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Visuals #2- Okinawa
This is the second installment of a series of images from around Japan. The plan is to document the “visual culture” here and share some of the photos on a regular basis. For this month I’ve pulled together some of my favorite patterns and textures encountered while on a recent holiday trip to Okinawa.
Click the images to view a larger size. Enjoy!
A little Swedish Inspiration
So, I know this is a little late, but I am so bad about blogging and with the hurry of the holiday season it makes it even worse. I though I would share a little about the design/process of our holiday greeting card. We made a card this year to send about and spread some holiday cheer. The design for it started with a trip to IKEA.
My wife and I headed to IKEA with the original purpose of finding a new desk. We actually ended up buying a desk, a bookcase, two chairs and a lamp. The trip back was kind of comical, we looked a bit like the Beverly Hillbillies, coming back in our Honda Life stuffed with giant boxes. But, while we were there, some guys were setting up a new display of vases. Just as we walked by, they happened to pull out some cardboard from one of the boxes and lean it against the wall. I thought it had a cool pattern on it – different sized circles that held the vases in place in the shipping box. So, I kind of spur-of-the-moment-like snapped a picture of it with my wife’s camera.
The original picture:
Several weeks later as I sat down to work on the card, that cardboard pattern from IKEA was the first thing that came to mind. While I celebrate Christmas, we thought it would be best to use a wintery theme, so as to be all-encompassing. This card would be going out to many people who might not necessarily celebrate Christmas (here in Japan the major holiday is the New Year and of course we didn’t want to leave out those who may be celebrating Festivus). I thought the IKEA circles with a little color could resemble snow and give us the wintery holiday look we were going for.
The pattern:
Now a little wintery color:
And after a little shifting around and addition of the message you have the final card:
Hope you all had a good one!
Web citizens trying to kill Internet Explorer 6
I laughed when I read the title of this article. Brought to mind images of coffee-house-glasses-wearing, knife-wielding nerds chasing down the IE logo. No such luck, but is an interesting article about the growing movement to rid the world of the scourge that is IE6.
(CNN) — Some Web designers are staging an online revolt against an old version of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser, which they say is hampering the ability of the Web to move forward in a cool and interactive way.
Read the rest of the article Here
Japan Visuals #1
This is the first installment of a series of images from around Japan. The plan is to document the “visual culture” here and share some of the photos on a regular basis. For this first month I’ve pulled together some of my favorite patterns, textures, graphics, etc. encountered over the last couple of months.
Click the images to view a larger size. Enjoy!
Interactive Music Video
I get an email every day from the Very Short List. Todays email featured a cool interactive music video from a Spanish group called Labuat.
“As the song — “Soy Tu Aire†(“I’m Your Airâ€) — kicks off, a line of black ink moves across the screen: You can send it up, down, back, and forth, or swirl it into circles. The line grows thicker along the way and splatters into several shapes: butterflies, red lips, birds. “The immersive experience will make you feel like a maestro.”
view it here: www.soytuaire.labuat.com
via the Very Short List
The New HeyParker.com
Welcome to the brand spankin’ new HeyParker.com.
This revamped site is part of an ongoing effort to increase my web presence and venture more into screen-based design. The site is Wordpress-based, (I seem to be doing a good bit of Wordpress lately) in order to have something that is faster and easier to update.
Stop by from time to time and see what is going on. I will be blogging regularly and updating with news and new projects as they are completed. Leave a comment, let me know what you think, any questions, suggestions, criticisms, are always welcome. I hope you like it and thanks for stopping by.