.

Website

I keep wanting to update with a lighter version, but I keep coming back to the darker colours and staying put. I know I will probably go for a slightly lighter motif pretty soon. Also I’d like to clean up the code finally as it’s a bit of a mess really. That’ll be the first thing I would like to do in January 2011. The design will pretty much remain the same, the underpinning will get lighter, the colours will change and I’ll probably add more doodles and images to places.

I guess I’m definitely of the mind to continue with the evolution of the site rather than a complete revolution. It works for me and it’s lasted the longest since I launched this site.

Creatively

Then there was this little drawing, which then got made into a glass painting which I get to look at every day.

I managed to make a few logos, some of which were actually used in the physical world, which again I thought was fantastic to see.

As if all of that wasn’t enough I got to complete my first draft and having been slowly hacking away at the second draft. It’s not as far along as I want it to be, but then again when was it ever going to be? Being this far along is reward enough. At least I’ve not given up on the dream. Given up on the dream, I’ve not worked this much on it ever. I’m waking up every morning and actually moving the process along.

Then finally, out of nowhere, I’ve even started off and created a little new robot character. I know I have a love for these things. It was completely by accident and it was inspired by me wanting to use my iPhone for something other than just consumption. I wanted to use it for creating. I am in the process of drawing a small backlog of pages so that I can start soliciting it on a weekly basis, which should be a nice distraction from all the other stuff that I’ve got going on at the moment.

When put like that, the output doesn’t seem too bad. There are a ton of projects I didn’t get to start, which I put the idea down on paper but never got around to. Ultimately however things actually were completed.

One of the things that I’m going to try and do next year is put rough deadlines. Even if I don’t meet these deadlines, at least I’ll push myself in the general direction of actually doing the work. Yes I might get a bit stressed while I do it, but that’s ok, it means I can look back on the year and be happy for what I completed. Actually completing projects is what keeps me happy. I’m also definitely going to buy this book.

Well that was not what I wanted to happen. Three posts made their way into the RSS feed that were not meant to be posts since they were emails….

Thankfully they are not that bad and hopefully we won’t be seeing that sort of thing again.

Back to our regularly scheduled programme….

Typomaps - Incredibly beautiful posters. Love the attention to detail and the colours chosen. This shall be mine and on one of my walls.

Just to let everyone know, I can now be found firing shots (pretty shortly) on Dribbble. (Thanks to Chris for hooking me up with an invite).

DBA Pen - Love this sort of thing. If I could buy something like this I would. The truth is, I finish ALL of my pens off, so my only concern really is the non biodegradable plastic. Potato based plastic you say? Interesting. I’m totally there.

V&A signage by Troika - This is excellent. Love the typography, love the neon blue.

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2010 by Jean Nouvel - Last year’s Serpentine gallery was pretty bland, it’s good to see that things are going back to normal in terms of the extavegance. This is almost as amazing as the Frank Gehry installation from a few years ago.

Urbanized - The new documentary by Gary Hustwit (Helvetica, Objectified). You know it’s going to be great.

Search Google - Truly amazing work from Philipp Antoni. I’ll definitely be using this in the future. It’s basically what google would have wanted to do, but didn’t know how.

User Interface Design Framework - Although I don’t use Illustrator (too heavy), this is most excellent.

You probably haven’t noticed but now the ‘Kode comes with a completely responsive shiney design, and by responsive design I mean it responds to the size of your screen, well by responds to the size of your screen, I mean if it’s less than 480px (size of your iphone/ipod/blackberry?) then you’ll still be able to read very clearly (without scrolling horizontally) my AMAZING writing, and the brilliant commentary that I provide to you on an extremely sporadic nature - what can I say I’m feeling in a sarcastic mood today.

So if you’re reading it on your feed reader, I guess you could visit the site properly to have a look. The main area i’m pretty happy with is the fact that even the images resize to accommodate (like in the illustration section).

The truth of the matter is, the current version of the ‘Kode is soo simple that doing this was pretty painless, and took an a few hours to read up on how to actually do it. The best resource as you would expect is found at these two A List Apart articles:

1. http://www.alistapart.com/articles/responsive-web-design/

2. http://www.alistapart.com/articles/fluidgrids/

Then of course there are the prime examples to look at how this is achieved. Jonathan Hick’s for example has gone ALL out, with stylesheets for the iphone, ipad, 600px resolution, smaller, bigger whatever, it’s crazy - who the hell’s got the time? The general plan for the site is to keep doing general maintenance on the site and adding little things like this and generally bringing the design tighter together, trying to stay abreast with what’s going on the web (rather than being ahead of the curve).

Obviously, I could give a shit if it works in Internet Explorer.

So I’m there minding my own business, just checking my feeds and I see a familiar sight. Manji was mentioned on Devlounge as one of the single column themes of choice.

That’s pretty cool actually, seeing as it was designed over 4 years ago and hasn’t really been modified since. What’s interesting to me really is that there does seem a severe lack of super simple themes out there. Super simple is fucking hard to do and make stick - but that’s a topic for another time, which I fully intend on exploring.

Oh and btw, this is officially Broken Kode’s 1500th post.

Ragnarama - Dunno how I missed this, but Ragnar’s new website. Just started looking at his book Big City and it’s a tour de force of just page after page of amazing art in creating his story. Amazing stuff. If you can get a copy, definitely flick through it.

Geomancy Typeface - Free typeface that’s worth having downloading. Easily of the same quality as all the excellent free fonts found at Exljbris Font Foundry.

Rian Hughes’s of London Logo Proposal - This is by one of my favourite designers of all time, Rian Hughes. Shame it’s never going to be used, as it’s amazing.

Inspired by Coudal, I’ve decided to have a Page 2. It’s basically everything that doesn’t fit into my minimalist design. I’ll have to go into this design a bit more to be honest, because it’s basically longest running design. Every time I try and make it ‘better’ I always end up coming back to the same thing, only with a minor tweak here or there. I’ve not really talked about it, because it never seems all that interesting. What is interesting is that I’ve got over 15 iterations of the current design as I experimented with layout always coming back. I’ll have to post them in a gallery at some point.

Soccer Aid World Cup 2010 Poster - By Trebleseven Design, this is an excellent poster for the World Cup. Which I’d seen this before, because I would have definitely got this for the house.

New Bus for London - Hopefully should be out when I next visit London.

Didi - While still on the whole World Cup kick, excellent typographic tees with the major players for each team. Most excellent. I really want the Argentina one.

Redesigned Wikipedia - Honestly I hadn’t noticed until today. I instantly look at the content, as for years I’ve ignored everything around it. This, the latest ‘Vector’ theme is actually extremely elegant and a great transition for the site.

National mascots - Don’t know what to make of the new London 2012 Olympic Mascots. What I do know however is that I love the comparison to the Prime Minister and Deputy.

Can they cut it? - Fantastic venn diagram of the proposed budget cuts from the various parties and how they aim to tighten up the UK economy if they get elected. Lots of ideas, excellent presentation as always by the Guardian website.

Earlier on in my sabbatical, my parents decided to sort out the house down in Lebanon, where I was going to be doing my creative drawing and writing. However, I did a couple of side projects as well. A couple of logos and decided to do my first large scale art project, a door of stained glass.

This was to fill a hole the size of a door into the living room in the house in Lebanon. The reason for filling it in is mainly to do with layout, but needless to say we’re not using that door so having something that represents the family is more than a welcome addition.

To understand what this image means you have to know a little bit about my family history. My parents and I were born in Lebanon. We all migrated to Greece shortly after I was born, and five years later my brother was born in Athens.

This history is represented by the cedar tree (Lebanon) at the bottom and the three fish swimming up towards an olive tree (Greece) where a little fish is waiting.

So once the guys got it, they printed out and then began carving it out.

And here is the finally finished stained glass family portrait installed:

And here are some details:

So what do I feel about the final product? I think the carving process was superb, second to none. I think however that the colouring could have been done in a better fashion. There are mistakes and the final colours were not exactly as I had imagined, or chosen. The thing is that no matter these minor quibbles, it’s nothing compared to the sheer joy I get when I look at it changing colours throughout the day, you forget everything else.

Appear - Graphic Design Bureau. Seriously sweet website, because it’s all done in javascript, no flash required.

Alfa Romeo Giulietta - I’m in love with Giulietta. I saw it this morning. Compare this car to the equivalent VW Golf, there is no comparison.

Sometime in February, my cousin asked me to sort out the logo for his jewellery business. I was obviously happy to oblige, and actually had some spare capacity to sort it out for him. The thing is, I sqaundarded most of that time, so he rings me on a Saturday to ask me how the logo was going….uh oh spagettio. Rushed to the only coffee place worth a shit in Saida and started sketching furiously. Pretty quickly I had my idea. In fact, the crazy thing is that by the end of the night I had created his logo and sent it out to him.

I played around with the colours (although his only request was to have the colour scheme be burgundy and grey). I thought it couldn’t hurt for them to see what it would look like in different colours.

So after a couple of colour tweaks he asked for I sent it through. The reason he was anxious for the logo to be sorted out quickly was because he had an exhibition in Kuwait and had a stand. A few weeks later he was in Lebanon and he showed me pictures of the stand.

iTunes Visual Redesign - I soo wish that Apple would sort out the UI elements of iTunes, because it really is a complete joke. Here’s soemthing Brandon did for free. Use it damn you.

Reindy Allendra - Industrial Design portfolio of this Indonesian native. The KLM blimp being a highlight.

Facebook Facelift - Have you noticed how Facebook always seems to be changing it’s look every 6 months? This would have been one of those welcome changes. Having said that, being away from my friends during this sabbatical, I’m actually very thankful for Facebook.

Creative Review incredible dissolving bag - This is from 6 months ago but it still remains as one of those great ideas, that I hope others adapt in the near future.

The Best Part - Love this print of an alphabet made of brand logos.

Colosseo Letterpress Poster - Love the attention to detail of course. It’s objects like this that make design something special.

Alphaposter - While I’m talking about love the detail in these posters as well (obviously not as elaborate as the Colosseo poster, but lovely nonetheless).

Mark Coleran Visual Designer - Remember all those awesome futuristic designs in movies? Ever wonder who designs them? Mark Coleran, that’s who.

How are Red Bull’s helmets painted? - Love this breakdown, especially coming of the new Vettel helmet that looks like a Red Bull can. Brilliant.

LOST Posters - Awesome minimalist posters. It’s definitely en vogue nowadays to do these, but I still like them.

Overcoming Creative Block - Some excellent ideas in there. One of my favourites (which I’ve not tried yet, but was actually thinking about that today) was the idea of going to a local university art library and just snapping or photocopying things from old journals to get inspiration and creating a physical drawer or scrapbook with ideas in there. I know I’ll be requiring a lot of inspiration in the coming months.

Radius 10 - If I was in the UK now, this would have been mine. One of the nicest calendars I’ve ever seen.

Panic Blog - Just wanted to say that the Panic Blog (like most things related to Panic) is pure genius. Simple, but extremely clever with loads of thought put into it. I’m surprised this hasn’t been featured on design websites…probably because most of them are attracted to shiney things rather than subtle.

The History of the Ampersand - Even thought the whole Ampersand thing is pretty ‘tired’ it’s still always interesting to see the origin of things we now take for granted….god that sounded old.

The first logo design of 2010 is for my oldest friend Yanni’s DJ Collective ‘Viasound’ (playing a range of House and Electronica music) which operate out of Athens, Greece. The guys have been doing this for several years but they’ve not been gaining much traction unfortunately, which is a shame because they truly have a passion for this type of music.

When we were discussing what they were doing wrong, I just kinda had the image of the logo in my head. Of course, it’s not that I think the logo is what is holding them back, but rather my own attempt to make the world slightly prettier. I think that’s ultimately what designers tend to want to do - prettify the world.

The idea just came through, and it just wouldn’t let go. We were out for some Italian and I quickly started scribbling these things down onto a napkin while talking to him. From that napkin, I just kept doodling until I got the angles that I felt worked the best.

The technique of using your brain to fill in the rest of the logo is something that is widely used in comics, but I think it works effectively in this design as well.

Seems I’ll be designing a logo a month (at least that’s the route I’m on at the moment). I’ve got another 2-3 more logos to create for various friends and family. I like doing it because it flexes a specific muscle that I don’t generally tend to use much anymore as I concentrate on my graphic novel.

Last.fm Visualisations - Oh my god, I might actually start using last.fm just so that i can get myself some meaningful posters and put them up. Also Felton’s annual report is up for pre-ordering. If wasn’t in Lebanon, I think I’d get myself a copy this year.

Plastic Beach- The new Gorillaz album appears to be imminent. Awesomeness.

N.Design Studio - Nick La’s new website. Seriously I don’t even know where to start. The attention to detail is mind boggling. It’s the sort of shit I wish I could have pulled off like 4 years ago. The write up is also just as impressive.

Banksy film to debut at Sundance - Soo, totally watching this when it comes out. What can I say, I’m one of those poor fools that actually enjoys what the man does. (via @stevemassart)

Büro Destruct III - Thought I’d point out that the latest book from this excellent Swiss design firm is out. I’ve got Buro Destruct II and is one of my favourite design books.

Those crazy Swiss and their matching jumpers.

Interview with Michael Chabon - On a complete sidenote, I’ve always loved the design of his book covers, which I believe are done by Will Staehle.

Pictory - Stories of culture shock. (via DF)

So Owen’s responded to a few things that I’d written. I knew it was coming, and I knew it would be a big one, so true to form the man’s gotten back to me.

To be clear, although I didn’t voice it at the time, one of the reasons why I actually decided to move over to WordPress a while back was in fact when it transpired that Owen might leave the project (I don’t know the exact details, but it seems a community member was maybe hurting more than helping). In any case, Habari without Owen is a much poorer place. Not to take anything away from others who tirelessly contributed to the code, but he’s amassed probably three times as much commits as the next guy (roughly speaking) and generally leads the way - so I listen when he’s got something to say because I respect him enough because he spends the time to explain himself properly. Forget the fact that we don’t agree on everything, I think it’s clear we both want the software to move in the right direction.

The Problem

I would love to replace the logo with something better. But something decidedly, unarguably better.

That’s the biggest problem. Who’s deciding which is unarguably better. I can argue that the question mark is brilliant and the non-descript H is rubbish till the cows come in, as I’m sure others can argue the direct opposite. The point is, it’s your opinion against someone elses. The frame work is not there for moving it forward either. We’re not going to strike lightning in a bottle, nor do I think that I can make something that is universally liked by everyone. Fuck me, that’s pretty much impossible to do. For everyone that thinks the Nike swoosh is an icon, you’ve got others proclaiming that it’s completely pointless.

The point is taking where we currently are and moving forward. Otherwise we end up hurting things more and ultimately not achieving anything.

The way forward

My suggestion? Elect a sub-group of people to huddle somewhere, create a plan, build something usable in a staging place, and then report back to the community for review. They take comments, re-huddle, and iterate until either everyone loves it, or there's no budging by one side or another. And at that point, the community defaults and uses what they've built.

I’ve created my logo. So if anything, I’m happy if I was the one making the decisions. My thought process is clear to me. The logo is out there for anyone to pick at as they please. I had an idea, I put it forward. It didn’t take me too long, hell writing up the previous 5 Habari posts probably took me longer to be honest. Like I said, if anything, I’ve got a nice t-shirt design.

I’m not adverse to exploring the issue further with a task force, hell I think it’s a great idea but ultimately I want to know that our work will be accepted, or voted upon. I want to know the structure, because the exercise will take more time out of me and honestly I don’t want to waste my time - which I’m sure you can appreciate.

The taskforce

The next question that should be raised is, does that then get used instantly? According to Owen, that shouldn’t be the case. It should be reviewed by the rest of the community, lather rinse repeat. This can work, after a fashion. I propose that this is done in a finite number of stages. When we design a building (I’m a building services engineer), the design process is broken down into 4 distinct stages (at least from an engineering POV). Concept, Scheme, Tender, Construction. In a similar fashion, we can also break it down into a few stages.

1. Concept - Ideas about what it could be are thrown on the table. The question mark, the capital H, the doorbell etc. At this stage it is important NOT to rubbish any ideas. This is to create as many ideas as is possible. No idea is off limits.

2. Scheme - The ideas with more legs are weeded out. This is going to be time consuming, because ultimately it is important to come up with one or two ideas options which can be further pursued. The point here is reduce the number of options to a manageable few that can be detailed further.

3. Tender - The few options that are thought to be in contention are whittled down to one. Maybe the execution isn't perfect but ultimately it's an idea that everyone is behind. The general thought process is there.

4. Construction - We build the logo based on the finally selected option. The detail is put in here, and the various elements are presented to be used. In the software, on the website, as badges etc. Used in 'press' releases. Whatever.

We report back at every stage. Any thoughts are processed then and then we move on. The other thing that is important is to have a proper timeline for all of this. Otherwise it’ll meander endlessly. Therefore I propose 1 month for each stage. Gives people enough time to consider, think about things, review, reflect, write emails/responses/posts if they have an issues concerns ideas.

We don’t jump back several stages. The rest of the community had the opportunity to review and present their ideas in the given timeframe. Inaction is not allowing progress which as I’ve explained has a negative affect on the software base itself.

If anything it’ll be an interesting exercise to see if design by commitee works on the internet and in an open source project. Afterall, how do you think all those buildings that you live and work in were designed? By the choices of one person? Don’t be silly.

I get the feeling that when you're done tearing the thing down, assuming you have any energy left afterwards, you might actually do something. Am I right?

I hope so. Like I said, it’s not because I think this will raise my profile, or because I want to have the Habari logo as a notch in my design portfolio (I don’t even have one, although I keep meaning to create one). This is all being done to ensure the progression and future of the software (selfishly because I enjoy using it). I’m not going to let a few with myopic vision hinder PROGRESS dammit :).

Inside ISO50 - Great set of photos to show the attention to detail.

