Design Relay

By Admin | Published: August 16, 2010

I’ve recently decided that I wanted to seperate my personal blog from a more informational and design related one. I’ve wanted to get into working with screencasts and tutorials to provide information for my clients and anyone out there who may find as much use from it as I do from many of the other blogs out there. For the time being, this blog will be carrying more personal information, (though some work related may still come in).

If you’d like to check out the new website the url is http://www.designrelay.com

Hope you find something useful!

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ESA Foundation

By Admin | Published: July 1, 2010

Just the other day I joined up in an art competition at the Center for New Media in Kalamazoo. The idea was that designers would collaborate with other designers to come up with a three piece campaign that helped promote renewable energy instead of offshore drilling. Obviously inspired by the recent disaster with the BP oil spill, I teamed up with local designers Amy O’donnell and Andy Peninger to create our campaign.

Rather then focus on one type of energy over another we kind of bent the rules a bit and attempted a campaign that was more towards promoting people to come visit a website where all the information was collected. We made up a fictional company called ESAmerica (Environmtal Support of America) and I designed a website for them and worked on a logo for them with Andy Peninger. Amy went on to work on a Propaganda poster that showed an awesome image about who was to blame on the matter of the oil spill. Andy then went on to create a billboard with some strong typography that said “Spill Your Thoughts”.

All in all it was a lot of fun, but we were all on really tight schedules with work so we didn’t get to do as much preparation as we’d like.

On the other hand though, we DID get Honorable Mention and a pretty high score overall afterwards. So while we didn’t really win any cash for our efforts, getting the honorable mention was really cool. Someone obviously liked our work so we’re going to have it displayed with all the rest at the Center for New Media in downtown Kalamazoo at the next local Art Hop.

As for the website design I made for ESAmerica, you can take a look here or in my portfolio page. I’m looking into doing a 3 part tutorial later on how I brainstormed, planned, designed it and how to turn it into a wordpress theme for personal use later. But thats for another day. Enjoy!

Posted in Design, Portfolio, identity, webdesign, wordpress | Leave a comment

iOS 4 and the new iPhone

By Admin | Published: June 10, 2010

I just got done watching the WWDC keynote where Steve Jobs officially announced iOS 4 and the new iPhone. I’ve got to say I’m pretty impressed. I know most of us have seen some of the leaked information on Gizmodo a while ago, but I don’t believe it really compares to what we saw at the world wide developer conference. Jobs really only had time to go over a small portion of the new features but he hit a lot of really nice ones. The new iOS operating system for the iPhone is a real leap compared to the old versions.

The ability to multitask and create folders together I thought was one of the bigger highlights of the Operating system. Primarily because we’ve been aching for multitask support since the iPhone was originally released. Jobs claims that multitasking wasn’t a good idea until it was handled right and also claims that apple is going to do it the best. From what I’ve seen so far it looks good but until I actually have one in my hand I wont know for sure.

Facetime is another feature which was released and is quite impressive. Video calling now being a reality is absolutely stellar release. Unfortunately Facetime only works from iPhone to iPhone and despite the fact that the charts say that the iPhone still shares an impressive portion of the market. Unless your friends have iPhones too, it will be an unused feature. Although Facetime with clients would be really good. Similar to skype but it would make interfacing with customers a lot easier.

An internal Gyroscope was shown as well which is going to wonders for gaming. I can’t really go into detail too much if you haven’t seen the demo that Jobs performed on stage. That can be viewed at the apple site here

Some of the other features that were mentioned of course was the new model and its retina display of 960 x 640 resolution and a 5 megapixel camera, new apple advertising to make developers more money and just a whole slew of improvements. I suggest you watch the keynote yourself or you can just take a hop to Gizmodo and get the full lowdown.

I know I’ll be upgrading, how about you guys? Thoughts?

Posted in Mobile | 1 Comment

Vexel Art Designs and Tutorials

By Admin | Published: June 4, 2010

Just the other night I was going browsing on the net looking for some inspiration and I came across a design style called Vexel Artwork. I had heard of this before but I kind of passed it over last time due to a lack of time. I took a closer look at what it really was this time and saw some really inspiring showcases.

According to wikipedia:

Vexel is a neologism for an entirely pixel-based form of raster art that imitates the visual appearance of vector graphics technique (i.e. sharp-edged lines and areas of flat colour or smooth gradient fills). The word itself is a portmanteau derived from a combination of “vector” and “pixel.”

Well, long story short I wound up at a few sites looking for some good examples and tutorials of Vexel Artwork and wound up at a few sites which can be found here:

Smashing Magazine

Design was here

psd tuts

Design Bump

Designr Fix

Some really great roundups here. I’m definitely going to incorporate some of these techniques in my next poster or magazine design. They can take a lot of time to build but the outcome is REALLY worth it.

Enjoy!

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Starkers and Starkers HTML5 WP Themes

By Admin | Published: May 24, 2010

So I recently took a look at some of the great work at the website of designer/developer Chris Coyier CSS Tricks and I noticed he was working with a theme called Starkers. After doing a little bit of Google work and visiting the website I found that it was another naked wordpress theme. All it really has applied is some basic layout information and a reset file. It has all the base files already created like, page.php, single.php, category.php, 404.php and others.

I had recently finished developing this website with Thematic, which at some points were arguably easier then some other frameworks. But what I really noticed after I started working with Starkers was that I really liked the control that it gave me. To really understand thematic, I had to go to the thematic forums to understand how it was built to solve certain problems. It’s definitely a great framework but I really enjoyed working with Starkers for that control.

Well recently I decided that I wanted to start making the move to HTML5 and started looking for a wordpress theme using HTML5 to get started. This eventually lead me to Starkers HTML5 which is basically the same as Starkers, except that its markup is using HTML5 elements and already has the files necessary to get it functional in other browsers.

Divs have been replaced with section, article, footer, header, hgroup and more. It was a really nice find and so far its been a lot of help getting into the groove of developing wordpress themes in HTML5.

You can find the link for info on, and for the download of Starkers by Elliot Jay Starks here

and for the HTML5 version by Nathan Staines here

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