Thursday, November 11, 2010
Moving day!
So I'm moving on over to a real URL! Updates will be stopping here, so please head on over to www.kevinpowell.ca and subscribe to that RSS feed if you want to keep getting updates!
Monday, November 08, 2010
Hiatus
There might be a bit of a hiatus in posting over the next little while while I start focusing on a few other projects. I plan to keep posting here, but with school starting to wind down I have other priorities at the moment. I also have something rather exciting as far as this blog goes, but it's still a ways off from fruition.
If you don't already I'd suggest following me on Twitter.
If you don't already I'd suggest following me on Twitter.
Friday, November 05, 2010
Chalk - Web based drawing 'app' for iPad
If any of you follow my twitter feed, you might have already seen this from there, but after playing around with it some more I feel it's worthy of a full blog post.
37signals were inspired by their own offices in creating a new app for the iPad called Chalk. It's a simple chalk-board with white and red chalk, and an eraser. It doesn't sound like much, but it really does everything you want a drawing app on the iPad to do as far as I'm concerned. While other apps try to get fancy, this goes to the basics, and of course, it's free, yay!
They've also found a way to circumvent Apple by making the app web based. Before you complain though, my iPad is wifi only, but as long as you bookmark the page, you can access it all the time, on or offline. You can save your pictures as well, which is nice.
It's a nice, clean and simple, everything I look for in a well made app. They had an idea and executed it brilliantly. Even my wife (who isn't always a fan of technology, despite buying me the pad), who sometimes gets frustrated with certain apps and just starts hitting the screen with all her fingers was able to use this with no trouble nor instruction.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
A bit of a rant
This post doesn't necessarily deal with a thing or concept so much as the attitude of the people around me, and may be akin to my old days as moderator of a Star Wars related message board in which I was most well known for Jediman's Bitching Board (as I had the very original nickname of JediMan84), which after a quick search I sadly could not find, even though I suppose that really is for the best.
As anyone who reads here on a semi-regular basis knows I am still in school, and am set to graduate in about 5 month. I'm excited, but have been a bit put back by my lack of work that I would consider portfolio worthy. Because of this I look forward to every project we get at the moment, hoping to do what I can to turn even the mundane into a great piece (not that I always succeed, but so be it).
Sometimes we get projects which at this late stage of our program are rather mundane (another stationery set? You've got to be kiddin' me!), yet people plug away at them without caring very much. Then we get something interesting, and you'd think everyone would be overjoyed (I know I was). Rather than be happy they have something which holds tremendous potential to be a portfolio piece, they instead complain we don't have enough time, that it is too complicated (because they are close minded... no offence of course), and that the requirements should be changed.
Let me put aside that I think it's a great project though. We are graduating in 5 months and they are saying 18 hours (working time over three days) isn't enough time to design something? And that's a SOFT deadline. What the hell are these people going to do when they get into the industry? Tell their boss they don't like the project they were assigned? Tell their client that time is a bit tight and they'd really appreciate if they changed the scope of the project?
Now I know that I shouldn't be complaining because these are people I'm going to be fighting for a job, and the more adverse to actually doing work they are, the easier my life should be when it comes to first finding, and then keeping a job, but it's just something that drives me up the wall. I am a big believer in the 'sit down, shut the fuck up, and get the work done' mentality. Sure, something might be hard, but all the more reason to do your best at it and make something god damn incredible.
I am one of the people in the class who is often finished first, as are three or four other people. We get our work done, and more often than not people really like the work we do, but they pass it off as "Oh, you're good and know what you're doing." Why am I good? What the hell separates me everyone else? Well, I actually follow the creative world outside of the classroom, following designers blogs, tweets and subscribing to or occasionally purchase design related magazines. What is stopping these other people from doing the same? Laziness? A lot of them go on about creativity, they are passionate about it, but don't invest time into it! Don't sit back and complain that you have no ideas when you refuse to brainstorm or pick up a pencil. Fuck off that you can go straight to work on a computer, when all you do is bitch that you don't have enough time. Why not think of a new approach then? Maybe you don't have time to trace a fucking raspberry in 6 spot colours in illustrator*, so don't god damn do it! But 90% of the people in this room get an idea and go to it without even thinking of a second (perhaps better) idea, never mind actually researching, brainstorming etc.
*We are currently working on a product which comes in multiple flavours, and we must design the packing for any three of our choice, and it has to be done as a 6 spot colour job. Who cares why, that's our constraints. So what do people do? Livetrace a raspberry, realize it looks like shit, then rather than realize their idea isn't very feasible, they decide to make a realistic tracing of a raspberry using 6 spot colours and say they don't have time to do three flavours.