So now that we’ve got ourselves a kick ass logo, now would be a good time to make some badges so that everyone can put them on their websites and you know, spread the word.

In this set you’ll also find a few with Habari written in them.

See how that logo gets integrated? The font used is Gill Sans, which is one of my favourite fonts - you can see it in use on this site. The reason I think it works here is because it’s rounded so it retains an element associated with the logo (the playful nature of the logo), and yet bold and modern (like the software). The package contains:

Logo

1. PNG - Light grey on white background

2. PNG - Dark grey on light grey background

3. PNG - White on dark grey background

4. EPS - Vector for you to customise as you wish

Logo with Habari

1. PNG - Dark grey on light grey background

2. PNG - Light grey on dark grey background

3. PNG - White on dark grey background

4. PNG - White on light grey background

Download entire set.

These will also find a permenant home at www.brokenkode.com/habari .

Lets turn our attention to the main menu in Habari. As I mentioned before there has to be a better way than the current method. The reasoning for the current menu is simple, once you start adding all the menu items (including those provided by the various plugin) the list becoming very long indeed. Without any plugin menus this is what is currently there (including one of the expanded menu version):

And here’s that menu with one of the side menus popping out:

From my personal use, I only need 8 menu items in total:

1. New Entry

2. New Page

3. Manage

4. Comments

5. Dashboard

6. Plugins

7. Options

8. Logout

For me everything else is completely superflous, or at least it’s bloody rare for me to even go there, like once a year if that (I don’t think I’ve ever gone to the logs and groups menu for example). As I said that’s only because of the way I choose to use Habari. Other users might feel like they want something a bit different, and this type of functionality would allow

Proposal

The other aspect of this Menu plugin that would also hopefully enhance the experience, would be bringing the shortcut numbers back. In the options menu we would also provide an option to assign the menu option with a keyboard shortcut to a menu item. This way we’d get back to a more streamlined workflow, which is slightly hindered by an additional keyboard stroke (at least in my eyes it is).

Future Details

For those who know me from my professional life (I’m a Chartered Engineer), know what a complete filing freak I am. All graduates that have helped me out, or that I’ve had anything to do with their training have gone through an induction with regards to how to file things properly. It’s a MASSIVE bug bear with me.

When I had that moment of madness and I moved over to WordPress, what struck me was that Habari’s elegance doesn’t extend to just the admin panel. In Habari it extends to the filing structure, which I really want to shine a bit of a spotlight on, only because I think it’s not generally discussed and I think that the developers deserve mad props for building this elegance in.

When you download a copy of Habari and you open your folder, you’re presented with the following files and folders:

Let’s compare some of the other people:

WordPress

Textpattern

Chyrp

There are a couple of things to take from the above. The first is the number of files without folders. In Habari, this is a total of 3, in WordPress it’s 23, in Textpattern it’s 4, while in Chyrp it’s 5.

The second thing to pay close attention to is the names chosen for these folders. I know which I feel is the clearest filing structure of those above.

Minimal Design - And here I thought the new ‘Kode was minimal. This site seriously takes it to the next level in certain ways. Might even use his minimal gallery solution.

Iconic TV Posters - by Albert Exergian. Also be sure to check out his site.

Air Multiplier by Dyson - To see how it was done.

Interview with James Dyson - It’s all about the fan. At $300 for the cheap version it’s pretty expensive, but still it’s an amazing invention.

Extreme Makeover Craigslist - From the latest issue of Wired (USA version), Craiglist remade. The standout as you can imagine is KhoI Vinh’s version.

Tour the Bugatti factory, Molsheim - It’s but a glimpse, but a glimpse I’ve never seen before, for the single most expensive supercar manufacturer in the world.

Moby Talks About Cartooning and Small Press Comics - Didn’t realise that he actually drew the cover to his latest album, which features that cute little character from some previous singles he’s released.

Design Observer redesigns - This has always been an inspiration in terms of the sheer amount of links offered and the very simple but effective design.

Gummisig - One of the best looking blog/websites I’ve seen in a good long time. It’s the combination of the colours, gridlines, and big bad bold type that does it for me.

LG Chocolate 4th Generation - This is what I had to say when the first generation of the Chocolate phone came out (which reminds me I really need to sort out the formatting in the normal post pages). It’s taken them 3 iterations in total before it became what I originally envisaged the ‘next’ generation of mobile phones to be. Unfortunately for LG they didn’t continue the same design aesthetics that made the first generation phone so successful. This new version looks like it could be a winner. The actual hardware looks absolutely fabulous. My only problem is the software. This may be it’s Achilles heel, as it doesn’t seem as polished as the iphone or even Android.

Definitely worth checking out in the future though, when it eventually lands.

Update: Video has been taken down, probably going to come back in like a month, when LG officially release everything.

Cannes Design Lions - Awesome collection of great work from the design world. Definitely needs a more detailed look at the entries and the winners.

Google Service Logos - Nice list of the befores and the afters. What’s interesting to me is the sheer number of services that Google actually provides. I’ve probably only heard of like a hand full of these and only ever used 5 of them (but I use them on a daily basis).

Busiek.com - Beautiful website. Probably one of the best looking comic book creator websites I’ve seen in a really long time. Loads of attention to little details that will make you want to work on your own website.

Thru eyes frank olinsky - Small Q&A with graphic designer Frank Olinsky, the man responsible for the art direction for the golden era of the Smashing Pumpkins album designs. Yes, of course I have that box set.

Joshua Middleton Website Revamped - Have always loved the man’s minimalist style. If I had a comment, it would be that the blog was actually properly integrated into the site, rather than bringing it in via a frame (or whatever is being used). The gallery section is the place to head first to though, with the ‘Sky Between Branches’ section as the top area to look at (damn that’s been in the making for close to a century).

The Hunt For Gollum - Fan movie which was released for the Sci Fi festival in London. Seems to be extremely well made, and it’s there for free to watch.

Vertigo Number 1s - A pretty large collection of some of the best comics have to offer, numbers for you to download as pdfs.

Here & There - A horizonless projection in Manhattan. I would really be interested in something like this for London as it really does provide a unique perspective of a city.

Glyphish - What a truly beautiful, simple looking site. Subtle but very well put together. Great set of icons to download as well.

Travis Charest’s Blog - Seems it’s only been up for a little over a month. The good news is that the man seems to be getting more drawing done now than I’ve seen from him in years. The better news is that he’s even more depressingly good than what he was a few years ago. If anything the little Metabaron sabbatical did him some good in honing his already IMMENSE talent. Park this one under easily one of my favourite artists of all time.

Grid Designer 2 - Best grid design implementation tool I’ve stumbled across so far.

Carrot Creative - A bit jquery heavy (I don’t think I’ve ever seen that many transitions in one place, but it’s done relatively tactfully.

JPG Magazine Archive - Never actually downloaded this magazine, and now it’s no more.

Simple takes time - Jason Santa Maria on design times. I loved the Mark Twain quote, which I’d never heard before, “I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.” So true, as I’ve been struggling the last couple of months to come to a final design for the ‘Kode. As you can probably tell, it’s still not finished.

The art of Pixar - A fan-curated gallery of inspiring artwork, good stuff in there.

Apple’s new ‘Get a Mac’ ads that directly address the resent Microsoft ‘I’m a PC’ adverts - Although these ads do feel a bit long in the tooth, the best ones are those that have subtle gestures or facial expressions by the actors.

Apple Command Prints by Christopher David Ryan (via theappleblog).

The New Adventures of Mr.Stephen Fry - awesome actor who clearly understands good internet marketing.

Web without words is an interesting experimental site. Block out all content form a site, so you can see what the layout looks like as a design exercise. So far it’s done CNN and Yahoo.

Wordpress users get treated to a whole new administration panel…again. How long has it been since Happy Cog’s redesign (wasn’t that in March)? The design definitely has a ‘jack of all trades, but master of none’ feel to it - hardly what I’d call elegant.

Wilson Miner’s new site - Love the layout and the colours.

The 2008 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion houses the first structure by Frank Gehry in England (engineering by Arup). Highly recommended if you’re in and around London until the 19th of October.

Today I was reminded that you cannot force design. You cannot force creativity. While thinking of something else the inspiration will strike. From my point of view, whenever I create anything I can actually see the final product in my mind. Sometimes depending on whatever it is that I am doing I will see this picture clearly and I have the necessary tools and skills to achieve that vision, othertimes I can see only my shortcomings…this is probably the norm to be honest.

The site’s design has been building slowly, organically as I got used to the Habari codebase and also what I wanted to do. I pretty much guarantee that the actual colours wil change, however I’ve got an idea in my head that if executed properly could be pretty good fun for me to see and also could be a good note to stop the redesigning of the site for a good long while.

I’m here to also confirm what everyone on the blogosphere has been saying, the Genius setting in the new iTunes 8 actually works. Creating playlists from a single song that actually is PERFECT. It’s like listening to the radio but it’s actually all of your tunes, stuff you hadn’t heard in years sometimes that work perfectly with the tune you’re listening to constantly today.

And can I also gush at the visualiser which is an absolute peach, yeah, I think I will a bit.

Jamie Hewlett animation (based on his Monkey show) celebrating the upcoming Olympics.

Skine.art is an awesome blog of moleskin contributors from around the world. Of note are some awesome illustrators from Sweden and Brazil.

Continuing my illustrators you should look at theme comes the awesome work of Jake Parker. I really like his pen and ink stuff more than his painted work, however both are all shades of great. Definitely going to pick up that little illustrated book of his.

There is definitely something to be said about a slow burning design. At least from where I’m sitting. I started redesigning the ‘Kode last week but the deal I made with myself was that I would limit myself to doing one small thing every day. One element of the design. Be it the typography, or some colour changes or implementing how the asides look. Nothing drastic, just small increments.

The honest reason for this approach is that my life doesn’t allow me the luxury to come in every single night and just hack away and try and sort the code out test it make sure it’s all pucker both locally and online before I unleash it in one big fell swoop. I’ll average 3 nights a week (usually less) when I’m actually at home at a reasonable time and I guess in part I was also suffering from a bit of design fatigue.

Trying to get to that final result seemed pretty daunting at first. Soo many pages that I want to sort out, so many elements that need to be designed for and implemented that when I’ve tried in the past year to deal with them, I just get overwhelmed and often they just live in an electronic graveyard on my computer.

So my tip for all you hobbiest blog designers that do have a bit of redesign fatigue, I would definitely recommend this approach of breaking the pie into smaller slices. Don’t get too upset if things are not there. Start on a solid foundation (I started from my favourite coding base from a previous design) and add to the design in a slow but controlled and consistent fashion. It might not get there as fast, but you’ll definitely enjoy the process more, at least I can claim that I am enjoying this tweaking a lot more than I’ve ever enjoyed sorting out my site.

Maybe it’s because you’ll have moved the design forward, maybe it’s because there’s something fresh to look at every day, maybe it’s both.

Ian Kim based out of LA is definitely a rising talent to watch in the illustration work. His stuff does have that James Jean quality to it.

I saw the PATH graphic novel in the comic book store the other day, but the cover design left a lot to be desired from. However I am all over the artwork on the inside. I’ve got to say that those are some of the funkiest character designs I’ve seen in a while and the colour tones that have been chosen for the art really work with the character’s expressions.

Earlier this week I attended a talk with a manufacturer who was giving us a brief rundown of the differences between British/European standards (BS, IEC) and American standards (NEC and NEMA). I came into that talk with a host of mostly founded preconceptions however I left with a changed view for the emerging design philosophies and how certain constraints around you will motivate and influence design.

Preconceptions

I will rightly admit that before this talk my I considered American design over-designed, bloated, over-sized, unrefined (with the exception of somethings of course, this is after all a gross generalisation). The impression I had of American design could be summed up into, BIGGER is better. In fact there was an element of contempt when designing buildings to American standards, because I felt that I was cheating my clients of a superior design due to being constrained by bloated design.

As it turns out I was right, after a fashion. I had considered the reasons but what I hadn’t considered was the added value that could be brought to the table in an attempt to justify the reduction of good design and engineering practices.

External Influences

I don’t want to get into specifics here, but ultimately a lot of gear that I specify for a building is 40-60% larger for a building that is designed to American standards than one that is designed to European standards. The reasoning behind this is partly due to constraints by the standards as set by a bunch of lawyers that have FUCK all understanding of what it is they are lawyering about and thus the end product is already on the back foot in terms of design because the constraint asks for an enclosure (no matter what the inside contains) of a specific size; a one size fits all mentality. The inards are then rated upwards or downwards as required.

The end result is bloated, unrefined engineering/design because of these external constraints. Which does nothing but fuel the fire to preconceptions because they are partly true.

Added Value

You’d think such products would then be pretty hard to sell if their counter parts where that much more supperior right? Well that’s what i thought was well. I thought that the only real reason for going down that route was because it was with stuff that the client or whomever felt comfortable with because that’s all they knew. Maybe as their trusted consultant we should present variations and ideas on this. We are after all engineers that try and push the boundaries and present the best solutions to try and make things run better, provide a more efficient, cost-effective and ultimately greatly design final solution. By their own admission they’re more expensive and bulkier in size.

The guys in America know they can’t compete on physical size and overall design elegance. However one thing that they’ve enhanced (which is where the difference in philosophy comes to play) is the product’s expandability and it’s endurance. The American products will last much longer and take a longer beating because they’ve been designed to do that. They also allow individual components to be augmented within the field. This enables changes and enhancements to a particular component to be done out in the field, sometimes when spares are not readily available or expensive to get.

Therefore these products have their own marketplace outside their origin but it’s really on a case by case basis. For me it was interesting because although I knew the constraints and the reasons what I hadn’t anticipated was the fact that the products were not stagnant in their design and just hid behind the standards. They pushed their design boundaries within the set constraints.

I guess the crux of the matter is that no design is better, except when taken into context. People have to be open to bringing in other elements that they may not be familiar with or uncomfortable with in the hopes of creating a better design.

The latest Banksy art is a stonker. I’ve not seen this up close yet, but I’m definitely going to be going down the road and checking it out. One Nation Under CCTV is an awesome feat of getting something done undetected in this city. I get pulled on camera something like 300 times a day! And that is what I love about Banksy, there is a message, which he does in a very funny way and presents some magic, in a ‘how the hell did he do that?’ sort of way.

Awesome.

FontStruct is a website that lets you create fonts using an EXCELLENT flash interface right from within the website. You don’t have to start from scratch as it’s even possible to clone another font that has already been created and modify it to your needs. What I love about all of this is the option to actually control EVERYTHING about an particular project straight away, down to the font. Having created a font years ago, I know how difficult it is to keep your house in order. The interface on FontStruct keeps things organised for you to actually put more effort into the creative process. Now the issue of course is that it might not seem as flexible of being able to come up with any font design you can, but honestly I think for the average hobbyist that might not be an issue really. If you really get into it, then I guess you can start learning how to do it from scratch…although having said that, I have NO IDEA what the standard tool for font creation is nowadays? Font Constructor looks pretty cool. Also there is a pretty extensive list about the different programmes available (even talks about FontStruct).

You Sucjk at Photoshop. You do, you’re awful, and that’s why you’re here. Absolutely brilliantly funny series of photoshop ‘tutorials’ from Donnie. There are 4 tutorials at the moment. Hopefully he’ll continue these because they are pretty good.

Fake Steve Jobs accepts one of those crunchie awards. Absoultely awesome video. The guy’s just as funny (probably more funny) in person than as a blogger to be honest, although I do read his stuff occasionally. And while he’s doing that thing he does so well, he also raises some really valid points as well.

A lot of people have been asking me about what I think about the new WordPress admin that’s coming for version 2.4. No actually I am telling big fat porkie lies. No one has asked me what I think, but I’m not going to let that stop me. Lets talk the new WordPress admin shall we.

Swiped directly from the demo site that can be found at hyper123, this is what the glorious new WordPress admin in version 2.4 is starting to look like. I say starting to look like, because you can see that they’ve got a while to go in sorting out all the breakages everywhere. In fact by Matt’s own addmission, it’s only 10-20% complete, which is why they’ve decided to wait until March to release this version, because obviously they’re not there yet.

Now obviously i’ve got a slight bit of interest in what’s going on in the admin, simply because I (and others, whom I really shouldn’t speak for) gave a year’s worth of our free time (more or less) to the creation of a revamped admin panel for WordPress. The powers that be, (well Matt actually) didn’t like it, which is why it never got included into the core.

So nearly 2 YEARS after the efforts that we did on that particular project, we are now finally getting a new administration panel design. Others seem to have tried and failed as well (the likes of Brian and i believe some other Automattic employee, I’m not into the WP community since they went commercial). Is this the thing that Happy Cogs have produced? I’m not sure.

Obviously they’ve decided to go away from the colour scheme that was introduced due to the Shuttle project. What you think the blue that you see came from somewhere else? Yeah no. The other thing that has changed, so far, is the dashboard. Last thing that I can see is the comments now have a number at the top to tell you how many comments in moderation or whatever. Apart from that nothing to report really.

For my money however, this is really like putting a bandaid onto a broken leg. Seriously. It’s past the time for this. This would have been bloody relevant several years ago, not now. Now, well it’s completely outdated and anything less of a complete and utter redesign (and that includes rethinking how your menu structure actually works) if you want it to be something relevant, fresh, exciting and ultimately usable by the widest range of people….but in that case you might as well start from the beginning and building something truly new and exciting…oh wait we’re already doing that.

Oooohhhh right, now I get it.

So my mac mini arrived last week. Three seperate boxes, one for the mini, one for the wireless mighty mouse and another for the wireless keyboard. What made me laugh was the fact that Joyce, arguably the smallest person in the world was carrying them to give to me. This stuff is actually completely tiny, it’s really incredible. So much so, that I’m not actually sure what I’m going to be doing with the rest of the real estate of my desk, the bottom of my desk is also looking pretty barren, so I’m thinking there’s going to be a trip to Ikea to get a table to put my stereo, thus freeing up enough space to get myself an A1 drawing board, as I see that coming in handy a lot in the coming year.

