The Heavy Chef Project

I’ve added LogoFaves to my reader and can’t help but featuring these little numbers. 

When I studied at the Cape Technikon Design School in the mid 90’s, a superbly talented mate of mine (who went to go onto be an art director at a host of advertising agencies in Cape Town and the UK) revealed that deep down his real passion was to be a movie credit designer. I was stunned, since I never really thought of that as a ‘career’. I’ve always remembered that conversation whenever I see a cool movie intro, and so, it was a fair dose of interest that I viewed Smashing Mag’s latest gallery masterpiece: ‘30 Unforgettable Movie Opening Sequences‘. 

Check out the gallery here.  

At the same time we had the conversation back in the 90’s, the hot film of the moment was Se7en - the creepy 7 sins film with Kevin Spacey and Brad Pitt - and everyone was talking about how cool the opening sequence was:

Thanks Vitaly and crew for yet another amazing and painstakingly put-together post.  

I love designing icons. It’s something that I still do whenever I get a chance. I find it relaxing, as weird as that may seem.

We often use icons for the sites we design at World Wide Creative. In our quest to develop sites that are profitable for our clients, we have seen (and research about the fact) that well-designed icons make difference to usability. Once a user is loyal to a site, and repeatedly visits the site, the icons go a long way into making it a more pleasurable experience.

So I found a post called ‘10 mistakes to avoid in Icon Design’ quite interesting (found via my new favourite resource, Design Float, which I posted about a week ago). Written by Denis Kortunov, it’s a detailed, well constructed breakdown on mistakes to avoid when designing icons.

On that note, one resource that our design team has found particularly useful in sourcing icons is iStockPhoto.com - especially when there’s no time to draw your own.

It’s amazing how much detail goes into a website. Think of the functional components, programming technology, tags, site navigation and the personas. Phew! And that’s before we even touch the content.

Design is the glue that holds everything together. And with so much to think about when you’re a web developer, I’m now going to add another to the list: typography.

When I studied (as a print designer), typography was a huge part of my course. In the Internet Age, it seems to have taken a back seat to structure and image manipulation, even though it’s such an integral part of keeping web layout together. If you take a quick browse through some of your most visited sites, I’ll bet you’ll see a noticable lack of well-weighted typography.

With the aim of keeping typography on the check-list for managers as well as designers, here’s a quick list of points to keep you honest:

1. Typography is about space. Like photography is about manipulating light, typography is about manipulating space. If the space (between lines, between letters) feels right, you’ve done a good job.

2. Sans serif CAN go with serif. The old adage of ‘don’t mix sans and serifs’ is NOT true. You’ve got to do what’s right for the project.

3. Type is meant to be be legible. If a designer says something like ‘it’s not supposed to be read’ or ‘I want the visitor to work for the message’ it means that someone’s chain is being jerked.

That’s all I got for now, but if you’ve got time, check out Smashing Magazine’s gallery of sweet typography acrobatics here.

In the web design arena, we can sometimes get too restricted by the parameters of our media. I’ve always been a fan of book cover design. It’s something we did back in college, and it was always a fun, and challenging, project. Check out this collection put together by Vitaly and crew at Smashing Magazine.  Great inspiration for web designers, to think a little differently. Below are two of my favourites…