The people around me cannot think for themselves either, they ask about everything. 'Why are the registration marks on your example* of the dieline not aligned?' was probably one of my favourites to come up recently. People don't take the time to think (I mean who gives a shit about the example on the board, obviously yours should line up). When a problem arises or the teacher doesn't give full information. They must ask, and then when the teacher shows them how to do it, it invariably becomes 'it didn't do that when I did it'. They can't accept that they fucked up, but rather it is the software or the hardware or the teacher for not teaching something fully. When I can't figure something out, my last resort is asking the teacher. I want to figure it out on my own, because then I'm likely to remember it, or at least know I can work around a given problem. Whenever I asks someone, I tend to forget how they did it for me rather quickly.
*the example was a sketch on a white board
I suppose all this frustration comes down to the point that I'm at least a little worried about who I'll be surrounded with when I will be working. I am of course dreaming of a fantastic job right out of school in which I will be surrounded by the the greatest and most creative minds in the field, and this of course is just that, a dream. But god help me that I'm thrown into nightmare of a team of people who can't problem solve, who don't know how to brainstorm and who are as stubborn as a bloody mule.
As anyone who reads here on a semi-regular basis knows I am still in school, and am set to graduate in about 5 month. I'm excited, but have been a bit put back by my lack of work that I would consider portfolio worthy. Because of this I look forward to every project we get at the moment, hoping to do what I can to turn even the mundane into a great piece (not that I always succeed, but so be it).
Sometimes we get projects which at this late stage of our program are rather mundane (another stationery set? You've got to be kiddin' me!), yet people plug away at them without caring very much. Then we get something interesting, and you'd think everyone would be overjoyed (I know I was). Rather than be happy they have something which holds tremendous potential to be a portfolio piece, they instead complain we don't have enough time, that it is too complicated (because they are close minded... no offence of course), and that the requirements should be changed.
Let me put aside that I think it's a great project though. We are graduating in 5 months and they are saying 18 hours (working time over three days) isn't enough time to design something? And that's a SOFT deadline. What the hell are these people going to do when they get into the industry? Tell their boss they don't like the project they were assigned? Tell their client that time is a bit tight and they'd really appreciate if they changed the scope of the project?
Now I know that I shouldn't be complaining because these are people I'm going to be fighting for a job, and the more adverse to actually doing work they are, the easier my life should be when it comes to first finding, and then keeping a job, but it's just something that drives me up the wall. I am a big believer in the 'sit down, shut the fuck up, and get the work done' mentality. Sure, something might be hard, but all the more reason to do your best at it and make something god damn incredible.
I am one of the people in the class who is often finished first, as are three or four other people. We get our work done, and more often than not people really like the work we do, but they pass it off as "Oh, you're good and know what you're doing." Why am I good? What the hell separates me everyone else? Well, I actually follow the creative world outside of the classroom, following designers blogs, tweets and subscribing to or occasionally purchase design related magazines. What is stopping these other people from doing the same? Laziness? A lot of them go on about creativity, they are passionate about it, but don't invest time into it! Don't sit back and complain that you have no ideas when you refuse to brainstorm or pick up a pencil. Fuck off that you can go straight to work on a computer, when all you do is bitch that you don't have enough time. Why not think of a new approach then? Maybe you don't have time to trace a fucking raspberry in 6 spot colours in illustrator*, so don't god damn do it! But 90% of the people in this room get an idea and go to it without even thinking of a second (perhaps better) idea, never mind actually researching, brainstorming etc.
*We are currently working on a product which comes in multiple flavours, and we must design the packing for any three of our choice, and it has to be done as a 6 spot colour job. Who cares why, that's our constraints. So what do people do? Livetrace a raspberry, realize it looks like shit, then rather than realize their idea isn't very feasible, they decide to make a realistic tracing of a raspberry using 6 spot colours and say they don't have time to do three flavours.
The people around me cannot think for themselves either, they ask about everything. 'Why are the registration marks on your example* of the dieline not aligned?' was probably one of my favourites to come up recently. People don't take the time to think (I mean who gives a shit about the example on the board, obviously yours should line up). When a problem arises or the teacher doesn't give full information. They must ask, and then when the teacher shows them how to do it, it invariably becomes 'it didn't do that when I did it'. They can't accept that they fucked up, but rather it is the software or the hardware or the teacher for not teaching something fully. When I can't figure something out, my last resort is asking the teacher. I want to figure it out on my own, because then I'm likely to remember it, or at least know I can work around a given problem. Whenever I asks someone, I tend to forget how they did it for me rather quickly.