It took a total of 12 minutes from the second I connected all the wires to the second i was surfing the net and talking to Bonsai online. The machine picked up the mouse, keyboard and wireless router in seconds and I was actually up and running in no time at all.

So what is my initial reactions to OSX now that I’ve played around on it for more than 30 minutes? There is genuinely a hell of a lot to like. Things that as a windows user I came to accept because that was the norm. That all changed last year when I got into Ubuntu and realised that there was actually a different way. The problem I faced with Ubuntu however was the lack of sophisticated software aimed directly at the operating system and the lack of hardware drivers for a lot of my peripherals. Obviously this isn’t the case here.

One of the greatest things for me however is the lack of having to shut down my computer every day. I put it to sleep and that’s pretty much it. Loading it up again takes a total of 3 seconds and I’m up and running again. The quiet nature of the machine is an incredible selling point to me, since my previous machine, although a work horse in it’s own right was fucking load as you like. So this was a breath of fresh air.

Then there’s how it all clicks together. All downloads go into the downloads folder which I can access. Hardly anything is actually on my desktop anymore (save for my blue shuffle icon, which I love btw). Installing a programme requires me to move the downloaded programme into the applications folder. I’ve got several funky ways to see my documents and applications in that is slightly less archaic than the traditional drop down menu and the list goes on.

Reading through that last paragraph you’d think that I had absolutely no negative comments about the system. Unfortunately you’d be wrong about that. However as that’s another post in and of itself I’ve had to split it up a bit.

2008 Pirelli calendar is up. Stunning use of colours. Also really great collection of the previous calendars. Anyone have any idea of how to get one of these?

So I got a load of help from the previous post about where I should look for more information about what kind of Mac I should go for. Unfortunately for me, I mentioned this to Graham at work, who’s a big computer hardware nerd…the man has got more computers in his house than spoons (and he’s been collecting for many years). So I mentioned my recent desire to make the jump. I said that I was probably going to hold out for the new Macbook Pro (if it comes out this January as rumored), with it’s ultra thin and slim stylings and trimmings (he already knows how much of a nut I am about computer portability, when I need it portable that is). Soo what does he do? He sends me the link for the Eee PC from Asus. Why did you go and do that for Graham?

For those in the dark (and believe me in a couple of months you won’t be in the dark at all about this), the Eee PC is one of the smallest fully functional laptops on the market for £220 (that’s about $400 dollars or so). 22.5cm across by 3.5cm thick and coming in at a measly 920grams!!!!! Preloaded with Xandros (a Debian based Linux distribution), it’s an ideal toy for the guy and gal on the move. I’ve put that image there because it definitely gives you a feel for the actual size of this thing. We’re talking slightly larger that a typical moleskin, which is just absolutely STONKINGLY small. How fast is it you ask? Well it starts up in about 20 something seconds, which is pretty damn impressive when you’re on the move.

No, I’ve not gone back on my thought about getting a mac, but I have had to rethink what equipment I want and need. The thought process is simple, get what you actually need. I’ve been working on my machine now for about 3 years roughly. It’s got a 64bit AMD processor coming in at 1.8GHz (or something like that). It’s got 512mgs of RAM and a 160Gb hardrive. I don’t ever do any video editing or any rendering (even though I bought this machine 3 years ago under the pretence that I would start getting into 3D modelling). So what do I use my computer for? I edit photos in photoshop, surf the net, code and programme some stuff, use vector illustration programmes (that do sometimes need some juice) and watch downloaded TV series, listen to music and well that’s about it. So is it really necessary to get the beast that is the MacPro? Do I really need the absolute latest processing power? Barring the occasional photoshop work, nothing I throw at my computer will really flex it’s muscles.

So I decided to get equipment that would eat anything I personally threw at it. So I’ve got myself a mac mini (since I already own a 20inch screen, I originally though it was 19inch, bonus!). I increased the RAM to 2Gigs and opted for the version with a DVD writer (since I do still do need this even though I’ve got two external hardrives). It’s arriving in a couple of weeks, and I’ve already started making a list of applications I might need. Expect a lot more silly questions being posted as I try to get to grips with the system. You guys having been doing this for a lot longer so I’m most definitely going to be leaning on you guys for advise and help.

There is definitely a market for the ultra portable computer, however it’s also important that the manufacturers realise that they should be catering to what the consumer needs as opposed to creating products that can do 1000 time more things than the user will ever likely need. Asus seems to have realised this ahead of anyone else, but it’s going to be very interesting to see how the other manufacturers react to this. Is this move going to change how we see computers? Is this going to be the tipping point for Linux? Or is it just a bit of a fad? Am I getting over excited over nothing really? Or is this going to be the ipod of ultra portable computers? I haven’t been able to see an Eee Pc up close since it sold out in like 2 days from release in the UK, but I’m sure sometime next year I’ll have a look at it and make my mind about whether or not it’s actually worthy of the hype.

World Press Photo 2007 Winners. Unbelievable collection of photographs collected from the past year. I guess it’s that time of the year when all these lists start coming through.

New Si Scott creme-your-pants-work. It’s been a while since I was thoroughly impressed by a new artist (in the same way I am with say James Jean). Si has been getting extremely good and his latest collection of work called Resonate is an awesome collection of work.

A brieft message. Obviously I missed the launch of this little gem. It’s a website of 200 word essays and thoughts on design that are accompanied by illustrations that change the look of every post. Awesome execution. While it borrows heavily from Khoi’s own Subtraction (in the comments section), it is great and inspiring to see what they’ll come up with next.

New Sony Bravia advert. Unlike the last couple of times this one has got bunnies and plastesine. I’ve got to say, it only gets really good and actually worthy of the legacy of the previous two adverts towards the end, so be sure to watch it all the way through.

So this last week I was in Princeton for my ‘little’ project in Egypt. The highlight of the trip without a doubt however was actually meeting Michael Graves. He was very busy looking at all sort of stones and mural paintings and whatnot for this other project that their office is knee deep into, however he spared some time and we had a bit of chat with him (myself, Steven and Reid) and he signed a monograph for each of us. Incredibly nice guy, very softly spoken and has got this great little smile that shows that he’s seriously enjoying himself.

Going through the monograph and buying stuff from their little design store you get a great feeling of all the different things that they’ve had a chance to influence and design. Notably are of course of all the Alessi products.

My price piece however is an Acme Studios pen (designed by MG) which is not only weighty but is a great little writing tool. The closes thing I can give an approximation to is how the front plates of Zippo lighters are used as a design piece, or statement

Awesome illustration from Christian Ward.

The Phiculator is a great little application, that you can download as a flash file as well (don’t know but I love applications that come as flash files). It calculates ? (phi), the golden ratio. To put things into a design perspective, if you’re trying to make a website that is 850px wide, it gives you the size of the column that splits this 850px line in an aesthetically pleasing way. So your main column would be 525px in that case. Also I really love James Mellers’s site as well.

So I’ve started looking at my blog feed reader and it hit me that I don’t really read all of my feeds as much as I skim them to see what new stuff might be happening in the world. The issue is though that I’m finding it harder and harder to find something that I must stop and read. I find that seriously strange. It’s not like I’ve got that much more blogs that I’m reading. I tend to add new blogs to my feed every so selectively.

Sure you have Khoi’s little commentary left and right, you have Paul’s exhaustive hardware reviews of consumer electronics I will never buy nor really care about. Michael’s blog is always an interesting collection of links (mainly movie related ones) from all over the place, Chris’s blog usually throws up some cool videos or interesting youtube snippets that I would never have the energy to look for, Journalista always gives me just about everything I could want in terms of comic book bytes and other assorted goodies (oftentimes more than I can possibly grasp). However one trend I’ve noticed is that the raw bloggers out there have reduced in number.

Oh but Khaled aren’t you part of the 9rules network? I’ve said this before (on another site) but I’ll say it again, 9rules is no longer the place it used to be. I’m not saying this is a bad thing, it’s just decidedly different. When I joined a couple of years ago it had something like 50 blogs in total. That’s 50 people I more or less knew from the forums. Knew and appreciated and liked and worked with and helped out etc. There are hunderds of memebers on there now, and honestly I don’t have the time to go through each one and vet each one.. I guess it was just more manageable in the past, for me at least, as I would add the ENTIRE feed for 9rules. Hell I wouldn’t know where to get it now if I tried. Anyone know where the feed for all the blogs from 9rules can be found? Shouldn’t that be a pretty prominent thing on this site? Shouldn’t you be able to taylor make your own RSS feed of all the various sites that are available to you? Kinda makes sense to me. Don’t know how easy it is to implement but I’m sure the guys are more than capable of doing something like that.

A couple of years ago it was this massive buzzing time, where we as bloggers (all of us, including you) ruled the net. Movies lived and died by our buzz (Snakes on a Plane), TV series got second leases on life (Serenity), well partly because of us.

Somedays I honestly feel like we’re not all that important anymore. Is it because all new fads become old quickly? Have we passed the ‘golden era’ of blogging? Is it that there is far too much noise on the net, and it’s becoming harder and harder to actually seperate the wheat from the chaff? Is blogging relevant nowadays or is it simply part of the general zeitgeist that is accepted and taken for granted?

Tales from Earthsea by Goro Miyazaki (the son of Hayao). File this under “I hadn’t heard anything about this until yesterday” sections. This movie seems to have all the right ingredients. It’s an adaptation of the great Earthsea story (which I’m a huge fan of). It’s being done by Studio Ghibli, who are to me like Pixar, they can do no wrong. Finally it’s directed by a Miyazaki, so it’s bound to be great right? I was like, oh cool, it’s his son doing a movie. That’s bound to be interesting.

Then I started thinking, hang on, I’ve never heard he had a son that was into animation. Seems like there has been a series of in house fighting over the fact that Goro was given this movie to direct. Surprisingly the main instigator to all of this was his own father. Reading around further (article from the latest Little White Lies) shows that the father/son relationship has completely broken down and is practically non-existent really. Honestly, this has kinda taken away from the movie from me. It’s not a particularly happy story but alas a new Ghibli movie is always cause for celebration.

The movie is out in cinemas in the UK as of the 3rd of August. Loads of good links over at the wikipedia page. You can read Goro’s translated production blog over at Nausicaa.net

I rarely pimp the company (in fact I never mention the company except in my contact page) but you can find 72 pages from the much larger Arup Design Yearbook 2007. There’s also a sampler of last years book which has got some pretty cool things to look at as well.

Update: Seems the website is down,…now that is might strange indeed. In any case you can also get a link to the pdf from here (that’s still working).

Amazing advert for Epuron, easily one of the smartest adverts I’ve seen in a really long time (via Frederik Samuel’s always excellent blog). As if that wasn’t enough in the comments someone pointed out another excellent advert for the Dove self esteem fund. Excellent viewing all around.

You know when you’re in the dark about something and then someone wakes you up and you get that realisation that things could have been better, you just didn’t know any better, because nobody bothered to tell you about it?

What am I talking about? I’m making less sense than normal? I’ll tell you what I’m blathering about. I’m talking about how fonts are displayed on the four major web browsers, Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 2, Safari 3 and Opera 9.

If you’ve visited the ‘kode in the last week, you’ll have seen some more changes in my every evolving design process. Currently I’ve given up altogether with putting a design mockups and opting for the completely different approach of throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. Subsequently I’ve decided to do things in glorious black and white and start thinking about colours and design elements once I’ve got the basic structure and functionality working as I actually want it. However what I have done is use fonts as big bold elements in the design, going above 16px font-size to bring things to the forefront.

Fortunately for me (as this is what actually opened my eyes) was that this effectively brings out the font rendering inadequacies in my favourite (and de facto) browser, Firefox.

Firefox

Opera

Internet Explorer

Safari

The fonts are all smoothed (the only part that I felt was a bit off, but that’s only because I’ve been staring at this for a while trying to find faults) is the bottom of rounded characters which become slightly more blurred. I haven’t checked to see what other things this browser has to offer because I’m still a bit gobsmacked by the way it rendered a simple page. I understand that Safari is based on the same framework as Konquerer, is that correct?

Final Thoughts

I’m looking at javascript libraries and it’s honestly proving a bit of an arduous task. We’ve got Moo.fx and Moo.fx2. The first has been superceeded by the second (obviously). Both it would seem can be used with prototype.js (or the lite version), however Moo.fx2 can be used as part of Mootools, and this is where things become more complicated.

Ok so you go over to Mootools and when you go to download the library, you get like 40 options (most of which I honestly don’t understand in the first place so you end up with something that is 42k rather than 3k).

It also seems less friendly than moo.fx on it’s own, but it does definitely look a hell of a lot more slick and polished and you can see a lot of time and effort has been placed into the overall setup of the information and the site itself.

However for a complete noob like me, it’s a bit overwhelming. So I decide, maybe it would be better to use JQuery. From first glance it doesn’t look as ‘polished’ in it’s overall slickness as the moo.fx but I know that WordPress, Habari and Drupal are going down this particular route in terms of their preferred library of choice.

Finally we’ve also got script.aculo.us as well, just so that we’ve got all our options in front of us.

Honestly I’m a bit perplexed as to what to go for. It seems that for a site, Mootools will provide all the kinds of animated effects that I could possibly want and the community behind this one is pretty strong with loads of documents and tutorials all over the place. However something tells me that jquery is the way to go, even though it’s not as flash. What’s a guy to do?

I honestly have no idea how I happened to get this togglegoogle on a couple of my machines (well not my machines but random machines at work, on my dad’s PC etc) but it’s a great little tweak to google which I actually honestly thought was part of their constant updates. For some reason it just organises everything very nicely. Also can someone please explain to me how to change the background in igoogle, because I was able to change the theme once and then the link that says ‘select theme’ is no longer a link.

Kyle’s just launched his Organix redesign of Warpspire. It’s easily one of the most comprehensive redesigns I’ve seen in a really good long while. Great attention to detail and some very nice implementations of using javascript to bring content to the foreground without the initial clutter.

Just sorting out the html and slowly hacking the css file. The idea is to slowly chip away at the actual code slowly but surely. I’m not in much of a hurry as I’ve got SOO much stuff left but I find that I enjoy writing more by actually having this new evolving design live.

Geeze that took a long time but I can finally report that I’ve actually sorted out the Kode’s version 6 mockup. Now you might say:

"How the hell is this relevant you lazy fuck? Sort out the full implementation of the site instead of telling us about the damn mockup".

Ah patience young Padawin one, the significance here you see is the fact that this final mockup has only come after 21 FAILED attempts. 21 attempts, and iterations and tweaks and modifications. That’s an insane amount of time spent on designs that are not going to be used….EVER. Some of the ideas where pretty nice but the overall package lacked a je ne sais quoi.

So how is this interesting to you? Easy, I actually realised what I was doing wrong and to be honest it’s a fundamental element that I employ in all of my works that seemed lacking in this instance and I decided to go down a completely different route, one that was more clinical rather than conceptual as I usually do. I’ll try and elaborate. When I design or draw something, I usually think of a concept and run with it. I may be trying to emulate a specific feel or idea. Version 4 for example was influenced by my rereading Akira at the time. I loved the cables and the detail which is where that particular design came from.

For this one, I just wandered aimlessly. Moving from one idea that I thought was killer to the next. Sadly only some ideas were any good. In general I was missing the overall picture that combined the design.

A new Broken Kode will be appearing shortly.

Well it’s been a bit too long coming, but I think I’ve found a theme that I can get to grips with relatively easily. I’m going to be hacking Depo Clean, adding parts of Fauna and some K2 in for good measure. I had a look at Sandbox and I’ve got to say that I was pretty turned off by the function.php file that they’ve added in there. It just makes the markup so much more difficult to understand at first glance which is what made me keep looking for alternatives that just did the job cleanly. In any case Depo Clean probably best resembles what I’m aiming for in the end anyway so it helps that I like the markup as well. The next time I do this I’ll be converting this markup into something that can be used with Habari.

Interesting developments over at Six Apart. Lets dig up some of the things I said back in the day about this shall we. For all those in the dark, MT was the defacto CMS you would choose if you were in the market to get yourself a blog with comments setup on your server back in 2003-2004. Of course what happened was the Six Apart crew got a bit greedy at the time and all this free effort by the community was kind of slapped in their collective faces when they introduced the updated version 3.0 which was built off the backs of the community and sold back to them. The original pricing scheme was a complete farce but they revised it when they got the unexpected (erm yeah) response.

What this did was move all those people who were originally using MT to convert to an alternative. Some went to Textpattern, most went to WordPress.

3 years on, SA are now doing what they should have done way back for version 3 and maybe have kept some form of dominance. Currently however I feel it’s far too little too late. Do I give a shit about MT? Not really. I’m not interested in remembering how to write templates using MT-Tags and other bullshit. I’m not interested in revisiting the past. I will say however that the admin looks nice, and it’s also very cool that the actual engine dealing with that is the same as the one dealing with the blog itself, so I’m definitely going to bring that up with the Habari folk.

Ah yes, Habari, whatever happened to that initiative you might ask? Loads have been happening in the background but nothing massive for me to personally talk about. I’m sure once I get some more free time I’ll return to more active contribution and discussion, but I’ll leave that post for another day.

The new London 2012 branding was unveiled today and seriously, it’s very funny how the organisers have got this soo spectacularly wrong. I don’t even know what the fuck this piece of shit is actually meant to be (also check out the absolutely heinous website) .

Update: Seems they’ve launched the site 4 days early since they saw what an absolute pile of shit their ‘placeholder’ actually was. I mean my placeholder is not better but at least you can read the text and it doesn’t hurt your eyes from the sheer stupid colour choices.

I’m to understand that it says 2012 but I mean seriously, what the hell were they thinking.

