Dlod
Posts About Fail
Writing is hard. Well it is for me because I’m a poor writer. I don’t enjoy writing and what should take me a couple of hours takes me a week as I grit my teeth and beat away at my words to make them make sense. My posts tend to be too long and over explained, I repeat myself. They are a nightmare.
Unfortunately like most ill-informed people I have a lot to say, so motivation to write is actually quite high. I’m not even that worried that only a handful of people read my blog, the process of thinking about what I’m going to write is really useful and enjoyable for me. It helps me to clarify my thoughts and work through issues. It’s just the process of writing itself that does my head in.
I persevere anyway because I’ve found it so valuable, but now that I have a new baby there is an increasing danger of not writing at all because I no longer have the time to bash away at something all week in my spare time. The funny thing is when I started this blog I thought the writing would be easy and I worried about the decision to do a new drawing for each post. But the drawings are the easy part, the literally take about 15 minutes each. Less than that even because since the aforementioned baby arrived I’ve just been rehashing older drawings. They would be better if I had more time to spend on them of course. So I’ve been wracking my brain trying to think how I can say just as much, just as often but spend less time doing it.
Posted: June 14th 2010
The transition from print to web isn’t as straight forward as it may first appear. With a slight sense of burning shame I offer up one of my very first web failures so that you may be spared my pain.
I’ve been thinking about my early experiences of applying what I learnt at design school to the web. I majored in photography and got an excellent but very print orientated education. After I graduated I started doing a lot of web work and looking back I fell into a lot of pretty obvious gotchas for traditionally trained designers.
So maybe it’s worth writing a few posts about making that transition. A good place to start I think, is to look at a fundamental mistake in approach a lot of us make when we first take on web projects. Although basic visual design principles are the same in both web and print scenarios, a lot of the specific techniques we develop to apply those principles in print rely on manipulating graphic elements that are unpredictable a web environment. The problem is that often our first reaction isn’t to rethink those techniques but to try and manipulate the web environment to make it more like the print one we are familiar with.
Fail, Graphic Design, Interactive Design, Print to Web
Posted: January 19th 2010
Slightly unrelated to anything, I joined Twitter recently (after telling anybody who would listen that I wouldn’t) and tried to make an Icon. Normally I wouldn’t share it here but the end result was such a monumental and creepy failure that I feel compelled to make you look.
It came out like a weird half bird half fish genetic hybrid with a creepy open mouth like it’s waiting to be fed. Or to pleasure someone. It’s so wrong I can’t look away. Also made me realise that I have accidently nicked the Twitter blue. In my mind my Twitter icon has woken up and just discovered that it is now a hybrid mutant and is begging to be killed. I’m sorry bird/fish. You should have never lived.
It’s here by the way: Matt’s Brain
Posted: December 3rd 2009
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