*the example was a sketch on a white board
I suppose all this frustration comes down to the point that I'm at least a little worried about who I'll be surrounded with when I will be working. I am of course dreaming of a fantastic job right out of school in which I will be surrounded by the the greatest and most creative minds in the field, and this of course is just that, a dream. But god help me that I'm thrown into nightmare of a team of people who can't problem solve, who don't know how to brainstorm and who are as stubborn as a bloody mule.
Friday, October 15, 2010
Inspiration
I'm slightly obsessed with the TED conferences. I really can't get enough of them and it's a struggle not to link a whole bunch of them to here.
Now that they have the TED iPad app (and my wife got me an iPad as a wedding gift, yay for me and a big 'thank you' to her) I've gone on a bit of a binge. The app is awesome in that it allows you to download talks for offline watching, and has an 'inspire me' button which then asks you to pick a category (inspiring, funny, etc.), and how long you have, so as to find a video that will fit your time constraints. Overall an awesome app, and even better, as with most things TED (apart from actually attending a conference), it's free.
I've been watching a lot of the talks about creativity for the past day now, and there have been some really interesting talks (such as the 12-year old Adora Svitak talking about what adults can learn from kids, and bringing up how kids have the advantage of not knowing what constraints might exist, to Steven Johnson talking about where good ideas come from).
What all this brings me to is my current project at school which is the open ended "design a t-shirt". Can't get much more open ended than that, can we? And when things are open ended like this, I tend to have zero to no inspiration to work on them. Sure I have a sketch book with a bunch of random stuff in there I could just plug into a t-shirt design, and why not? Well none of it is great, and I want to make something great, something that I would wear. I looked through my book and didn't see anything that I really wanted to expand upon for this particular project (sometimes it does work though). I looked over websites and saw a ton of amazing and creative designs, which just made me wonder why I didn't think of that first.
Being so open ended just gives me too many possibilities. I have some fun ideas in my sketchbook that if I were to expand upon them they'd probably make a design, but what if I could think of something better? When I'm stuck like this I like to try and come up with a theme for myself, at least to help start focusing. So I did that, and then ended up coming up with so many themes and ideas I'd like to explore, I was even more overwhelmed than when I started.
Great ideas are often something that need time to mature, but do I even need a great idea here? It's not like I'm trying to stop world hunger... even though if I were, how would I design a shirt around that? That has been my thought process over everything I've thought about or read for the past 18 hours or so, and I'm starting to go mad.
Wednesday, October 06, 2010
The new gap logo
 |
| old logo on left, new on right |
It looks like the design community is up in arms over the new Gap logo, as can be found on their site. Everyone is voicing their hatred on Twitter (including myself), Brand New's Armin didn't hold back in his review of the new logo, while Mat Dolphin took a more 'I don't like it, but let's wait and see' approach in his review. David Airey didn't bother saying anything, but made his opinion rather clear as well at his LogoDesignLove blog. Pretty much everyone thinks they are going to be pulling a Tropicana and going back to the old logo, but only time will tell.
Since everyone else is being so vocal I figured I might as well get vocal myself about the whole thing. First off, I do think it's terrible. Second, I tend to agree with Mat Dolphin in that it's important we wait and see what direction they plan on going with the brand before it can be considered a full write off.
I'd like to know why they thought Gap needed be rebranded, and how they thought this new logo was an improvement. I like Helvetica, but just because it's a nice, universal font, doesn't mean it works all the time. Here it does not, it just makes it look generic (as is always a danger with a default system font). I don't think this fails because the name of the company is in Helvetica though. It fails because of small, randomly placed blue box with a random gradient on it. I've heard a few attempts at justifying it, the most logical being that they wanted to keep the blue square as to connect with the old identity, but show how they are breaking away from it. Thing is, this is such a departure from the old logo that the blue square doesn't make me think of the old one, it just confuses me and looks like something from a bad design contest, or perhaps something made using PowerPoint.
The old logo wasn't amazing, but it wasn't bad either. When I saw it I knew what I was looking at. They had effectively branded their company. Their new mark doesn't even make me think of their company, it looks to amateurish to evoke thoughts of a giant clothing line.
The thing is, they can save this. It'll take one hell of an branding effort and tons of money (all of which I don't see why they'd want to spend unless they are taking the company in a completely new direction - cheaper and more generic possibly? :P), but they can make us forget the old one and embrace (as much as one might embrace Gap) the new one. Until I know why they made these changes I can't say it's a complete and utter fail, but I can say I think it's really bad so far.