What I find really ironic is how the British design press (Creative Review, I’m looking at you) kept harping on how the Athens Olympics logo just wasn’t all that great. Personally and I’ll admit that my opinion on the subject may be slightly biased but I thought the Athens Olympic logo was miles better, miles and miles better.

So I’ve decided on the final design (after something like 19 iterations all of which I will show everyone in due course) but I feel some of the html that I have been using on my site is slightly out dated since to be honest I have definitely not been keeping track of the comings and goings of the wordpress software and a lot of that code was based on practices of version 1.5 and before.

So the question I pose to everyone is what is the most up to date theme that has super simple html markup and most importantly doesn’t try to do too much. What I mean by that is a theme that has not been designed with additional cruft to include for an admin options panel, hooks for widgets that fit within wordpress.com etc. I’m not looking for a mod like K2, although I’ll be sure to have a look at some of the things done on K2 for inspiration. I’m looking for something that I can use and modify myself. The look is completely irrelevant as I’ll be dumping the css file straight away anyway and starting fresh.

Any recommendations ?

Now see that is bloody interesting. A month ago I kinda asked about whether or not people actually look at design or not. Since that time I kinda have this inprogress site design going on and have noticed my readership and hits to the site seriously fall by half.

So for all those thinking to themselves and wondering whether or not design is still important to traffic, hell damn yes it is important. You’re all fickle, you know that don’t you :). Which also means I’ve got to pull my finger outta my a$$ and just finish off the design, which I more or less completed as a mockup last week. So expect something soon.

Well for the first time ever, I’m actually going to be going through the live redesign process. Fuck it man, I’ve been playing around with countless photoshop mockups and NONE of them are really jumping out at me, so I’m just jumping into this with two feet and see where it all goes. I know there are some things I want in a certain way, so lets see how this all rolls out and how long it takes me to get to the finish line. It’s going to be sporadic at best, but hey it’ll be interesting to see how long this actually takes me.

Is it just me, or has the yearly ‘reboot’ phase kinda gone down like a bit of a whipper this year? I’ve read one website that I actually read participate in this year’s event. No the ‘Kode hasn’t really jumped into it this year, although I’ve been working on a redesign for a little while. The problem is actually two-fold. One is that I’m not feeling as creative as I have been in years past, and secondly I’m failing to see the point in doing this anymore as most people who read this don’t visit the site. They read it via their RSS aggregator. It’s only those crazy souls that come via search engines and actually typing a comment in here (I love you both, although those that leave a comment even more).

Does it matter anymore what my site looks like? I’m finding it hard to convince myself at the moment, and I’m lacking that dramatic flair and energy that is needed for a proper redesign.

I’m going to post a collection of one liners that are rattling in my head, probably going to make it into a regular sunday evening thing:

1. The Offspring Greatest hits album dualdisc is pretty damn good listening. Reminds me back to when I was 13 and was about to take on the world. 30 was a lifetime away.

2. So we're talking with Rosie and Dom about ethnic minorities and how it's actually a lot less than you might expect. I know that statistics are made on the spot in general, but the one quoted seemed a bit low, which lead to us talking about the first wave of the black community into Britain in the 50s and 60s and how people of a certain age who had not seen black people until that stage felt/dealt/reacted with the new world order. Which then triggered the memory of me meeting my first black man, must have been 12 years old or something; I honestly can't remember his name, but he was from Mauritius. I remember he was a very softly spoken guy and very very gentle in nature. The only thing that made an impression on me was his hands and how the palms were slightly coarser than mine. Such a strange thing to take back.

3. Lewis Hamilton is a great little rookie, however I'm really not liking the shitty HYPE that British media seems intent on throwing his way. I mean seriously you see this shit year after year. They build them up just so that they can slap them down when they put a foot wrong. Really shitty as far as I'm concerned, and I don't blame Ron Dennis trying to shield his driver from all that bullshit.

4. Clerks II is how a DVD should be made. It's got about 6hours of extra material and Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier have seriously spent a lot of time to make it a special experience. You're not buying the DVD just to watch the movie a couple of times. It's really about the DVD experience and really using it, with multiple commentaries, bloopers, interviews, behind the scene footage and the list goes on. I put this up as one of the great DVDs of last year, easily.

5. Just watched Christopher Nolan's first movie, Following. Seriously, it's one of the better indie films I've seen in a really long time. Black and white, shot in various locations in and around London, check it out, great little twist at the end.

6. Diet is going well. I must have had a serious fat day last Sunday because I'm about 2kg less this week. Part of that I guess is the running, part is the diet changes, part is the psychology as well I guess. I'll keep the updates on this going.

7. I bought an ipod shuffle last week, first Apple product I've ever bought myself, and I've got to say I'm loving the size. It's like part of my clothing now. It never runs out of juice and it stores enough music to last me my runs, my trips to work and around the place. It would be nice to have a display but when it comes right down to it I don't think it's completely necessary for the function that I am using it in. Does this mean an Apple mac isn't far behind,...hmm probably not.

8. So Ubuntu Feisty Fawn came out this week. I downloaded it for my laptop. They still hadn't sorted out the bugs that I had reported that I had confirmed that had tried to help solve, that worked in 2 previous versions. I'm talking my laptop into the office to get Windows installed on the machine. I want to swear at Canonical, but alas it's not completely their fault, although it's really annoying not to have this sorted. Renders my laptop really annoying to use to be honest, so much so that I haven't been using it for the past couple of months properly.

9. SMODCAST (love that name as well, especially how Kevin introduces it and everything). Easily one of the best podcast's I've heard in a really long time (thanks for the heads up Michael). I've gotten into listening to dvd commentary while working on something as I can actually get through a lot of things, and listen the plethora of commentaries that I generally have no real time to listen to.

Google Reader Theme by Jon Hicks. Awesome doesn’t even begin to describe this. I wish someone would do something similar for Gmail, because there is just soo much cruft and rubbish in gmail. The code is great and the functionality is great but google couldn’t design themselves out of a paper bag in most cases. Their forte is making applications usable and fun but not pretty look at.

Massive shout out to Jos Buivenga over at Exljbris for the truly excellent and awesome fonts he’s got on offer for free. When he says “Quality Free Font Foundry” he’s seriously not lying. Excellent stuff. I love Delicious and Fontin are both fonts that I’m going to definitely try and use in a future iteration of the ‘Kode.

Great little interview with Jakub Steiner and Andreas Nilsson over at Gnome Journal. The most interesting part of the interview was this little side project, Art Libre Iconset. An integration of Gimp, Inkscape and Scribbus would be great, not that I use Gimp (but that’s another post for another time).

Blender 2.43 was released today. To my mind (and I’ve said this many times before) is the most professional open source project EVER. This is how open source should be. Every release is golden, and this one is a keeper. From the new website, the excellent release log, feature videos and the list honestly goes on. Download it NOW!

The more I think about this the more embarrassed of myself I feel. Basically I sat down today to take stock of what I should be doing in my free time (yes I have to have to be doing something in my free time, I bore extremely easily). I decided earlier last month that I was going to finish off my commitments from last year as soon as possible.

These are basically Priya and Stathi’s websites. For the eagle eyed of you, if you go over to the illustration section of the site you will see the very first completed illustration of 2007 (the first of many to come I hope). It’s the basis for Priya’s website which I should go live by the end of the week (make a deadline public therefore making sure I deliver, nice). I’m about 50% into the coding; it’s a simple website that really should not have taken the stupid amount of time that it has taken but alas better late than never. Also by next week I should have the next illustration up there as well (it’ll be the basis for Stathi’s website) which is definitely one of the most detailed sites I’ve worked on in a very long time.

After which I will only delve into the world of websites when I’m fucking about with my own web space. It’s funny but the code that is currently running the site was originally written nearly a year ago and it’s been tweaked slightly over the year. I don’t really intend to screw around too much with the site to be honest but the colours and graphics will be changing in the coming months as I delve deeper into Aitus Moralis; this is the tentative title (and may end up being the actual final title) of my first graphic novel and my next confirmed project.

I knew the basic idea of the story and remembered that I had actually written something for it, but I honestly couldn’t remember what I had written. It’s not until today that I really realised just how much work I’ve completed over the years and just completely forgotten about. I’ve got flash trailers, sketches and pages upon pages of research and script already written. My life on the internet has seriously been one MASSIVE detour for my honest true passion, sequential storytelling.

So today marks the first day of the journey into getting published. I’m not going to hide it, I want to publish my book via Image Comics. I want the ‘I’ on my book. I know it sounds strange but while the older generation was into Marvel and DC comics I have always been a follower of creators. I guess that’s what’s I was raised on in the 90s. The pundits can say what they will about the 90s, it had a lot more creator owned books than what we have now. Oh sure a lot of it was pure garbage but at least it was the creator’s garbage and the stuff that was weak has and will never be seen again, I intend for “Aitus Moralis” to not fall down that stupid path. I want to own my book’s destiny, because honestly I wouldn’t allow for any other monkey to touch it. All monkey business will be under my control.

Lofty goals I’m sure but it’s a dream I’ve had since I was 13, so it’s about time I delivered and reached.

I will be peppering the site with sketches and designs and drawings from this series as the Kode starts to shift slowly but surely into that direction. Coco will be making his exit and I’ll be moving him over to Splash Panel as he will be the official mascot for Splash Panel. The logo might change slightly in the future to be honest to tie better with the new graphical direction which will be decidedly less vector and have a more painted feel to it.

Interesting article on the Guardian regarding the new UK mac adverts, some valid points while others seem like their there to goad people into a reaction.

Let me start off by saying that Inksmith is what I view as my biggest online failure, after a fashion and this is what this particular post is about. Whenever I announce a project or something I usually deliver, notice I said whenever I announce a project. I may be a blabber mouth an I do get excited about things and have the urge to talk about them, however I never announce until I’m 100% certain I’m going to follow through (seriously if I didn’t do that I’d be writing this sort of shit all the time).

I might take some time to bring it forward (usually I take a lot longer that I could possibly want) however the fact of the matter remains that I will see things through. It seems that ever since the ‘announcement’ of Habari a few moons ago, some have brought up Inksmith as a way to bring discredit to Habari (at least the negative connotations that Inksmith is presented in infers this). It’s as though the fact that nothing moving forward on Inksmith is telling of stuff that might not happen on Habari, which honestly is the single most preposterous idea I’ve ever heard. These are two very very different things and I find those that mention them as though they’re linked in the same way done so as an act of ignorance/stupidity/lack of understanding etc. Here’s why.

The first fact brought forward is to understand what the two things actually were. Inksmith simply was an idea to create a community for bloggers. No this wasn’t a rip off on 9rules. I wasn’t creating a blog network but rather an area for bloggers to get around and be themselves. Oh sure there wasn’t really a central theme for us to bandy around, but what I wanted was a nice buzzing community that helped each other out and was open for people to get to know each other re our love for blogging. It wasn’t ground breaking and it wasn’t anything crazy, but it would have been fun and loads of the guys where well up for it. The best part of it all was the pictures on the coming soon site. I really liked the fact that we were all pissed off in those photos. It delivered what Inksmith was all about, angry people on the internet venting :).

So where does the similarities lie you ask? As far as I can tell it’s the fact that some of the names attached to one project are now attached to another. So does this mean I’ve tarnished the credibility of the others on that list (since it was my idea)? Maybe and I guess they are the only ones I owe an apology to, because I didn’t deliver on my part of the bargain, so to everyone that was attached to the Inksmith project I apologise profusely. Let’s get something clear here, if I ask someone to be part of something I take their commitment seriously. I generally don’t like to waste ANYONE’S time as time for me is the most important commodity. So I genuinely feel bad about wasting those people’s time. We had some great discussions and it did prompt a lot of people on the internet to discuss the deal with being anonymous on the internet and using handles.

Why didn’t Inksmith take off? Because I didn’t have the energy to kick it off. 2006 was one of the toughest years on me from many many respects. In fact from May onwards I can definitely consider 2006 as one of the darkest times in my life from many angles. Which is actually reflected in my blog. What, you think that the dark motif was because I was joining in with the trend for darker sites at the time? No, Broken Kode is an extension of me and it reflects my mood in many cases. When my mood changes so to does the colours on my site, and the design itself in many respects.

So why didn’t I get Inksmith started? Honestly it came down to the amount of energy and enthusiasm I had to provide for the project, which after completing FOFR and Shuttle and 2 websites for clients and my on website and a bunch of illustrations I just didn’t have any more to give, until I was in Greece in October/November. At that point I had charged my batteries and I had decided that it was time for me to pull my finger out and build Inksmith all over again. For all the negative assholes that don’t believe me here’s the logo I created on the plane back to the UK:

So why did I stop that momentum? Simply put because the day I got back from the UK Chris had emailed me about Habari. In Habari I basically found another way to solve the problem that I wanted Inksmith to solve in the first place; the difference of course is that we’d have a central idea to gather around and that would be the software.

The community coming together around Habari is one I’m very proud to be a part of in the first instance. Final word to those that decide to put Inksmith in my face one more time, seriously try and do something constructive with your time, I know I am.

It’s been a truly exciting time for Habari on the design front (not that it’s not been exciting on the code front, but I can only really properly comment on all things design to be honest). Since the last time we talked, Michael has been a busy boy with absolutely everything under the sun. All these ideas have been filtering through the designs as we build towards a unified look for the administration panel.

Remember these mockups are just that mockups, we’re still meandering trying to sort things out, this is an open design process so things are going to change. Don’t think that what you see here is gospel and how it’s going to be, don’t be quoting me fekking Jakob in my face about usability and whatnot. These are the formation months, trust me we’re going through MANY MANY loops and discussions. So with that in mind let’s begin shall we.

The Installer

Stage One:

Final Stage:

We’re still playing around with loads of things here. The header and footer are still up for discussion but the main ideas are there. We’re definitely going for the easiest installer award with this release.

Create Page

Michael’s been pretty busy and he’s got his ideas regarding the media browser on ‘paper’. Once we’ve ironed out all the kinks and how it’s going to work I think it’ll be the most special media browser on any blogging platform.

We did have a great deal of interation of ideas between us on the logo. Work is still ongoing in this area and probably will be for a little while longer as we try and find ourselves the best fit for what the logo means to the community and how people will view us effectively.

Remember nothing is set, everything’s up for discussion. As always Spread the news!

This is the first (hopefully) weekly instalment of the comings and goings on in the Habari Design Community. As this was our first week ‘out’ it was obviously a pretty wild and exciting ride with an immense amount of interest from all people around the world. What’s fascinating to me is that the people at the table currently trying to shape the design aspect of Habari. We’ve got Michael and myself working on all things admin at the moment, with comments from the entire community. Bryan Veloso has joined the team and he’s going to be handling all the website related stuff (from main site to wiki design to whatever the hell else we can keep him busy with) and we have the truly talented Yoram who’s kindly offered to do the icons, so as far as I’m concerned we’re in pretty good shape regarding the graphical direction the project is going to have.

Logo

A great deal of work has been done in the logo department. However we're still not really decided on the direction we want to take as the current options on the table haven't been a unanimous 'HELL YES'. There are merits to all of them but I think with respect to the logo it's better to just wait for that one idea that jumps out at us and really makes us all smile rather than settling for a right here and right now solution. Here's a few examples of what are on the table:

Installer

A lot of work has gone into the installer as well. I'm not going to comment on the design of the installers, because that's out in the wild going through the motions.

We’re still hammering through these back and forth, but the idea is there, one click install, degradable JS that makes parts of the install appear as and when the previous section has been completed and verified.

Administration Panel

Very minor tweaks going on here, except of course the colours. The pink is displayed for when you hover over the log out button.

Publish

More work going on this part. We've been having a lot of discussions regarding the number of buttons we should have. The subtle addition to these mockups is the slider for the tags (think increasing/decreasing the tags on display).

Remember nothing is set, everything’s up for discussion. As always Spread the news!

It’s been one hell of a couple of days since we first talked about the Habari project. There’s been a slew of reaction to the news all over the internet (go to the pingback section of that post) and to be honest it’s far exceeded all expectations I could have had because I honestly don’t have any. See I wasn’t completely sure how everyone would react over the news and therefore I was preparing myself for a little bit of a fight, in so much that we would have to prove the meritts of the software before we got people actually wanting to join and help build the community.

This in turn got me thinking to what all this meant and so I’m writing this post for several reasons. A couple of them is to dispell any rumours, a few others is to point everyone in the right direction should they want any more information, while others is to address concerns I’ve heard from people over the last couple of days.

On Community

There's been a lot of speculation as to why we're doing this. I'm not going to speak for the others (because they're doing a pretty good job of it themselves to be honest) but I'll tell you why I'm doing this. I've been talking to (read: boring) many of my offline friends with just how cool this is going to be. The first thing that they ask me is "Why the hell are you doing this to yourself? Why are you working for free again? Why are you spending your free time doing this?" I can only answer by saying that it's incredible fun to be part of an online community of like minded people who are trying to make one of my favourite pastimes (ie blogging and tinkering with my website) a more enjoyable experience. I love being involved in open source projects and this is without a doubt one of the biggest things I've ever been involved with.

When I first started looking for an alternative to Movable Type I had two options. The first was WordPress the other was Textpattern. I chose WordPress for the community. That community however has changed. It’s core has shifted into something different. The thing is though I can’t really say that this is the community’s fault. This shift actually can be attributed to something else. The fact of the matter is that WordPress developement has stagnated as far as the .org user is concerned.

The only explanation I can give is that this is because the WordPress development shifted it’s attention. Shifted from the .org section to the .com section. I’m not going to condem the guys for doing this, in fact in most cases I understand them doing this. However this move and shift hasn’t gone unnoticed and obviously a lot of energy flying about the WordPress community has either gone into the ether, ignored or shrugged aside. All these thousands of people out there that have contributed in the past feel as though they have been forsaken. That could be part of the reason why a great number of people genuinely got excited about the prospect of a new system, written from the ground up that might address questions. It’s all about the community. It’s all about the people that you interact with and that help you along your way.

