Designing for the web
Since it’s the last day of 2008, I’m happy to announce that desktop calendar for January of 2009 is live and managed to land on the list of Smashing Magazine’s Desktop Wallpaper Calendar again. This was a quick, pure-typo work, hope you like it.
And now, I’m off to celebrate the first day of the new year. Take care and let this year be better for all of us. No matter what.
So I got to design holiday cards that were to be sent to customers and friends of my company. The requirements were to make branding blend in nice and don’t use Christian symbols, cause our customers are not only Christian/Catholic and we didn’t want to hurt somebody’s feelings. Anyway, it was my first print work since my old business cards, so it was quite a challenge, to be honest.
For the branding, I didn’t want to expose logo that much, so I decided to make our branding font and colours more visible than the logo itself. One of our branding colours is pure cyan, so it fitted perfectly for winter-themed postcard. I also used winter-themed illustration of snowflake, since I thought things like Christmas tree would be too Christian (did I mentioned already that sometimes “political correctness” makes me sick?)
Anyway, when I look at it now, I think I could’ve aligned the text, logo and tagline a bit better, but overally I’m quite happy with the result. Any thoughts from your side?
I’m terrible when it comes to organizing my time. When I don’t have anything to rush me and literally kick me in the butt with “You have to do it!” I prefer spending my time slacking around, playing games and doing absolutely nothing. Yes, I was born lazy and the only thing that keeps me organized are the to-do lists.
I’ve used quite a few desktop and web-based applications so far and the only one that stood out for me was Todoist, where I even have bought Premium membership. It’s not expensive and makes lots of things easier. Since I switched to Mac I started using Things, but I was not quite amazed with it - it was simple to the bone, too simple for me, there were a lot of things in Things that pissed me off, so I moved back to Todoist.
In search of The Holy Grail of Desktop To-Do Applications I found this news about The Hit List on TUAW. I read all about it and decided to ask Potion Factory for the private beta access. It didn’t take long when I got an e-mail with a response that I’ve been granted beta access and they want my feedback when I get the application. Here are some quick thoughts that I got after migrating my Things to The Hit List.
I know it’s not Weekly finds anymore, since I forgot to do it every week, mostly because I was a bit overwhelmed with my college assignments and office work, so I renamed it to “Design finds” just for the matter of ’semantic correctness’ (yes, some people in my previous company used to call me a semantic terrorist ;^)). Hopefully this will become “Weekly finds” again when I’ll manage to jump over that pile of assignments that life gave me.
Anyway, here we go.
I’m happy to announce that yes, I made another desktop calendar for the wallpaper and also I’m happy to announce that - yes - just like the November one it’s featured on Smashing Magazine’s Wallpaper Desktop Calendar article.
This time, the inspiration came from aurora borealis effect that can be seen in the northern parts of the world during winter. I was lucky to see aurora borealis live during one of my trips and I must say it’s really stunning. I tried to capture the astonishing view in the wallpaper, but I’m sure that it can’t be done that easy.
Anyway, I hope you like it and it will serve you good. Feel free to drop a line in comment whenever you feel you want to leave me a comment about it or about my work in general.
As a designer, I often seek inspiration in unusual places. As a fan of every sprout of the metal and rock music, I follow the scene (especially not-so-known bands) very closely. I found out that there are lots of widely unknown bands that album covers’ make great design inspiration — mostly dark and spooky, some very iconic, but all of them very inspiring and well done. Here are some that I find particularily interesting lately.
A bit late this week, but we’re strong in numbers this time.
Well, that’s quite a shock. I was browsing thru my RSS just now to find that the logo I designed for ITSBA has been featured on Design Your Way’s Show me some well designed logos! article.
I’m very happy with the fact, especially that I’m a DYW’s reader for a long time and it was always one of the places where I was seeking for inspiration while designing. Yay!
I’m happy to announce that another project, I’ve been working on lately has gone live. This time it’s RubyTime, an open source (available to clone on Github) time-tracking application written entirely in Merb as a showcase project — to show that Lunar Logic Polska is not only about Rails.
My work in this project was mostly about design and interaction flow, and I’m quite happy with the results (I have some feedback already from the guys here in the office who just started using the application internally). If you’re feeling like checking it out and feel that you like it, or not, have any suggestions or objections, let me know in comments here or drop a note on the Github on Lighthouse.
Happy time-tracking!
Update: the project should be available from our Github repository soon.
Update #2: the project is now available from our Github repository and we started using Lighthouse to track our bugs/improvements. Happy testing!
Update #3: I forgot to write about it, but Rubytime.org also works for quite a while now. Happy testing!
Just a quick information — wallpaper “Unforgettable autumn” I designed some time ago has been featured on Smashing Magazine’s Desktop Wallpaper Calendar 2008.
Yay me?
Mariusz Cieśla. Born 9th October 1984. Webdesigner, front-end developer. Fascinated by the web two-point-oh trend, wide variety of design. Loves his fiance, dogs, cats, books and Apple products. more about Mariusz...