If they are doing a complete rebrand, why didn't they launch everything with the logo? So far all they have done is taken out logo.jpg from their site and inserted newlogo.jpg and apart from that, it seems like they are done. If they had gone with a full rebrand across web and advertising in one big swoop, we might have been able to see how the logo integrates into the rest of the system and been content. Instead the design community is freaking out and attacking Gap for being stupid.
Advice for design students
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| from DavidAirey.com |
So just as I'm really starting to buckle down and figure things out, David Airey puts out this great and resourceful post on his personal blog filled with past advice of his, all nicely organized.
For those of you who don't follow any of his now 3 blogs, what are you waiting for?
- www.davidairey.com
- www.identitydesigned.com
- www.logodesignlove.com
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Time to start thinking about my Portfolio
For those of you who read one of my older posts, you know I'm graduating in about 6 months time. Knowing that, I've started going through my work to find what I might start to put together for my portfolio, and how I'm going to assemble it and what not.
After going over a bunch of sites (such as this one by Jushua Blankenship that I liked) and a Layers Magazine article from their last issue I'm starting to get a good idea of what I should be including and I've got a few basic concepts for how I want to put my physical one together. I find all these sources funny though. Some will tell you that they'd like to see a lot of your work, while others say the less the better. Some say a fancy presentation is necessary to stand out, and over/undersized portfolios are a good thing, while others won't even look at them if they are too out of the norm. It almost becomes a 'you need to stand out without going out of your way to stand out'.
Overall I know that certain styles will appeal to certain people, and I think the right approach is to go in one direction knowing that while some people will dismiss you right away, others will love your approach. It's either that or you're stuck in the middle of the road for everyone, and never really making a huge impression (be it positive or negative).
My biggest concern now is what the hell do I put into it? I seems a lot of people think student work isn't always worth looking at (probably because relax time constraints + a lot of it sucks), which obviously makes it hard to put something else together. I have some pieces I like, and while some of them get nice comments from my teachers and excited remarks from classmates, they don't make me go 'wow', so why would they make someone else go 'wow'?
The other problem is I've been told, and have read from multiple sources, that you want to target a certain job with your portfolio (lots of web based stuff for web design, lots of photoshop/illustrator stuff for ad agency etc...) but I don't have a bunch of anything, but a few select pieces of each that are worth presenting.
Obviously I have to make-do with what I have, and I will, it's just a daunting project I guess, and I want to be able to put something together that really is great. Once it's done I'll get some photos of it and put them on here, even though that's awhile away from now, it's still something to look forward to.
After going over a bunch of sites (such as this one by Jushua Blankenship that I liked) and a Layers Magazine article from their last issue I'm starting to get a good idea of what I should be including and I've got a few basic concepts for how I want to put my physical one together. I find all these sources funny though. Some will tell you that they'd like to see a lot of your work, while others say the less the better. Some say a fancy presentation is necessary to stand out, and over/undersized portfolios are a good thing, while others won't even look at them if they are too out of the norm. It almost becomes a 'you need to stand out without going out of your way to stand out'.
Overall I know that certain styles will appeal to certain people, and I think the right approach is to go in one direction knowing that while some people will dismiss you right away, others will love your approach. It's either that or you're stuck in the middle of the road for everyone, and never really making a huge impression (be it positive or negative).
My biggest concern now is what the hell do I put into it? I seems a lot of people think student work isn't always worth looking at (probably because relax time constraints + a lot of it sucks), which obviously makes it hard to put something else together. I have some pieces I like, and while some of them get nice comments from my teachers and excited remarks from classmates, they don't make me go 'wow', so why would they make someone else go 'wow'?
The other problem is I've been told, and have read from multiple sources, that you want to target a certain job with your portfolio (lots of web based stuff for web design, lots of photoshop/illustrator stuff for ad agency etc...) but I don't have a bunch of anything, but a few select pieces of each that are worth presenting.
Obviously I have to make-do with what I have, and I will, it's just a daunting project I guess, and I want to be able to put something together that really is great. Once it's done I'll get some photos of it and put them on here, even though that's awhile away from now, it's still something to look forward to.
Friday, September 24, 2010
Designer Lightbulbs
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| too awesome |
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Photography
Around a month ago, for a class project, we had to head down to a local farmers market to take some pictures. The subject matter was up to us, and while most people chose to take pictures of the various foods that were on sale I really wanted to try and capture the people who were there. There we so many people and all so different from one another. I also saw it as more of a challenge as it's a lot harder to get good pictures of people, rather than static fruit and veg.
So here are some of the pictures that I managed to get. I'm rather happy with the results, but I wish I had a bigger memory card so I really could have gone wild. It's rare I get much photography in these days, and after going out and taking these I really would like to do it more often.
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