What you think the latest release of ‘features’ on WordPress.org is a coincidence. It’s obvious (to me at least and this feature could have been in development for months, in which case I apologise) that this is a knee-jerk reaction to a situation that obviously has made them sit up and think about the situation. It’s not every day that several prominent developers (Robert, Owen, Michael), at the very least in the past otherwise they would not be in the credit box on wordpress.org, decide to leave and start something on their own; it’s a sign that something isn’t exactly right in the community. My absolute favourite one however is this one (I only saw this because it was lying in my referrer log), so yeah go and hammer that link and lets get it up there at the top :) lol.

So you're aiming to kill WordPress?

Don't be silly. Nobody is trying to kill WP. We're not aiming to make software that is better than WordPress, we're trying to make software that is better than ALL blogging software out there. Lets be clear about this there are quite a large number of open source projects that allow you to do essentially the same thing. Their degree of complication obviously varies, however the fact remains that there are many alternatives. As it stands it's considered that WordPress is the best alternative that's available on the market. So it's obvious that people would think that we are in fact trying to create something that out does WP. Also many of us have come from a WordPress user base, however that doesn't mean other people from other backgrounds cannot join the fun. But would we really be getting involved and doing something if we didn't feel like there was a void to be filled? Room for one more solution that offered an alternative way of doing things? We're ultimately here because we feel that we can contribute back and put our efforts into something that can aid people and can provide a fun platform to share their thoughts, photos and media.

We don't even have a developer's pre-release. The reason it was announced in any fashion was because one of the core developers moved his site over and was the first person to actively use the code for his site. That's a MAJOR success, one that deserved to be celebrated. In a weird twist of fate, outing slightly earlier than anticipated was actually an incredible great thing. Why? Because people that were on the fringes, thinking that this was just all wishful thinking might actually hold some legs. As such this little buzz has gotten several people wanting to contribute, and here's one reason why:

Habari is a fresh start. We’re all in the unique position that we’ve been blogging for several years now. We’ve all had our share of experiences with open source and we’ve all seen several different packages in our time. We’re at the stage now that if we had a fresh start we’d do things slightly differently and hopefully better. And that’s what we’re aiming to do.

Habari Contribution Model

I guess that might be the greatest draw to the Habari project. We're pretty open for people who want to contribute to the project, in fact the way that this project has been set up, it's ideal for people wanting to contribute as it's got a completely different structure in it's development, in that it's a meritocracy. It's a great way to make sure that the software comes first and that there is no one person who veto's everything or has final say in everything.

So were do we go from here? Well one of the things that I shall be doing as I'm coordinating the designers on this team is to give a recap every Sunday of this week's activities on the design front. What we finished off and what we've got to look forward towards. I'll be including pics and so everyone is always welcome to chime in and add their two cents to the design either here or in the dev mailing list.

Spread the news!

Well Chris broke the news about, Habari, a new open source blogging CMS platform. While he didn’t want feel it correct to mention in the post who was involved, I’m going to step forward and put my hand up as the designated pixel pushing monkey of this motley crew.

What I find amusing is that as this news was released by Chris, I read this post about how any new blogging software would not stand a chance because of WordPress. Man I love a fucking challenge. I mean reading that post you’d think we’d be fools to even consider making a WordPress alternative. I guess all I can say to that is: Colour us DAMN foolish.

History Lesson

Back in November Chris approached a few of us to see who would be up for helping design for the new project he was working on. His timing couldn't have been better to be honest with you. See I had a MASSIVE itch that just needed to be scratched. I had definitely not said everything that needed to be said about blogging administration panels, especially since the last one I was actively involved with didn't exactly go exactly the way it should have.

I felt pretty burnt the last time round to be honest, so much so that I really thought it was best for me to steer well clear of any open source involvement in the future. However like I said in that post the most important thing that I got out of the online experience was the collaboration with the guys. If it was anyone else asking me to do something apart from Michael, Joen and Chris I’d have probably declined there and then. I didn’t join the team because I didn’t have anything better to do (as it will become clear in the coming months), but alas because I really want to create something that I can be proud to have been involved with and that I will find a joy to use. Something that I can contribute towards and that others can contribute towards as well in an open fashion.

So when Chris came forward I was all too happy to say yes. Considering that I had actually contacted another developer (I’m not going to mention him by name but needless to say he was also having a similar itch which says a lot about how things stand in the current open source blogging world) about starting our own blogging CMS, it was interesting that others around me felt the need for an alternative as well.

Shuttle vs Habari

The great thing about the Habari project is the fact that it's a clean slate. Imagine starting on the ground floor. There were no presidencies, no set stringent codebase that couldn't be altered, no existing userbase that might be confused and the list goes on. This is a decidedly different beast than Shuttle.

Those who don’t learn from the past end up repeating the mistakes again and again. So my approach to the graphical development of Habari is slightly different. Simply put, I’m going to be as transparent about the design process as you can imagine. I’ve seen several times in the past couple of months on the project, that through being open about the design I’ve been able to seriously move it forward in ways that I very well might not have considered. Ideas are what will make things move forward. At the same time it’s important that one person takes the bull by the horns and really goes to town on the design. Others should jump in with as many suggestions as possible, all the time because that’s how the innovation will continue and the project will not stagnate.

The Design

I will be going into a lot more detail in future posts regarding all the design decisions and what everything does and how it all fits together, so be patient, it'll all pay off in the long run I promise. As we've only recently kind of decided about colours (although knowing me I will probably tweak them, but I'm trying to be very good about this and sticking with this colour scheme), posting this will give people a feel of the quality of final product we're going for (and I'm not going to even talk about the code, the others are more than capable of that).

The following jpg is but a mockup, however Chris has implemented a fair chunk of this believe it or not (with probably like a 2 week old mock up), I’m telling you the man is a machine that will not be stopped. His dedication has forced me to make sure that I bring my very best to the table. It’s a bit of pressure that I’m actually relishing. Keeps me honest about things.

Final Thoughts

I started writing a best of 2006 about a week ago, however I’ve had to break that down into several posts because it got far too large and I didn’t feel that I would be doing each topic justice, if I bulked all of them into one post. So for the first topic of conversation I’ll talk about the best of the Net for 2006. This is mainly about design on the net, internet applications, websites that caught my attention on the net for one reason or another. So without further adieu here’s the Squeaky Kode Trophies for the year of 2006.

Addictive Site of the Year

Best Advert of 2006

Best Designed Site of the Year

Best Internet Application

It’s taken me a long while but I finally bit the Flickr bug as well and got myself an pro account as well. I’ve got to say that I don’t use it as much as I should do but that will be changing in the not to distant future.

For my feed reading I’ve jumped on the Newsgator bandwagon. I’ve got a lot to write about with respect to FOFRedux and will hopefully go to using that application in the not too distant future sometime next year, but in the meanwhile I’ve found the Newsgator service to be exactly what I was looking for.

So I guess it’s not so much that I had a specific internet application, but rather the fact that I actually decided to use several of the plethora of applications out there for use in the first place.

Best Internet Related Software

Best Firefox Plugin

Blogging Networks Politics

If you think I’ve missed something pretty fundamental just drop a comment and I’ll be sure to add it into the list or create a whole new category for it.

Mandolux, easily one of the single best implementations of a good idea for wallpapers on the net. Take some nice high quality photographs, halve them so they’re abstract enough provide them as wallpapers in different sizes. Genius.

This “little” Eboy poster is so apt for capturing what I’ve been experiencing for the past year and a half as I got more into the internet in general. What’s great about the poster is that you actually notice more and more stuff on second and third viewing.

Blue Dragon from the fine folk at Mistwalker. Dammit, they’ve actually got me considering getting an Xbox 360 as it’s what I expected Final Fantasy 8 to look like (7 was and is the only Final Fantasy game I’ve played, but when I mean played I mean bought a Playstation just to play…(thanks to Aurum3 for the heads up, I might have to kill you guys).

It’s late. What’s definitely becoming endemic of my life in general (being late with projects), Broken Kode | Season One is roughly 8 months late. This book was meant to have been completed and at the printers end of February so that I could put it forward for the Blooker prize. Wasn’t for the prize to be honest, but so that I could at least adhere to a deadline and get the book finished. I remember pressuring Michael to sort out the introduction and then I subsequently missed the deadline (sorry Mike); who knows maybe I’ll put it forward for this year’s Blooker prize (although I seriously doubt it would stand much of a chance).

The first paper copy of the book sat on my desk (next to my mouse) for the past 6 months and hadn’t moved. It just sat there as a constant reminder to me that I had invest hundreds of hours in compiling and putting together that it wasn’t complete. I took it with me to America and completed reading it and annotating it on the plane there but couldn’t find the energy to sit down and correct everything.

If I get nothing else out of this vacation (which I actually have) I’ll know that I completed this book.

I'm happy to report that the copy has been sent to Lulu and is ready to be ordered.

The standard version is in glorious black and white, however I’ve included a colour version of the book as well for myself and to see what the colour printing of Lulu is like, as I intend to compile a design and illustration book in the not too distant future (yeah I know, but thankfully that’ll only be illustrations and a little commentary here and there). For all intents and purposes that’s all the tweaking I’ll be doing. I’ve gone through the original book soo many times, I’ve still got that feeling that I’ve missed something; maybe that’s because I’m soo close to this book that I feel as though I’m never going to really finish the book and that there’s always something to do.

The original book came in at over 285 pages long. After sitting down and thinking about it, I felt that a lot of the posts really didn’t deserve a whole page dedicated to them. So part of the exercise was to cut down the number of pages. The current page count is a more manageable 195 pages.

I’ll be providing a decent page for the book and sorting out my Lulu store front as well, until then the dead tree version provides a little bang for your buck, as it’s got the following goodies:

1. Introduction by Michael Heilemann
2. 12 Illustrations (created during that year) which form the month covers
3. Commentary for most of the posts
4. Sketchbook material
5. Afterword

As this is one big experiment, I’m going to write down some of my reasoning behind the layout and design of the book itself and other things I’ve learnt about the Lulu process. Hopefully these might enlighten those brave souls that are considering jumping into the book based on blog field.

One post equals one page

So here’s a layout of the pages themselves (click on the image for an expanded view). Now I’ve decided to put one blog post on every page. This allows you enough room to actually include a number of things, including the categories, the dates and other good stuff like commentary for the actual posts themselves.

All Posts?

Comments or no comments?

Extras?

Summary

Standards Reboot. In a way it was inevitable, following these pretty shocking results. Seems we do actually have a way to go before the majority of sites are standards compliant.

I’m currently in Greece for a full 2 weeks. I’ve been looking forward to this break for well over a month now, hell I’ve been looking forward to this break for at least 3 months. I didn’t go anywhere during the summer period, which was probably the worst thing to do for my psyche to be honest. The summer was a very dark time for me with very little bright spots which was clearly reflected in my mood and how I dealt with those around me. Being a traditionally pretty patient person, I noticed myself getting more irate with things and situations that I would normally brush off, or at least see the funny side. Hasn’t been the case for at least 3 months now.

I guess I can attribute this to the situation in Lebanon which seriously hit me very hard. I can probably attribute it to work which has been very far from enjoyable these last few months, or I can attribute it to unfinished business from several areas that kept me down (my list of unfinished projects is pretty extensive). Needless to say, I need a break and a break I shall have. However I’m never happy until I’ve got things off my plate and I’ve been very good at not putting anything new on my plate but actually finishing those projects that I had opened/started/committed to first, after all I’m a finisher, not just an instigator.

Since it’s good to have a list I think I’ll make this list to remind myself what I have to look forward to in getting these monkeys off my back:

Finish the Splash Panel Redesign.

Stathi's and Priya's Websites.

Broken Kode Season One

Broken Kode Prints

Chameleon Theme

Also on a completely different note, I really need to get myself a laptop (any recommendations for small dinky laptops, like the Fujitsu Lifebook or a Vaio would be welcome) as I’m currently using my dad’s windowz install using an ADSL connection that might be a little difficult to sort out on Ubuntu and it’s seriously painful to get anything done (which isn’t helped by the fact that it’s a shitty CRT screen that’s got a tinge of purple going through,…nice), the ‘Kode has never looked this bad.

Check out the new Sony Bravia Paint Advert. I’ve got to say that these adverts are taking over the same status as the Levis ads of the mid 90s. You know the ones that would propel music artists into the limelight and just make little contributions to pop culture. Even more flamboyant than the bouncy balls.

Flickr Cards. What makes this strange is that I only sorted out my flickr account yesterday (yeah I’ve been resisting this for a while now). I love print as well.

Finally my wishes for a mobile that actually provides me with what I want have been answer with the latest Sony Ericsson M600i.

I honestly don’t care that it doesn’t have a camera, as I find that feature a bit superfluous for my liking in a mobile phone anyway. It’s also fantastic news that mobile phone manufacturers are starting to utilise touch screens a little bit more, thus reducing the overall number of buttons on the phones, simplifying the design completely. Even better than a Crackberry.

In my mind this is exactly what I was trying to get last year. A phone that lets me:

1. surf the internet
2. check my emails
3. all within a nice, small tidy little package, not the size of a PDA.

On a similar but unrelated note, by the very nature of contracts in the UK, I end up getting new handsets every year; while this is a great thing, it’s also a terrible waste, as I’m massing a collection of handsets. All of them work, but they’re different generations. Randing from a battered Ericsson (when Sony hadn’t merged) to an oldie Nokia, the LG chocolate phone and my Sony Ericsson K750i. Definitely make a nice collection of how quickly technology for mobile devices has ramped up in a small space of time, but what the hell am I supposed to do with all these handsets? It’s not like they’re vintage yet so I can sell them on ebay as a collector’s item, and it seems like an awful waste chucking them in the bin. I mean where do ipod mini’s go when they retire? I ask because I’m eying up either a Zune or one of the new ipods.

There seems to be a bit of resurgence in the design and web development UK market. This is a very good thing as it’s been pretty poor the last year or so. When I cleaned up my room a couple of weeks ago I kept looking at my old magazines like I do and there seriously is a great deal of inspiration to still be gleamed from them. For web development I highly recommend .net. The magazine had a makeover a couple of months ago (including their website, which has a lot of great stuff on there) and has a great deal of good people working for them.

Unfortunately for the more artwork/design inclined, the available mags out there are slightly more hit and miss. While I do love the class that emanates from Digit, it does lack a certain amount of fun in their features. It seems less made to showcase designers and their work, and more inclined to actually provide information on what’s going on. Now that Computer Arts has gotten rid of the previous editor-in-chief and promoted Paul Newman into that position the magazine is definitely more readable. The problem is that they still continue to make the majority of the magazine tutorial heavy. Yeah guys move on already. There is a lot more to talk about than how to use photoshop and illustrator to do stuff. You might think I’m just jaded because I don’t use either, however the fact remains that rather than providing tutorials about design and how to development your skills, and more interviews with design firms and creatives, it’s all about filters and put this layer here etc, which in my mind is a complete and utter waste of space that could be used for something more useful.

As a sidenote, the recent Jason Arber (a man whom I have a lot of respect for) article on typography and fonts was completely wrong, which I have no doubt is going to spawn some serious amounts of letters being sent to CA. Basically (and I’m completely paraphrasing, except where I’m going to be quoting the man), he said that he doesn’t understand why there is a need for font designers anymore. We’ve got enough fonts, and here’s the kicker, which is I guess meant tongue in cheek, but he still said it:

In time, and with enough re-training, these poor creatures could become normal members of society.

Oh, dear, he didn’t just say that did he? As if that wasn’t bad he then gives the following as well:

Do you think these sick font designers will be happy when they've created a million fonts? Two million? A billion?

Oh dear again. You might as well call all those writers and tell them we’ve got enough books in this world, all the directors we’ve got enough movies in this world, all the musicians that we’ve got enough music in this world and to all artists that we’ve got enough art in this world. This is what is known in the industry as letterbait (read it in the recent Wired). This has got letterbait written all over it.

We definitely need better font management systems (I’ve been using Character map for Gnome and absolutely loving it), but saying we don’t need any more fonts and then insulting the font designers is just plain wrong.

I’ve been playing around with the Gimp a bit more. Yes I know, I’ve got a massive post about this and other Ubuntu goodness. To make things slightly nicer on myself I’ve downloaded this little theme that integrates the new Tango icons from the upcoming (and has been upcoming since October of last year) version 2.4 of Gimp. Anyone got any news about when this is going to be released? I downloaded the unstable version and I see the crappy text dialogue function is still missing a text wrapper (which is pretty essential).

The last week has seen some movement on a couple of the open source projects I’ve been involved with in the past couple of years. I’ve already spoken about the first one but now I’m going to talk about the other project that I had such high hopes for which have been washed away and effectively thrown back into the faces of those that actually devoted their time into producing the goods, I am of course talking about Shuttle.

For those in the dark I’ll give a brief history of the WordPress Shuttle project. The idea first came to me after I had just finished my work on the Manji theme. I had so much fun collaborating with people online and producing something that could be used by other people (and thus giving back to the software that runs my site), that I really wanted to get back into the game straight away. I talked to Joshua and the Chris, both of whom I have the greatest amount of respect for, both of which were completely up for the project. By sheer luck Michael was having thoughts about this of his own as well. He was more than happy to join the team and in doing so brought Matt’s (Lead WordPress developer and Automattic head honcho) attention. The endeavour was now considered more than just hot air. In a very shrewd move Michael brought in Joen and thus the initial Shuttle team began work. Because a picture paints a thousand words, this is the screen shot of what we had to work with when we first started:

If you’re interested to see more, you can have a look at a Carthik’s screenshots for WordPress version 1.5.

