Cool Packs for SF

April.06.2011

Gotta update the packaging section of the portfolio some time this month. Here's what's coming up

c4d funtimes

April.04.2011

We're doing another packaging project at work which finally gave me a chance to play around with Cinema 4d again.

Firefox 4 Sweetness

March.29.2011

Finally making some use of the tab candy feature in Firefox 4. There are all kinds of productivity hacks for it, but right now I'm using it in the most natural way. It's the early stages of a project and I have all kinds of "inspiration" open as well as stock photography sites where I will add dozens of tabs. Back in the ol' Firefox 3 days all these would've been multiple windows each with twenty or thirty tabs but no more.

Everything is beautifully organized and it's very fast to go between tab groups. Loving it. Now I just need the Delicious extension to be supported.

Back to divs

March.20.2011

For the last week or so I've had some time to jump back into learning html/css. I kinda knew it before, but over the last three years of doing purely design, I've pretty much forgotten how to do everything.

Here's what I got so far. AirPac. Just the home page and services page. Now on to the complaining.

Also got myself a squarespace account. Their wysiwyg tools seemed easy enough and I thought I'd be able to pack my comps full of advanced features right off the bat. The cool thing is that anything I make on ss will work on most browsers so I don't have to worry about all that nonsense. The bad news is that the way the workflow is set up, it's not very well suited for what I want to do.

My goal was to create multiple comps of multiple sites, hopefully faster than it would take to code everything by hand. ss isn't really suited for that, because every comp I make gets treated as a page on one big site and it only has one main navigation. So I basically have to hide the main nav and create navigation specific to each comp by hand.

This sort of set up I got going is ruining any advantage I had by working from existing templates. Since my comps are way off from most of the defaul templates, I end up doing a lot of the html and css work by hand anyways.

There's still a lot to learn, and I'm hoping that once I get used to process things will speed up a little bit.

Sushi Boy on the Mac App Store

February.20.2011

Got to work again with the fellas from WeFiends a few days ago. Sushi Boy is now on the Mac App Store (it's been ported over from iOS). They needed a banner design to go to the app store so here's what we came up with.

It's finally up there now, so good times. Although the app store people just gave them one of those little banners, not the big ones. Still should provide some exposure.

New Work

January.29.2011

Hooray! New portfolio pieces are up in the Web portfolio section. Check it out here.

Trailer Trash

January.25.2011

Another week another post. This time around we go inside the trailer.

Welcome To The Desert

January.13.2011

Meanwhile at 32 Rounds I'm kicking off a post-a-thon. From now until the last week of February I'll be putting up a set of photos a week from my most recent outing to a desert trailer park. This week we check out the desert view.

Sushi Time

October.26.2010

Congrats to Nick and Kevin of WeFiends on their release of Sushi Boy!  The game is fast paced, perfect for an iPhone sized quick play. It's also available for iPad in HD for those of you with a larger screen. The art looks friggin' awesome and there's plenty of customization with various hats, pets and backgrounds. Grab it here! Oh yeah, good luck getting the catchy tunes out of your head.

Treasure Island Music Festival Will Make You Wet

October.19.2010

Sunday was the day of the big event. I finally went to the Treasure Island Music Festival. So yes, it rained and it rained well. My socks were soacked and my feet were freezing, but none of that took away from how awesome the shows were.

There were two stages and the preformances were staggered, so I suppose it would have been possible to see all of the bands, but in the second half of the day when the bigger bands started playing it was impossible to move. The show was packed so I decided to hedge my bets and stick to the main stage instead of shuffling back and forth between the two stages. All this to say I didn't see a third of the bands that were playing that day. As for the bands I did see...

PHOSPHORESCENT

I was pleasantly surprised with Phosphorescent. This band kicked off the music festival which is unfortunate since there were very few people at Treasure Island at the very beginning. Usually the crappier bands go on first and better bands go later in the lineup. These guys should've definitely been third or fourth up instead of first. Very good stuff. If they come through the Bay Area, I'll definitely go see them.

RA RA RIOT

The first bigger band to play was Ra Ra Riot. I gotta say, everybody in this band is very very pretty. These guys and gals had a nice string section and some horns. Apparently that was a requirement to get booked on the main stage because every band that was on the main stage that night also had strings and brass. I guess it's that kind of show. As for the music, they were cool but I'm not really all that into their music.

SUPERCHUNK

This is one of those bands that other bands love to see and love to cover. This was my first time hearing them and I loved what I heard.

BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE

F this band. No structure to the songs, all the fans in their audience were douchy kids, all the members of the band came out wearing sunglasses. DId I mention it was raining? Not sunny. Raining...and getting dark. Why are there ten people on stage with sunglasses? All the songs were pretty much the same song. We'll start with five guitars playing random stuff, then layer violins and french horns into the mix and pretend it's music. Doesn't matter what you're playing as long as it's artsy kind of.

