Regardless of time zones, Cocoia wishes you a successful, fun, and above all iconic 2008! Expect new regular blog updates to recommence soon after I have recovered from the exuberant partying.
I want to thank Jelmar from Typehigh for the best typography of 2007 (the header font of this blog design, for example), all my clients who made my dream of working on what I love to do possible, and all you readers for keeping up with my erratic posting. I wish you all the best!
Well, Mediatemple was kind enough to inform me over email that I would be getting an overage of $3851,- or more if I were to continue transferring data at the insane rate that I am. Yeah, Orion, the so well received set, has gone over a few odd terabytes now – something I can’t say has ever happened in my life as a website owner. I have, first and foremost, upgraded my server, but I think I might have to move to another hosting solution, or something like S3 for bulk data transfer.
Offering help, advice? Drop a comment if you will.
My, what a few insane days it has been. Orion hit the Apple website, while also being linked from other major sites like the Iconfactory. At the moment of writing, Orion just exceeded a grand total of 300 GB in downloads, with well over 150,000 new visitors on my websites. Actually, it’s the fourth most downloaded thing on Apple.com, just under iTunes, Quicktime, and Safari.
I got a lot of email asking how to use the icons, and I gladly replied; Kupuk’s great tutorial of the ‘good ol’ manual way’, and Panic’s awesome Candybar 3. Of course, your downloads are flattening and the kind emails and comments have been very encouraging. Work on the extended set of Orion, with all system replacements for Mac, Windows, and Linux, along with several creative new folder motifs, has commenced already. I will push out a new volume with a complete system replacement icons, and a dock for OS X, late in December or in January. What’s that? A sneak peek? Okay, one of the ‘fantasy’ microsets in the extended Orion is… a ‘sci-fi’ themed, highly detailed EVE Online architecture set.
Permission from CCP Games pending.
What is most important in all of this, is your feedback. You want more folders? What kind of folders? Your vote counts! As the cumulative comments of this blog are reaching 500 fast, there is chance that your comment will be the 500th – which means prizes, baby!
Drop your requests in this post’s comments and have a fair chance of winning a full license for Noble, my stock icon set, and a single folder icon request for the upcoming extended Orion iconset that will be fulfilled – guaranteed!. Of course, comments on all posts are eligible – be sure to use your actual email address.
I purchased a Flickr Pro account today, having the benefit of unlimited uploads, sets, and collections seemed like a great deal to me and I have come to love flickr over the time I had an account there. To put the new account to good use, I registered my personal part of flickr and added a good lot of sketches and a more complete set of icons I have made (although far from everything).
You can find my account at www.flickr.com/photos/cocoia/ from now on.
For the last month, I have been working on a freeware icon set to supersede all my older work. I was interested in how much I could learn by attracting critique from the most valued artists and criticasters I have in my buddy lists and address book, and I took it all to the heart. I decided to make a folder set that would find the middle ground between the flat front-on perspective of Mac OS X Leopard and the old, spatial perspective of folders in Tiger.
Coinciding with a new freeware icon release and a very large batch of client work, Cocoia will soon start selling a series of prints in line with the work I used to make before I started this blog. If you are unaware of what kind of graphic work I did, this might be a nice chance to explore the expressive prints in my ancient deviantART gallery (this work is not representative of my current quality standard, please keep that in mind).
The recurrent theme in the prints is nature conquering our technological leaps. The icons I shall be dealing out will remain shrouded in mystery, for now.