We started work in earnest and the emails began flying between us. We were talking about everything and anything that came to our minds. We did research of all the existing blogging software tools (and the time those that hadn’t been released yet). We talked about usability, advanced users, novice users how things should work, how things should not work, what areas we should concentrate on. Seeing as we’re all bloggers we decided to give the call out to people to find out what they thought as well:

1. http://www.brokenkode.com/archives/shuttle-development/
2. http://binarybonsai.com/archives/2005/02/01/wordpress-shuttle/
3. http://www.brokenkode.com/archives/shuttle-workshop-01-dashboard/
4. http://www.chrisjdavis.org/2005/01/31/the-cat-she-is-out-of-the-bag/

My initial thinking was heading towards something completely radical to what we had. Just strip the walls down and start implementing things in a completely different way. I don’t know if I can find the very initial mockups I started flirting with but you can check out the image set to show a lot of the initial design development. This is where working in a team is paramount. I remember Joen distinctly pointing out that the fundamental structure of WordPress was fine and that we shouldn’t be rocking the boat for the sake of it but rather finding what works and what doesn’t. Making things simple for the user. I’m completely paraphrasing probably a couple of weeks worth emails beings fired between the ENTIRE design team, which of course included Matt at every step of the way (we didn’t have a mailing list until Matt set one up for us). It was agreed that we wouldn’t move to anything radical unless we felt it served a specific purpose.

I should have seen the writing on the wall to be honest. As the design went forward Matt seemed to implement things he liked and not bother with things he didn’t. So the blue hues made it into the design, as did the pods on the side, but little else. To be fair to him at this stage we really hadn’t moved every single aspect forward as you see it in the final mock ups.

The days went by and action on Shuttle was sporadic at best. We’d go through these massive bursts of creativity and energy and information sharing. Every once in a while one of us would prod the team to get it’s finger out and continue with this project. You might think it should be easy but people have lives and many things to do get in the way and it’s not like any of us didn’t have other projects on at the time.

Lets make one thing clear here. I am a finisher. I complete the projects I’ve actively put my name down for. I’m not in the business of making a claim for something and not going through with it. I’ve proven this time and time again. Even when things get tough, even when it seems like it’s not even worth it, I will continue to plough forward even if it’s only me, with the hopes that those around me will feel good enough for them to contribute as and when they seem fit. Contributing to Open Source should never feel like a chore. It should be fun, it should be something you actually want to contribute towards.

So in a last attempt before I completely gave up on the project I dived into the designs. For two weeks straight I would come in from work and spend 4-5 hours implementing the designs. I tried hard to keep with EVERYTHING we’d discussed in the past. The dos and dont. I tried to find solutions to design aspects we hadn’t really covered. I’ve not had that massive creative burst of energy in years (and this was done on the back end of creating the FOFRedux redesigned UI). I tried taking into consideration things that although I didn’t agree with I had to make concessions to allow for.

A prime example is the dashboard. We were told not to go too far with this because lots of discussions were going on in the hackers mailing list and it would probably be the one place that we didn’t have much say in. This is all well and good, so I tried to come up with a solution I could at least stomach. It’s easily my least favourite page of the entire design.

Once the mock ups had been completed I left them with the rest of the team for comments to be put on the table for them to change whatever everyone felt worked and didn’t work. We then proceeded to discuss how we were going to implement the designs. Matt was NEVER truly forthcoming about how this was all going to be implemented. We discussed the issue further, but once again he was as elusive as ever. When a response finally came back I didn’t know how to react. Thankfully other members of the team did. The designs were not some chicken to pick and choose at what you like and what you don’t like. They present a certain level of uniformity across the pages. They follow a specific design thought, and a great deal of thought and attention to detail has gone into them.

After we talked about it a bit more, and we were promised by Matt that things would get incorporated into the WordPress core, however it would take some time and it was mainly to make sure that people didn’t get jarred with the changes in one go, this was a solution I could honestly live with. The design wouldn’t be hacked but implemented gradually. So I went forward and released the mockups because they were the culmination of our active involvement in the project as things would now begin to get integrated into the core code. Of course things would change or be tweaked as the design was implemented but by and large it would remain the same.

Any which way you cut it that’s why Shuttle never made it into the design of WordPress. It has nothing to do with us being lazy or that we couldn’t be bothered to do anything but the photoshop files. Joshua had begun implementing the design on his own machine, we were discussing the logistics of how this project would be implemented into the code. However as it turns out there doesn’t seem like there was/is any commitment from the WordPress Dev team to incorporate these designs. If there was a commitment it would take 3 guys 4 weeks TOPS to deal with it all. There are well over 100,000 WordPress users, many of which are pretty capable with both CSS/PHP/JS. Hell there are people out there that are already implementing this off their own backs.

It doesn’t seem like the WordPress development team (and by definition Automattic team) are keeping to their word because the latest addition to the Automattic team is now going back to square one to start over, asking people the same questions we did when we first started the project.

Bryan joined the shuttle team late in the game and in some ways I think he didn’t feel as comfortable jumping into the design. He’s a fine addition to the Automattic team, and more importantly I like the guy, so none of this is aimed at him. He has been given new directions by the powers that be. Strip it down, build it up again from the ground if we have to. Why is it called Shuttle:Atlantis? Maybe because Matt didn’t like the first one? That’s what it boils down to to be honest. The alarm bells started going off when I read the first things to come from Bryan over of the WordPress.com blog.

... see that Shuttle finally makes its debut in whatever form we as a team see fit.

So I’d like to address those that didn’t like the Shuttle mockups. You (the collective you) got 5 people (plus 1) devoting a massive amount of their time to make your blogging experience more enjoyable; more usable; more fun. We didn’t ask for compensation and we didn’t ask for anything in return. We didn’t rush into this and we certainly didn’t hack through the designs. We did this because we believed in the sotfware. We believed in the people behind it and the people using it. None of us on the team are new to open source contribution. Michael’s contribution doesn’t need much introduction (Kubrick and K2), similarly with Chris (whose contributions extend far into the past of WordPress, Persian, plugins galore, K2), Joen does this for a living and has contributed for the admin panel on Zenphoto (including the default theme) and his wordpress theme Fauna. I have given the open source world Manji & Rin and contributed in the redesign of the FOFRedux UI. Joshua has answered enough support questions to make my head dizzy. Bryan has contributed to the world ChaoticSoul.

Open source is great because you can contribute to the source in a positive way, otherwise none of us would be actively giving to it so freely. That however is not the universal truth. At least that doesn’t seem to be the case in the WordPress world. This is a shame because part of WordPress’s success is the people involved with the world it surrounds. I have said many times before that is one of the things that elevates it above other open source initiatives.

It’s a shame really. Has WordPress really gotten so big that those in charge of implementing it no longer care for those that devote their time? As long as you’re creating a theme or a plugin that’s great, just don’t even bother thinking about contributing to the final product in any way. That kind of contribution is obviously not welcomed. There was a time when the Shuttle mockups, created exclusively for making WordPress prettier, would have been taken in with grateful arms. It seems that time for WordPress has passed.

Compare the current admin panel with those presented in the Shuttle mockups. Once you’ve done that go back to the top and compare it with Version 1.5.

Do you see something different. One was designed and thought through. The other is an ad hoc implementation of core ideas. I could go on at length to discuss the design decisions to be honest with you however I tend to allow the work speak for itself.

Ultimately I’m extremely proud of the work we did in TRYING to make the WordPress admin a better looking more usable place. The online friendships I’ve forged with the Shuttle team are thanks enough, even though the work we did was ultimately not appreciated. This is probably the very last time that I talk about Shuttle, unless of course someone implements the design aspects of the work we created as a plugin or in another way.

One of the nicest adverts I’ve seen since the Sony Bravia advert. This is for Sky’s new HD service. Also on the Bravia advert, did you know they’re prepping up a brand new one as well? This kind of reminds me of the mid/early 90s when Levis held the fort for adverts that were more art than just promotion of the products.

Grid Systems by Kimberly Elam (published by PA Press) is required reading for ANYONE even thinking about jumping into graphic design of any description. I blasted through this book in a week and it’s definitely one of those books you refer back to again and again as it’s a reference book as well as a book which generally teaches you the basics.

I was talking to Kyle a couple of days ago. He was expressing how he liked the summer and then we got a bit geeky and started talking operation systems. He’s recently made the jump from Windows to the land of the Apple, while I have dumped my windows box for a shiney new ubuntu setup. Kyle not known to be one to mince words. He’s easily one of the most direct people I know online. What’s scarey is that he often says things with a decent amount of authority with proof and counter arguements to back this opinion up. He’s definitely not scared to go in the direct opposite channel to what people are talking about at that particular moment in time. So taking a page out of his book I’ll make an observation and a prediction.

In five years time the main operating system in the world will be a flavour of Linux. I’m not saying it’ll be Ubuntu (although it’s definitely on the right track), just that this is something that will happen. 5 years; that’s when the linux operating system will hit critical mass. By critical mass, I’m talking with this definition in mind:

An amount or level needed for a specific result or new action to occur.

I swear I can actually hear everyone turning off and pointing their browser elsewhere, but hear me out. Yes I am still new and excited about Ubuntu and everything is fresh and new to me right, so it stands to reason that I’m in my honeymoon period, after all I’ve been locked to the Windows operating system for the past 10 years or so. The truth of the matter is we’re on the cusp of something important. To illustrate my point, I present exhibit A. Everyone loves graphs, so here’s one that shows the difference in development cycles of proprietary software and open source software.

Yes it’s COMPLETELY made up, but I’m just trying to illustrate a point here. Proprietary software works in this way. You have a piece of software and you update it for the following reasons:

1. Make some noise so people who haven't invested in the software can do so now.
2. Make some noise so that people who have invested in the software can do so again because they thought the first version was so great.

So what should you do in order to make some noise? You add new features. You do things the competition are not doing, and you do it in a certain scheduled manner that doesn’t make people who paid for it 18 months ago feel a bit cheated that they’ve got to shell out the cash all over again so soon. Bring in discontent within the ranks which is not good for business. Sometimes what happens is that the software feels bloated, takes ages to load anything. It doesn’t really make all that much business sense spending a great deal of time on trying to clean up the code and cutting things down, because it’s not as big a marketing push as just saying you’ve got 115 new features or whatever.

Meanwhile, in the land of the open, you’ve got MILLIONS of people ALL over the world, some paid, some not, constantly chugging at the plethora of open source projects. Open source doesn’t benefit much from adding new features just for the sake of this. This is very clear with such powerful applications such as Blender (for 3D modelling) and Xara for vector illustrations. Lightweight programmes that do their functions well and quickly with the minimum amount of fuss.

What’s the downside of all of this? Well the only thing I can think of is the fact that open source isn’t really in any hurry to get anywhere. The model is based upon slow updates, on a constant basis. Open Source doesn’t really benefit from doing things quickly really. Also every once in a while you also get projects getting abandoned. However it’s good to understand that by their very nature these projects can be picked up anywhere down the line. All that’s happened is that the process and development has been slowed down (so some projects might not exihibit the above graph exactly but might have a plataeu or two. A great example is WordPress. It’s a fork of the abandoned B2 project. WordPress is now much more used than B2 ever was.

Open Source will eventually surpass proprietary software because there are more people devoted to the packages and their ranks are expanding. However the reason why companies will eventually jump ship to the land of the penguin is because of the bottom line. When you’ve got software that is completely free, operates better than the proprietary ones and can be modified to do your bidding without any consequence to that bottom line, it will begin making business sense.

Currently Linux isn’t there yet. In many respects it has definitely surpassed Windows on many, many levels. However there are other areas that could definitely use some SERIOUS polish. I believe that polish will take a good 5 years before Linux is at that stage of the fight where it can take on both Microsoft and Apple.

The common link between Microsoft and Apple is that both of these companies are slowly heading down a very restrictive road, a claustraphobic one; which is in direct opposition to Linux which has begun it’s accention up and open field. It’s early days but mark my words this will happen, it’s only a matter of time.

I’ll probably do a more proper review of the latest version of Flock at some point when it’s slightly more mature, but v0.7 Beta is a good stage to look at it more seriously. Also mad props to my boy Veloso for a really nice implementation of the new Flock website, very cool.

Seriously one of the best adverts I’ve seen on TV in a good long while. The advert was aparently done by Mother (does anyone have a link for this ad agency, definitely one to look out for).

I’m going to ramble on a bit more about Shuttle, simply because it’s been a pretty big part of my life the last year and loads of things I’ve wanted to talk about on this blog have been waiting for this moment in time. Everytime I would think about something cool to talk about relating this project I always had to keep on the mental shelf until after I got to this stage.

People expected the second coming for some reason. The simple thinking behind joining forces with the likes of Michael, Joen, Chris, Bryan and Joshuas was that by joining forces with these exceptionally talented people, at the top of their game, we would get something that would far exceed anything I could have come up with on my own. Make no mistake about it, without everyone’s contribution we wouldn’t have the mockups you see before you. They would be INFINITELY different and IMHO much weaker.

The problem however with this situation is that INSTANTLY people’s expectations were raised. Some people were expecting the second coming and didn’t get it. To be fair though we never promised you the second coming. We promised we’d do our best to make the WordPress admin beautiful and usable to people of all levels of experience with the programme. Some might forget that we’re not catering just to the power users; we’re catering to the every users. That’s a tough thing to do correctly, and that’s part of why it took as long as it did… but only a small part.

Of course then there are those that feel that the admin didn’t really need to change at all. I obviously disagree with this assessment COMPLETELY, otherwise I wouldn’t have gone down this road in the first place. However this is a VERY important comment to take note of. You see change is feared by a great deal of people. In fact that’s probably (amongst many other reasons) by Matt will be implementing the design incrementally. WordPress got to it’s current popularity based on the fact that the software does what it does, well. Add to that list the community behind it; and finally the simplicity of the UI design.

The Shuttle team obviously saw room for improvement as we belive it’s not the prettiest to look at. Some might then argue and say:

Well hang on, it does the job right?

That there is a programmer’s mentality, not a designer’s. So right from the very start (I remember clearly) Joen tried to push the idea that the overall structure that the interface currently has is not incorrect fundamentally and therefore we shouldn’t be looking to change that just for the sake of it. Michael then kept hammering the ideas (through his comps) that if it’s not needed STRIP IT OUT, keep it simple, keep it clean, keep it clear. On the flip side we had Matt telling us some seriously weird things you guys do when using WordPress so we had to factor a bit of that weirdness in there as well. However don’t try and deviate from what has been established as a core unless there’s a serious reason. Those reasons would then get hammered back and forth, between Denmark, England and the US on a regular basis.

For those that are thinking that this is just a design exercise and won’t get included fast enough, I think you’ll find that if you’re running WordPress 2.0 the integration of Shuttle has already begun! What you think Matt woke up one morning and decided to add the colour blue from the previous grey? Or that those drop-down-draggable menus in the write section appeared on their own? All things that came about from the Shuttle project. Admittedly they’re not as we mocked them up at the time, however we hadn’t progressed to the level we are now at the time those areas were being implemented in the code. I now officially feel like Morpheus in the Matrix after Neo gets his ass whupped in Kung Fu.

Many lessons were learnt during this design process however we’ll keep it at this for now.

Before you read this I suggest you go and have a look at the 20 mockups showing the future of WordPress.

The idea of redesigning the WordPress administration panel began believe it or not in December 2004. For over a year and a half myself, Michael Heilemann, Joen Asmussen, Chris J Davis, Joshua Sigar (later joined by Bryan Veloso) exchanged countless emails and mockups and links and ideas regarding what we thought the WordPress administration panel should be. The project was called the Shuttle Project. I now have the pleasure of presenting what we came up with and explaining the future of the project.

The Shuttle project was without a doubt the single hardest thing I’ve ever been involved with. The only thing that made it easy for me was the fine and exceptional gentlemen on the Shuttle team itself. What made it so difficult is the fact that we were thinking of the thousands of WordPress users all over the world. We were thinking of usability, we were thinking of asthetics, we were thinking of the power user and the novice user. How do you get three headstrong (and passionate) designers to play nice with each other? I swear I have no idea but somehow it all actually worked out in the end. I owe Michael and Joen a great deal of thanks for helping me improve how I think about design.

However the greatest thing that I could have gotten from this project is the sense of collaboration that I felt throughout the project. We were all working towards making something we use on a daily basis that much better, it makes Open Source that much more enjoyable. Although it was tough going through this design process, I think we’ll all instantly forget everything once it’s part of the official install.

When's it coming out?

I can’t wait for the Shuttle designs to be incorporated into the WordPress install, as I do believe that once it’s done there will be only one choice in which platform you should be using.

WordPress Identity | The Colour Blue

So the first major change we made was give WordPress a colour and it’s own distinct identity. We had to make sure that it didn’t mimic any of the other blogging tools out there, so we did a bit of research first. Textpattern has orange, Symphony is green, Moveable Type is grey/green, Expresion Engine is purple. We decided to go for blue. What does blue signify you ask? An easy link (and direct from Wikipedia) is that the colour blue:

...is considered a calming, soothing colour, perhaps related to its association with water and to the sky.

That was what I was hoping we’d get. The colour palette provides an atmosphere that is familiar and not harsh on the eyes. Seeing as a lot of people spend a great deal of time looking at the actual backend of WordPress a great deal throughout the day, it was very important to keep the visual impact of the administration panel to a minimum.

After a great deal of back and forth and loads of mockups and discussion the number of hues of blue was kept to a total of 3. These same blues would be used to distinguish links within the panel itself, as consistency is a major factor in keeping the user comfortable.

System Messages | The Importance of Colour

Join me next time as I talk a bit about usability (or at least try and talk about the subject).

Go buy the DVD version of an open-source movie? Open source as in you’ve got full access to all the elements that went into making the movie. I know sounds completely crazy but very cool at the same time. I’ve been waiting for this for a good long while, ever since I heard about it all those moons ago. If you’ve not tried Blender and want to try your hand at 3d modelling, you really don’t have very far to travel, and nothing to pay for your visit either.