At this point I should mention that there were technical difficulties on the main stage all day. Every band had some instrument or amp go out on them. Every other band handled it professionally. The singer in this band was a complete jerk to the stage hands. When his guitar (one of five guitars playing random notes at the time) went out, he couldn't decided whether to keep singing or to throw a tantrum. He did both.

SHE AND HIM

Loved it. M.Ward covered Roll Over Beethoven. The SHim songs were great, the band was great. Awesome stuff.

THE NATIONAL

This was my first time seeing The National live. Matt Berninger brought a lot of energy to the stage. He's hilarious too. The band rocked and the live songs didn't sound like the record. Perfect.

BELLE AND SEBASTIAN

Turns out I've heard Belle and Sebastian before. Yes they're huge and everyone loves them, but I didn't realize this until I heard them. Amazing stage presence, beautiful music. Oh yeah, and that thing I said earlier about strings and horns in every band, these guys did it right. Overall a wonderful show.

Behind The Scenes

September.18.2010

Two really cool sites I discovered recently. A little something for everyone here.

Identity Designed

Case studies for some really great logos / identity programs. It's always amazing to see what the process was through all the rough sketches and watch the final product get widdled down through all the in between comps. In most of these cases a writeup is also presented to help understand what the designers and the clients were thinking.

Photoshop In Movie Posters

This baby tears apart keyart for the sum of its parts that it usually is. In entertainment there's usually very little time to do the work and no assets provided. Now there's an awesome blog to show off all the shortcuts, repeated elements, and random photography that goes into making that polished result.

In With The New

September.04.2010

I'm not too crazy about the new iTunes icon / logo. Specifically, the over rendering of it

Not that the old one was all that great or anything, but it seems if they decided to go with this little icon as a main element of a larger system, they really could've kept going in cleaning it up. Although I gotta say, the structure is much more simple and direct now than it was before, but all the glows and the gloss really makes this seem like one of those free icon sets floating around online.

Catchup

August.28.2010

Things have been kinda hectic between work and moving to Berkeley. More on that in a later post. For now, new pics up at 32 Rounds from our trip to the Grand Canyon this past May.

She & Him & Stuff

June.30.2010

Zooey Deschanel looks fantastic in the latest She & Him Videos.

The first is part of Levi's Pioneer Sessions which is an ongoing project that's creating an oh so awesome library of great covers.

The second is a music video for In The Sun. Loving the choreography, style, and lighting. Also, M.Ward is looking a lot like Robert Downey Jr with his mustache and goatee.

Some Cool Sites This Week

June.22.2010

Font Fabric

Just like the name says. It's an awesome resource for fonts. Some are free, some are pricey, but they're all amazing. I'm pretty stoked about how good the free fonts are.

IS Parade

Turns your twitter feed into a parade of avatars, much like the Mii parade on the Wii.

Yanko Design

Liking this product design site a bunch. Come for the mouse shaped like genitalia, stay for everything else.

Undercover

June.15.2010

The AV club is doing a cool series where they'll have artists come in and record a cover song picked from a list of 25 songs. My favorite is Wish You Were Here covered by The Antlers. Yes this song's probably been covered a million times, but I think the band does a good job with it. This rendition could fit on Hospice, their cancer ward themed album.

The Big 4.0

June.09.2010

Even though Gizmodo has been showing off the leaked iPhone for a while now, it was still very exciting to watch the keynote with the announcement of the sweet sweet object of my desire. I was mainly looking forward to the new crisp display and the speed, but everything else is just icing on the cake.

The folders and the multi-tasking are my favorite features in the new OS. The video chat will be fun once it can be done over 3g/4g not just WiFi; also once everyone I know gets the new phone. Now the only question is, which color

Aquascript

June.06.2010

If I ever find myself doing any sort of installations or environmental design, I will definitely have to propose this. Lit droplets of water fall in short bursts, creating beautiful images. Especially loving the way it was executed for Solidarites.

The Delicious Bump

May.24.2010

Last night we went to see The Delicous Bump Show at The Glasshouse. Four Japanese pop-rock bands with The Pillows as headliners. The whole show was great, especially towards the end when the club really filled up and everyone was jumping aroud. Plus, the banter the bands had with the audience was pretty awesome since the artists only spoke three words of english.

Here's where you may have heard The Pillows before.

Dusty Room

May.13.2010

New set of pics up at 32 Rounds. Took these before a photoshoot we did for t-shirts which should be up in a few weeks. The room we were in had a lot of cool textures in it, and the sun was highlighting all the dust particles.

The portfolio portfolio

May.07.2010

While Nick's been diligently building my site, I've turned my attention to how my book is going to look. I decided to go with a landscape legal size. The wide proportions look kinda cool and relate to how I will show work on the website. The drawback is that I haven't been able to find a custom book.... ....until now. Scott Mullenberg. My book will be clothy and wide and awesome. Also it will be way smaller than the 17x11 plastic book I had a few years ago.