Pocket Revolutionary » Design

The Vendor-Client Relationship

jeremy — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 16:26:23 +0000

Searching in Vain

jeremy — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 04:02:59 +0000

I tested out the new bing.com “decision engine” with a good ol’ fashioned vanity search for “Jeremy Greenawalt”. You cannot imagine my horror to see that the #8 result is this site with the words “Animated Logo designed and created by: Jeremy Greenawalt”. I will go on the record right now to any future clients and say “It’s not me”. I’m sure he’s a nice person. I feel bad knowing that my site is at the top of the list of “Jeremy Greenawalt” responses in Google and he would probably find this post in his own vanity search, but I must disavow this logo right now. I’m not sure I can legally send a cease and desist order over his name as a “designer of spinning logos”, but my lawyers are working on it right now and I will keep you apprised.

Reason #53 Why I Should Not Own Illustrator

jeremy — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 05:16:38 +0000

What do you do when you’re brain has been turned to steak tartare by debugging and you’re feeling punchy? You abuse Illustrator into creating a special “3 am” logo for an internal app. In this case, the app is our internal backend for FishCart built using CakePHP which I have, of course, named FishCake. I show this only to publicly state my profound appreciation of graphic designers– e.g. the folks who would never make a logo this ugly no matter how sleep-deprived they may be.

Tul.com’s creative “hook”

jeremy — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 21:34:03 +0000

Looking for an alternative pen (I love you, G-2, but I just want to know my options), I ran across the website for Tul pens. Their handwriting analysis toy (I don’t know what else to call it) was actually pretty imaginative and kept me on the site, made me send my wife to the site, and made me want to post it here. For a pen that’s inexpensive and sold only at OfficeMax, I thought it was surprisingly creative, and I might just check out their pens now. The lesson is that sometimes your “hook” for viewers can be engaging and only tangentially related to your core business to pique somebody’s interest. Of course, this also goes horribly wrong or just lame on a lot of well-known corporate websites with bizarre or completely random advertising, but for a relatively unknown or small company it can be very effective and you’re not risking very much if it does go wrong. I didn’t know who Tul was before, and if their website was just “good” then I would quickly forget who they were. If I didn’t like the handwriting analysis, then I might go somewhere else or I might skip to the catalog. Either way, the only way to keep my attention was to risk it on a Flash toy.

[via tul.com]

WordPress 2.5

jeremy — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:12:54 +0000

It looks like the folks at Happy Cog really did a great job with the new WordPress 2.5 design. I’ve just started to play with it, but so far I’m just happy that the templates are in the “design” area where I expect them to be. In my ever-so-humble opinion, I think great design is just putting everything where people expect them to be. I mean, I could probably go into a Windows vs. Apple rant on that, but I won’t (though, seriously, that’s part of what makes Apple awesome). I’m not trying to say it’s that easy to make things intuitive, either. I am just happy that Jeffery Zeldman and Happy Cog manage to make it look that easy, and I can’t wait to dive into this some more.

Michael Lopp (Rands) talked about Apple’s Design Process

jeremy — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 00:28:23 +0000

Michael Lopp (a senior engineering manager at Apple) gave a great presentation this past weekend at SXSW with John Gruber about the blood, sweat and fear in great design. He talked about the long, hard process they go through at Apple, and it was probably one of my favorite panels. I was so excited by some of the ideas that I recited everything I could remember (without my notes) to our graphic designer at Generals this morning before coffee. I was so excited about it that I was going to post all of my impressions here… until I saw that Helen Walters had already written a better report on it for Business Week here. So, I highly recommend reading the article, and I’ll go back to trying to write my original thoughts about other people’s words later.

[via TUAW]