The real reason why I decided to reboot to something more simple this time round hopefully is becoming more obvious with the latest change in the background on the front page. As the section implies the background (which occupies the most real estate on the site) will be used to throw the spotlight on specific projects and completed artwork. Version 4 isn’t all that different (at least in structure) to what I have now, however it’s been adapted in such a way to allow me to play around more freely.

This week I’m throwing the spotlight on a little open source project I got involved with a couple of months ago. It’s an online feed aggregator and it’s allowed me to actually get up to speed and READ all the various sites that I’ve subscribed to. Traditionally most of my feeds were read from the Sage extension for Firefox, however I needed something a little bit more powerful FOFRedux provided me with what I was looking for.

The FOFR dev team is a great bunch of people. It’s a tight nit community of devs and users as the programme itself isn’t as widely used as it really deserves to be, however we’re hoping to change that with a number of great additions to the software. The major element being a complete overhaul of the UI admin section as you can see from the project page.

Anywho if you’re looking for an online open source aggregator that sits on your server, then you don’t have to look further. It’s still early days (version 0.3 was released a couple of weeks ago) but I have very high hopes for the software. Final word, I’m planning on spending a lot more time cleaning up my projects area over the coming weeks as I’ve got a great number of announcements to be making. Sometime over the weekend I should have some pretty exciting news about Shuttle to share with everyone and a page that mimics the FOFRedux page (it’s a lot bigger because I’ve got to upload over 29 images).

Guy Howard emailed me on Tuesday asking me whether or not I wanted a free LG Chocolate phone to test out. So off I went to see what this promotion was all about.

From the site itself:

They realise that consumer-to-consumer recommendations carry a higher trust factor than virtually all other forms of advertising, and that word of mouth is a frequent factor for purchase. They also recognise that bloggers are the most important initiators of online conversation right now.

Hence this programme. The premise is simple:

1. Connect with the key online design/style/fashion 'thinkers'
2. Send them a pre-release version of the phone
3. Let them use it
4. Find out what they think

I can sum it up very simply. I’m a complete whore. Free shit? Hell I’ll take 2.

Now bare in mind that I recently went through a pretty painful experience to try and find the phone and package of choice for me. I will say that I’ve pretty much got it wrong on the package that I chose and I’ll be changing that very very shortly. The phone I have though in my mind was the best on the market. Sony seemed to have got it right this time. So how has does the LG Chocolate compare to what I considered a pretty damn solid phone, in fact the most solid phone IMHO to date?

The packaging The first thing I noticed of course was the AMAZING packaging. LG have seriously given this some thought and it really shows. Traditionally mobile phone boxes come in these ugly square things plastered with stickers. The box is more like a showcase rather than anything else. It’s a slender black rectangle that closes with a magnetic flap. Opening it up reveals a red back with just the LG logo on it and then the phone sits nicely in the middle with two compartments on either side where all the accessories are housed. If you’re reading this going why the hell is he telling us about the box; I’m telling you about the box because it’s bloody important (and yes I was the kid that used to throw away the toy and go mental with the actual box…I still do that). I opened this at work and was ranting and raving at how cool this box looked, Tim on the other side of the partition asked me if it’s a better box than the ipod, which it really is.

The Innovation It’s one of those phones that does provide a glimse of the future and provides some innovative steps in mobile phone design. I’m specifically talking about the touch sensetive pad at the bottom of the phone. When it’s closed you don’t see anything but a smooth shiney surface. Once you’ve opened it however you get the buttons glowing red from behind and they’re not actually buttons. So the problems seen on the Sony any many other phones is gone. Give if a few years and most phones will have this technology employed as standard.

The good Apart from the elements above I’ll say that I was very impressed with the earphone system they’ve decided to employ. While Sony have decided to have a special sony input for the earphones, with a completely seperate accessory to enable you to use a normal earphone jack, LG have enabled this feature from the start which is just good forethought in my eyes. And the remote controller is also very cool as well.

The bad It’s about the details for me. For some strange reason in an attempt to make everything slick and seamless many electronics manufacturers seem to skimp on a very basic element of product design. I’m specifically talking about flaps. Flaps are notoriously badly designed it makes me wonder how all these different manufacturers get it wrong across the board. The most specific example that comes to my mind is my recent purchase of my Kodak digi camera (yeah I haven’t really talked about this because I’ve not really used it extensively but my trip to America should remedy that situation). The flap that opens up for the memory card is this flimsy piece of metal that gets pulled back and is held onto the phone by two very thin bits of plastic. It’s basically asking to be broken in the future.

The second thing that’s not all that hot is the phone. It’s only 1.3 megapixels, so it’s back to the grainy photos of old. See I was getting used to my 2 megapixel camera on the Sony and so I don’t expect to go back in this department. But as Tracey rightly pointed out, you never do anything with the photos on your phone, this is very true of the average user…I’m a bit weird and different like that. I tend to take loads of snappy snaps of things that inspire me that I can draw or more importantly I can use in my drawings, so the reduction in definition of the camera is a bit annoying. Guess I’m going to have to start carrying my normal camera some more from now on.

It’s pretty obvious based on this promotion and other things that LG are pretty proud of the phone they’ve come up with here. They’ve definitely taken a page from Apple and tried to simplify things as much as possible and get clever product designers on board.

James Jean explains the process behind the new cover work for Calexico’s latest album. I’ve really got to stop visiting that guy’s site, it depresses me too much how much talent that guy has.

Ok I’m officially in love. Claire Wendling (the site is in French, so now you know where she’s from as well) is the most amazing artist I’ve seen in a bloody good long while. I’ve got two of her art books here in front of me and each page oozes with inspiration. In many ways the woman was born to depress the shit out of me, because she’s that bloody good at what she does.

I bought her smaller book Iguana Bay 2.0 around a year ago or something, however what I didn’t expect was her latest offering (it’s not even on her site yet), Drawers 2.0 is an amazing collection of drawings and illustrations from an artist at the top of her game. I seriously recommend you go out and buy this book if you’re into Don Bluth type of artwork mixed in with a serious chic french BD stylings. She uses several mediums to bring her vision to life, using just pencils, going a bit more dark with simple ink brush work. Her painted work is exceptional as well, however in my eyes her most sublime artwork are the ones that are coloured in photoshop with flat colours. It gives this animated look that is absolutely stunning. While Disney has decided to go all 3D, I think it shows a distinct lack of vision on their part. 2d animation is not dead, and the likes of Miyazaki show this off again and again. Wendling shows what can be achieved as Drawers 2.0 shows a number of animation sketch stills for an animated series called Ozma that is not going to get made, which is a shame, I’d have bought it in a second.

Both these books (not sure about her other publications to be honest) are from publishing house Le Cycliste (shocking site, easily one of the worst I’ve seen for a proper publisher in a good long while) and are hardcover books. The paper is nice and thick and even though the binding is the stitch type (which is the more expensive type) I don’t think they got that aspect as well as they could have.

In any case for anyone looking to be inspired, Claire Wendling is your woman as she’ll take you to places you couldn’t have imagined yourself.

Well I did actually like the whole documenting what was on the table to be completed during any particular month it did actually keep my mind focused on the task at hand.

So recapping January I didn't complete everything I had on that list of things to do, the main one was Shuttle. My intentions were very good however I got sucked into sorting out my book and that honestly did take a great deal longer than I originally anticipated. I did however sort out a couple of things that have been lingering over my head for a very good long while, mainly my logo and the associated business cards which I've also sorted (more about the business cards and online printers in an upcoming mammoth post).

So looking forward into February I forsee a great deal of Photoshop action ahead of me.

1. Operation: Borg - I've got the pages I need to mockup for this clear in my head. I had a massive moment of inspiration on Wednesday last week regarding the future of this project, and needless to say I am absolutely buzzing about the possiblities that this will no doubt provide. I'm glad that Snookie is feeling the excitement again, but at this stage it's really up to me to provide him with the goods, so to speak.
2. Shuttle - We're so close I can actually smell it. Last month we had some very good progress in general and after something stupid like 20 mockups we're all happy with what the login page will look like. The Dashboard is getting there although that is one of those pages that might not end up exactly like we want it but then again that's cool, graphically it will be the part whatever stays or leaves. Time to concentrate on the rest of the aspects of the programme. I do actually intend to finish this off this month. I don't have anything as time consuming as putting a 300 page book together so I should be able to keep my word.
3. Broken Kode Version 5 - I've actually started mocking this up. Most things are starting to fall into place, however I am actually stuck as to how I'm going to do a couple of things. Not so much stuck, because I'm sure that they can be done, it's just the fact that I don't know how to do them myself. Soo if I know you and you're a 'presser of much programming-fu-knowledge, you're going to definitely get an email from me, consider yourself warned :).
4. Inksmith - I've got a couple of things to get sorted for Inksmith this month. It's not a lot but it will get the ball rolling on this little project that will expand in due course I am convinced. So hopefully we should have an announcement of some description by the end of the month.
5. MA - I've promised Stathis that I'd complete the design for his website very soon. Going through his archives it's amazing to realise that he's been blogging for 6 months now and doesn't show any signs of stopping anytime soon, which is great. I'm a big fan of his work, although I don't generally read it online since I feel that his work has to be read on dead tree. So hopefully sometime this year we can sort that out for him. Regarding the style of his site, I've got a very clear view in my mind of what it's going to eventually look like, which is completely different to anything I've done before. Of course it will have drawings in it, but not what you'd expect.
6. Priya - Again another site that I promised I'd sort out. This is for a fashion designer friend of mine. It's going to be very ethnic and I can't wait to get on with it since this has been on the table for a good long while. I just need to get a slew of photos from her and I should be away.

So it seems there's a good deal of photoshop going on this month and lots of coding towards the end of the month. I can live with that.

When I’m not talking much on the Kode, it usually means I’m up to something. This has been a pretty long weekend for me. I didn’t go to work on Friday because I was pretty determind to finish off several of my projects. You’d be amazed at the amount of progress someone can get done if he’s under a self imposed deadline.

Of the things that was on the top of the list was to finally create myself a logo. This task is a lot simpler to say than actually accomplish because the honest truth of the situation is that I’ve been trying unsuccessfully to get myself sorted with a logo for like over a year now. I couldn’t for the life of me decide what I wanted the logo to convey. I couldn’t for the life of me sit down and come up with an idea and run with it.

Honestly I tried everything. I tried sketching, hoping that devine inspiration would strike me and I’d be off, however I’ve come to realise and accept that unfortunately my mind simply doesn’t operate that way. Sometimes I can force the issue and will eventually submitt. This could be because of time constraints, it could be because of lack of energy to continue kicking the point into submission. However Broken Kode is different. Broken Kode is in many ways a reflection of myself and as such I don’t care how long things take, as long as they’re done properly.

Sitting on something for a long time however is not good. Taking your time and taking a year and a half to think of a logo is silly. Now I don’t know if it’s because I sat down and I thought things through, or if the pressure got to me but Saturday evening it hit me. I knew exactly what I wanted my logo to convey. I knew what I want to say with it, and I had a clear image in my head.

I’m not sure how most designers go about getting ideas to create things, but due to my background in weilding a pencil and ink brush, I visualise the entire thing in my head before I’ve even begun. I can ‘see’ everything clearly in my head. The final result might differ in the details, but the overall outcome is pretty close to what I envisioned at the start.

The one thing that really annoyed me was getting something to work as 16px x 16px for the new favicon. After going down to like 50px x 50px there seriously was no point to the whole thing. So you’ll notice the favicon is a bit different to the real logo, but the essence is there. I’m not going to base my logo on the basis that it’s got to fit into a 16px x 16px square, anyway the logo is going to be getting a lot of use in the physical world, so that takes a bit of presidence. For all those IE users that can’t see the favicon (first of all switch to Firefox) here’s an image,

This element only occupied 1/6 of my weekend. I’ll hopefully be announcing the other stuff later on during the week.

If you’re looking for the ultimate in modern art, I direct you no further than one of my favourite artists out there, in any medium. His name is Banksy and he’s a graffiti artist. However he’s a little more than just a graffiti artist. The man is also a genius of his form. Reading Computer Arts for a couple of years came with getting introduced (although not as often as I should have been) to some true creatives around the world. Buro Destruct spring to mind, as do Identikal and more recently Banksy.

What sets this guy apart is that his graffiti has got a story to tell and it’s just plain clever. He’s got a message to convey and doesn’t mind going out of his way to convey that message. Rather than decreasing the collection in an art gallery (either by defacing it or stealing it) he increases it by adding one of his paintings amongs other in such notable areas as the Louvre (in Paris), the Tate (in London) and the New York Metropolitan Museum (in NY). The funniest aspect of it all is the CCTV camera footage that he includes in the book of him putting these paintings on the walls. The rest of the book will either make you smile or laugh out loud at what he’s trying to say.

What made me laugh even more was the quote at the back of the book by the London Metropolitan Police:

There's no way you're going to get a quote from us to use on your book cover

As he says himself, you either love him or hate him. His work can be seen in his book Wall and Piece or over on his website.

Not many people read The Guardian, compared to other fine publications like The Sun (which apparently has got the biggest circulation, something seriously wrong with this statistic in case you missed the sarcasm, but anyway).

I’ve never been a newspaper person myself. Just never seen the point. Which is kind of strange, considering that growing up, it was a weekly pilgrimage to get the Sunday papers. In Athens there wasn’t that many places that sold Arabic newspapers. Sundays was always a trip to the local newsagent, that was over an hour away :). My dad would sell this trip in a family outing type thing, we’d get some lunch in a restaurant (my mum cooks Monday - Saturday, Sunday is my dad’s day to cook, which explains the restaurant option every Sunday). When I was at University, everyone used read the paper every Saturday and Sunday during breakfast and lunch.

I find it strange since I devour the written word in all it’s forms, except this clearly disposable version, the newspaper. On Wednesday, coming out of the tube, I was greeted with a free sample copy of the new redesigned Guardian. So I had a look at it, and I was engrossed in the little snippets. I read a couple of the opinion columns, and while a lot of it didn’t really inspire me much, but even then I’m considering buying this or the Independent on a quasi-regular basis.

Saida has been listed on several sites: CSS Import™ , CSS Drive , CSS Mania

LifeHut Go check it out, then come back and thank me for pointing it out to you.

Bran Man. This is a pretty cool idea. You either get it or you don’t.

CSS Reboot Fall 2005. Well BK4 will be out long before then, but still pretty cool.

forgetfoo is this crazy blog that takes AJAX to the next level. I absolutely love what he’s done with the functionality. Not so keen on the overall design (liquid and all) but it’s a spectacular effort.

I’ve spent over 24hours straight on my computer in the last 2 days. Truthfully speaking this really was a long time coming. I didn’t go anywhere (except to the supermarket) and just spent all day ‘drawing’. Now I’m inverting it because I’m very traditional when it comes to my classification of artwork in general. My brain finds it difficult to call digital artwork (the kind that was done completely on the computer), well artwork. There’s no paint to be cleared. No pencil sharpenings and most importantly no paper, end product.

All my work (www.emmortel.com) is done first on paper, then scanned in and redone on the computer for the crispness if that is indeed what I want (recently that’s not been the case).

Broken Kode V4: Saida I concentrated on two drawings. The first will eventually form the basis around which Broken Kode V4 is based upon. The running name for that is Saida (as that’s where I actually drew and inked the drawing). When I started colouring this one in, it just felt all wrong. As if I really didn’t know where I was going. I find that choosing the right colours is sometimes one of the hardest things in a drawing. That’s why I sometimes like to flick through all the various blending modes in photoshop, incase a colour contrast works well for me. Saturday I was able to crack this tough nut and get it to a pretty good area, which hopefully I’ll build upon for my mock up.

Human? I’m such a dick. I have less than 4 days to finish this drawing off and actually send it off to the editors. This is for that book I’ll be contributing to. Cutting it terribly fine is a complete understatement. The thing is though, and this is true, I just didn’t have any particular inspiration for the topic. It’s not the topic’s fault, but I wanted this to be special. So I kept writing notes in my moleskin to try and flesh out all the avenues in front of me.

Yesterday inbetween work on ‘Saida’ I got the inspiration and the ideas started flowin through. In fact there were too many ideas, that I actually thought I wasn’t going to be able to incorporate them all. I’m 70% there. Just need one more quadrant and this should be finished.

It’s been a seriously tough weekend, productive to say the least, why is that we only push ourselves when there’s a deadline, rather than taking it easy and doing the job correctly over a decent period of time? It’s not like I didn’t have ample time to prepare for this particular project. Live and learn I guess.

My god for a second there I thought I’d actually forgotten what it was like to be truely inspired. I draw a lot of inspiration from graphic novels and graphic design in general. The thing is though it’s been a while since I’ve been truely inspired to do some kick ass work in the past week and a bit. I will admit that a lot of it has to do with my current slump I’m in (which is why the updates haven’t been fast and furious as they usually are around these parts).

So I’ve been reading and trying to gain inspiration. It’s not soo much that I don’t have the ideas, or the projects to sick my teeth into, it’s just that right now I’m lacking that drive that motivates me to go for it with absolutely everything I’ve got.

Yesterday I sat down and read Mark Millar and J.G Jones' Wanted. Now usually I’ll buy a book based on the writer. Seldom do I go for the artist alone. This was not the case say 6 years ago when the artist was everything. The thing is though, that while the writer makes me think, COOL, that was great. It’s the artist that will make my jaw drop, and my imagination race for a while, and there’s this silence in my head, as everything begins to become clear and I know what I was missing all this time.

It’s the spark that’s been missing, and thanks to Jeff Johnson and a pin up he did for Wanted I’m inspired and I can start doing things again. I’ll be updating everyone about the portal we spoke about a while back, as there have been some interesting development in that area. Just need to get my thoughts in place before we get that going.

Gather round children while I explain why I’ve got an online presence at all.

Draw! My first and biggest passion is drawing. That’s what I did for the better part of my adolescent life. I would spend hours upon hours sketching away, trying to perfect that one drawing. Summers on end where I would wake up and spend 10-15 hours over my desk sketching and painting and learning a new technique.

I haven’t done that in a very long time. Day in day out, Draw! Draw! Draw! I can attribute that to one and only reason, the web. I’ve already spoken about how I got into learning how to design, but why did I bother with the computer at all in the first place? The main and only reason at the time was I wanted to computer colour my work. It seemed like the right thing to do I guess.

Inbetween all of this the web however had a strange allure on me. ‘Let’s get a website, everyone seems to have one, why not me? You’ve got a reason to be online, it’ll be great.’

Part of me wants to go back to that poor bastard and tell him to stop these stupid ideas and get back down to the business of drawing, because I was soo naive at how hard it can actually be. Of course if I did that, well then life at work wouldn’t be quite as interesting, and I wouldn’t be able to do a great deal of things that I can to enhance my drawings, plus I wouldn’t have 3 different drawings styles that I do now. It all kind of works out in the end I guess, just takes that much longer with, story of my life actually. I always get there, it just takes me 3 times as long, and sometimes the train has passed.

Therefore that effort has not been lost, it’s hidden there, it’s just a matter of sitting down and getting drawing again. Emmortel provides me with the framework set up for quick and easy updates, I’m ready to tackle the first reason I decided to get online. The origins of Broken Kode can be mapped back to providing an easy way to update my portfolio site with news updates. It’s spiralled into oh so much more, and I didn’t expect that, but I’m really glad for it.

Is this the first time I’ve got a portfolio online? No hardly, but it is the first time where updating the site, won’t be an issue. It won’t be a chore, just a 3 minute job, with no coding involved at all. It’s a base for me to start.

Design. In creating Emmortel I had to think about several things. The main issue was whether or not to go for Flash versus something HTML/CSS pure. I ended up with a hybrid as they both have their advantages and disadvantages. With Flash you’ve got control over images, functions, sound (coming soon I hope), movement, etc. It’s a great little tool, if used wisely. Strangely it’s the Flash part of the site that I’m least happy with, but I’m in no rush. I’ll be tweaking that file for sure, adding better interactivity and functionality. I just need to learn how.

In sorting out my Flash side of things, I ran into MANY problems. My knight in shining armour was Scotty, (his website can be found here: Gertdesign ). Scotty you sir ROCK!

I have optimised the images as much as they will go, and the css file runs at a whopping 3k which I’m pretty happy with, so hopefully it’s not an arduous task to load the site.

1024 versus 800 I’ve chosen my path on this particular war. This portfolio website is meant to be a showcase of art and design, it’s not meant to be seen at such as small screen, and honestly I’m not targeting people who are still with an 800 screen. The majority (and by majority I’m talking about 80%) will be able to view the website as it was intended to. I apologise to those still on 800 screens, but alas I believe it’s time to chuck out that dusty old monitor (do they still make 800x600s?)

So now when I get my business cards made, I’ll have:

Words | www.brokenkode.com Pictures | www.emmortel.com

See now this is a pretty interesting little project that I’m surprised the usual culprits on the web haven’t really talked about. Mike Davidson has just released sIFR 2.0: Rich Accessible Typography for the Masses. It’s a smart little method to actually enhance your typography without killing accessibility.

A flash file is created, but not after it’s jumped through a couple of hoops to make sure that the end user actually has the proper software to see the fantastic new and exciting typography.

What I’m most impressed about is just tight the entire package is. I love it when I download something and there’s a handy manual in it. The code might be the most spectacular in the world, however because I can’t make heads or tails of it, it’s pretty useless to me.

I’ve been having soo much fun with designing Emmortel lately, that I’ve got this mini creative boost, and I’m itching for the next project I take on because I’d also really like to implement this method and a couple of others that I’ve been learning.

So I went into central london (as I generally do on a Saturday) and grabbed some comics. While we’re on the train, Stathis tells me we should go via Old Street to grab my prints from Constandinos. I actually got a small tingle in the back of my neck when he said this. Words cannot describe how amazing it felt to actually see my prints there ready to go. I hinted at this at the beginning of the year, start my limited edition print shop. I’ve been building towards this point for a good long while now.

Ages ago I had the idea of creating a small shop where I’d provide things that I myself would want to own. I see a lot of Cafepress shops around the place, and I can’t imagine lots of people buying things from them. The reason being that the actual items aren’t really all that appealing. It’s like a half assed effort on the owner’s part. They stick a logo on a mug and sell it for $15 plus postage, screw that for a laugh. I’d never sell something that I myself wouldn’t buy. If I decide to have a T-shirt on offer, you’ll be sure I’ve done it so that I can wear it myself, before I try to sell it off to anyone.

The first item on offer is the very first

CoCo Limited Edition Print

Any print I decide to offer will have a print run limited to a maximum of 10 copies. The first copy will be mine (like the one pictured above), which reduces the number down to 9 copies to be sold. Since they’re coming from me directly I’ll sign and number them, on the front or back depending on the actual person’s preferance. This thing measures slightly larger than your typical A3 paper, and the paperstock is a fantastically thick 250msg. Costandinos, you sir, ROCK.

Once they’re gone, that’s it I guess. So if you’re interested go over to the shop.

Well that’s depressing. I’m a MASSIVE Flash fanatic. I love how the program is built, the interface, the freedom it provides. All these things make Flash one of my favourite programs, except for the past year or so I’ve got to say I’ve only really used it for colouring in and completing my images. The real reason behind that is I’ve been concentrating on creating content for a portfolio website, and that CSS has been occupying my time immensely.

I finally sat down today to try and start on the often beleaguered Emmortel.com. I thought well might as well have a nice animated button on BK. So I fired up the program,…and NOTHING. I’ve forgotten soo much. I guess everything is practice, but it’s pretty scary how rusty I am since I was really getting into Action scripting a year ago, and now I’ve got to effectively start from the beginning in that department!!

Nothing like a challenge really, since I’ve got less than a month to whip out a portfolio website, with a WordPress front page and a completely Flash interface.

About 3.5 years ago I was scared of computers. Well not so much scared, as just didn’t really want anything to do with them. This I guess was due to my brother, who when we brought a computer back in 93 or whenever, decided to methodically trash the thing, and install viruses on for shits and giggles. Obviously my frustration had it’s limits and I just didn’t bother with the whole thing.

Fast-forward to University and I got by using the Uni computers and borrowed a 586 from my buddy Richard who’d just bought a Laptop. I did a bit of word processing, e-mailing and message boards. Very little else. My main creative output was to actually drawing and painting. I would spend days on end on a single drawing. After I’d compiled enough work I decided to set up a website and have an online portfolio like all the pros. The only person I knew that could help me with this project was my brother.

We spent an entire month sorting out my website. I would sketch it and he’d do everything else. I’d ask him if he could make this happen or that happen. He came through in grand style, and that’s when kalscreations was born. It was updated once, and never again. This was back in 2000.

When I graduated in 2001, I decided it was time to get another website up and running. Again I enlisted the help of my brother for this little project. This time however he didn’t last. If anything I was even more demanding than before. You see I’m a complete anal perfectionist. It’s a sickness I guess. He lasted 2 weeks this time before he just looked at me, having reached the end of his rope, and said

' You know what, if you want that effect, DO IT YOURSELF'.

‘What do you mean do it myself? I don’t know how!’

‘Learn.'

So I did. It was tough. It took months upon months to understand photoshop, it took agest to understand how Flash worked. It took a while to get to grips with vectors. The main thing was persistence. I don’t know what reminded me of this story but I thought I should write it down and say thanks to my bro who pushed me into the deep end when the time was right.

While on the DO forums (that’s Designate Online), the topic of recommended design books came up. The one that caught my eye straight away was this little book called Freewave. I read the amazon review, thought about it for like 10 seconds and quickly ordered. Yes Amazon is very lucky to have people like me, suckers for books, even bigger suckers for experimental books.

So what sets Freewave apart from the other design books out there, that have literally pages upon pages of design and illustration within their covers? A very simple idea. All the FILES that make up the images within the book are included on a DVD that comes together with book. Run that through your head a little. 248 pages, each page is made up of several files, all there for you to analyse and see how they were made, and here’s the great part, it’s all under (as far as I can tell from the legal jargon they’ve decided to use on the front of the page) a form of creative commons license. So you’re free to use the images and files in anyway you see fit.

Now you might think that the book would be filled with utter shit. Fortunately that’s not the case. The book’s got some brilliant designers contributing to it’s pages and what’s great is how they’re all grouped into specific areas of design.

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Honestly I’d love to contribute to something like this in the future. If you’re a designer, buy the book. ISBN 1-86154-273-9

How exactly did I miss this one, the second it came out? Go over to typographica and have a read of a pretty good interview with Rian Hughes, desigener, illustrator and typographer extrodinaire. I’ll be sure to check out that little catalogue they mention at the bottom.

I wish I could buy affordable prints by the man, the one’s I’ve seen are bloody expensive, but that’s the modern design world for you right there.

It’s been a while since I posted one of these, and this is definitely not a slant on all you beautiful people that have been slaving away on your superb Manji designs it’s just that this one as I’m sure you’ll agree truely does deserve a mention.

It belongs to Catonya and Rick, however it was designed by Lisa Fahrmeyer from Cafelisa. From her website it’s clear that Lisa has a distinct style to her work, and that’s something that’s a rare thing on the internet. To have a style that people associated you with. Lisa seems to be of an illustration background and that mentality shows. As illustrators you spend years trying to find your voice. I guess the same can be said of graphic and web design in general.

Found the link for this on the Designate Online forums. The following is taken from the Building Letters page for the Tsunami Relief effort:

As a core element of this issue, Max Kisman suggested to ask type designers, designers, artists and illustrators to produce one flower each, that will be published in the magazine as a respectful tribute to the people who have lost their lives, and to the power of nature.

This is what I’ve decided to give to this effort. Originally I wanted to use this as the Manji logo but I think somehow it seems like it was made for this effort.

I do urge any other designers out there with a few hours to spare to contribute to this edition

Damn. I’ve been stuck in front of my computer for too long I think. I mean, I’ve been back in Greece for 2 days and already I sorted out at a conceptual level the logo design I’ve been promising Alfie for like 2 months. It’s incredibly simple and yet has everything we’ve talked about all in this simple logo.

I spent months battling the options and trying to come up with decent ideas but the thing is all I needed was to calm down from the routine of working life, and I’d be able to achieve everything I wanted.

I always wanted to create a mascot for this site as well, but to be honest again it was just a thought. I can create characters pretty quickly, when I’ve inspiration, so the fact that I’ve done that as well in such a short period of time is just getting me all excited thinking about what other things I’ll come up with in the coming week and a bit.

I will unveil my design sometime in the not too distant future, but needless to say I’ll be trying to use Blender at some stage for the character animation. What’s funny is that usually I struggle with coming up with the name that fits the character, this time round I actually came up with the name and created the character around that name.

Today I concetrate on the finalising my plot draft and start drawing spreadsheets for ‘Sublime’.

Just realised that next Tuesday marks one full year of active blogging. I think a year ender mammoth post is lurking on the horizon.

Over a year ago I went the then newly located to London Rana to an art exhibition by one of my all time favourite designers in the world. The man is seriously brilliant. I later find out that a great deal of the design (mainly logos) for a great number of comics I used to buy as a small kid originated from him. He’s the first designers who’s book I bought without any hesitation (Devices in case you were wondering ). His portfolio can be found at Device Fonts.

So the calanders have been coming in hard and fast. There are two to download. These can be found at Comadivision (from Pixelsurgeon) and at FontFont (via typographica). The second one is of great interest, because they’ve called in some type designers into the fold and the only person that gets 2 months in there was Rian Hughes. Nooch.

Update: Oops, erm didn’t realise I’d closed the comments, erm if you’d like to add a comment please feel free to :).

Been a pretty productive weekend to be honest. I’ve really hammered through a load of ideas that have been floating in my head for a while now. The good news is that I’ve completed the cover to the Chameleon Manual cover. Here’s a small teaser of it. Just to clarify that’s not the whole image, just a small part of it :).

How’s the development of Chameleon going? Well pretty slowly to be honest, my partner in crime Rootie has gone AWOL for the past week and a half and I can’t seem to get through to him. I hope he’s ok but he’s not answering his e-mails and he’s not posted anything on his blog for a while now. I’ve got the following list of things to do before I can release Version 1.0 of the template:

1. Incorporate some icons for some pretty simple javascript.
2. Write the part of the manual relating to the CSS and the code itself.
3. Bring into play the additional php pages that make up the template, i.e the search page, archives page, links page etc.
4. Sort out the main menu at the top of the page since it seems a bit borked right now.
5. Have a small little play-around with the footer, I think I can make things work slightly better than what they’re being shown right now.
6. Continue and NOT screw the perfect validation that’s been established by Root so far.

I’ll hopefully get down and dirty this week to be honest. It’s going to be tough as I’ve got loads of other things that need to be done this week as well.

I went to get measured for Yasmine’s wedding next week. Since I was in the Oxford Circus area I decided to actually walk around and take in the pre-christmas atmosphere. Decided to buy a Mocha from Nero, it was without a doubt one of the worst coffee’s I’ve had in a long while. Expensive and crap, well that’s life, at least that means I won’t be buying something from there for a pretty long time,…if ever again.

I walked in Borders and scoped out the magazine section. Saw the Adbusters magazine and saw a whole bunch of other graphic design mags and illustration mags. 3x3 was something I’d not noticed before. The back cover really made me smile because I recognised the art straight away. It’s the esteemed James Jean. I wondered upstairs to the graphic novel section, dude it’s increased big time, I turn the corner and I counted like 6 people sitting around reading comics. Seriously I thought that was the coolest thing in the world. I’ll be going there some time again maybe striking up a conversation with fellow comic boys and gals, since I don’t really get that chance very often to be honest.

Iliosnare will be going live in a small fashion pretty soon I think. I’ve thought of the bare basic structure to the site and I think it’s about time I did something about it. With the release of Chameleon I think it’ll be about time. Chameleon might have to be postponed for a week or so. I’ve been working on a number of other projects right now and it’s pretty hard to finish all the bits and pieces that I have in mind for the official release. I’ve finished the front cover for the manual though and I’m really happy with that. Yeah there is going to be a manual for the thing, it will come as a pdf and should explain everything that’s needed really, from both a coding point of view and from the architecture and philosophy.

Radio silence for the next 5 days. I’ll explain all once I get through everything, needless to say it’s very exciting news. Part of the reason is also that I’ll be in Milan over the weekend, although that has nothing to do with the exciting news. Watch this space though, and yes there’s a reason why the category is Design Nation.

Another fantastic find from our friends over at pixelsurgeon, this time out it’s for this fantastic design outfit operating out of England as far as I can tell called Magnetic North. Check out the link called Imagination, really brilliant, I loved it.

Slowly but surely I’m starting to find more and more hidden treasures on the net. This is one of those. Greyscale.net. Thanks to drunkfoundation for the heads up. Beautiful stuff.

One of my absolute favorite designers in the past few years is Robert Lindstorm from Sweden, he is Design Chapel. I absolutely love his work, and is someone I actually look up to in terms of what I can achieve and what I can do in the field of design and contemporary illustration.

I wish I had 150 Euros. Check this website out, BLAUGALLERY

Go have a look at the stuff this guy has on his site. It’s brilliant, soft and vibrant. Definitely worth watching. I really like finding treasures like this on the net.

David Lanham

I’ve got a lot to get off my chest right now.

I’ve been reading Computer Arts for a while now, over 18 months and counting. Recently they had a change of editor-in-chief. Now while the last one Vicki Atkinson wasn’t a babe, she did her job WELL. She kept pushing the design of the magazine forward, she kept the ideas and content fresh, she had a vision and really knew what her audience wanted.

Enter shebag of horror, Gillian Carson. Oh dear, nice to look at, but she’s running the damn magazine into the ground. What’s really frustrating for me is that I renewed my subscription before she came on board, and that means I have to see through a whole year of her rubbish. Man that really hurts, it hurts soo much I refuse to ever buy the magazine as a subscription until she leaves, we get an actual editor worth a damn, and is guaranteed to last the entire tenure of my subscription.

Seriously there is loads and loads of comments about the complete wank the magazine has become under her in the very short 4 months. Here’s a couple:

cover to issue #99 gillian you’ve ruined it

What’s triggered this off is the new issue. 100 issues of Computer Arts, that’s a major thing. You’d think it would be something amazing, instead what do we get? A dvd with demos, a book with tips and tricks ripped from the magazine from the past few months; not even a full version of Vue D’Espirit, and five stock images, worth 1000 quid, MY ASS are those 5 images of people running on the god damn beach worth 1000 quid. If they are actually worth that much, there are some mighty dumbass art directors in this world, with waaay too much time and money on their hands.

The magazine itself doesn’t inspire either. The interview with House is more interested in giving me pictures of the people that work there than their work, which is relegated to a few smaller sections, c’mon, they’re not rock bands that don’t have something visual to show. You want me to know what they look like? Fine do that, but don’t let that take presidence over their work.

The rest is filled with the general gumph, that keeps talking about ‘stunning’ this, ‘fantastic’ that, ‘astonishing’ the other, ‘beautiful’ whatever. It’s getting really old, real quick.

This is my latest creation. That is my font, iliosnap. I used a free copy of Font Creator given with the computer arts magazine, pretty amazing what you can do with freeware and open source coding.

[FLASH]HTTP://www.brokenkode.com/wp-content/images/iliosnap.swf, 568,400 [/FLASH]

So after god knows how long, actually probably something like 3 weeks I finally did a bit of designing, other than for this blog. I’ve still got loads of little things I need to sort out for this blog, but I’m working on that as well. Just completed a logo for a charity organisation for a friend. He’s a good guy, heart in the right place, very strick views about things but he means well. I promised this 3 weeks ago, so I think he’ll be happy to actually see it. I’ll be doing a few posters using it. This is just the logo, I think 2 illustrations to accompany it should be enough.