The big move.

Since we’re steadily moving towards fully appropriating and settling into our new studio (home/office), I’ve posted a few pictures of our new location.

If you’re Dutch, you may recognize the artistic direction of the building as ‘de Stijl’;

(… De Stijl sought to express a new utopian ideal of spiritual harmony and order. [It] advocated pure abstraction and universality by a reduction to the essentials of form and colour — [members of de Stijl] simplified visual compositions to the vertical and horizontal directions, and used only primary colors along with black and white. – wikipedia )

The similarity is not coincidental, as the entire block was designed by the founder of de Stijl, Theo van Doesburg. As such, we considered it to be the perfect location for such a graphic studio!

Feel free to check out more of the images on our flickr.

Swiss Interface Syndrome.

I have been noticing a disturbing trend in custom interface design of third party applications for Mac OS X. As it is no longer an exception for software developers to build interface elements that are entirely unique to their application, the threshold for customizing other, system-standard interface elements is also lowered significantly. The ghastly trend I am about to describe is in existence due to this lowered threshold. In fact, I think this particular deviation off the beaten interface path would have been far more frowned upon a few years ago, when Mac interface designers were more conservative in using custom UI elements in general, and Apple disapproved of it more fiercely. Today, however, it won’t even stand in the way of scoring a design award runner-up, as my examples will go to prove.

Continue reading Swiss Interface Syndrome….

Perspective Shift.

First off, let me thank everyone for such a great reception of Icon Resource. The first 24 hours of its existence were fantastically exciting, and I’ve gotten an overwhelming amount of positive feedback. I will consider all your input carefully. Now, I wanted to tell a story that relates a lot to, amongst things, Icon Resource and its genesis, but most importantly, radically changed the way I look at life and the things I feel strongly about.

It has been waiting to be written since late January of this year. It was around that time, late into the evening, in my brand new little office, that my laptop made the familiar ‘bling!’ sound of new mail. I got off from my chair, opened Mail, and found an email from a representative of Apple. They were wondering if I would be interested in a position at Apple in Cupertino.

Continue reading Perspective Shift….

Master rig.

The wireless whips that tame the octocore beast on my wooden office desk.

On a calm afternoon of working with my intern in the office, I got a call from my girlfriend; my Mac Pro was finally coming home. I had ordered one of these workstations when they were updated, and I was delighted to move up from my first real Mac workstation, my dated, damaged and dented rev. A Macbook Pro. It’s fast, it’s blazing, and it locks up at occasions. Read on for the verdict.

Continue reading Master rig….

Click and Drag to your nowhere.

Where the Firefox 3 Beta is going, interface-wise. My opinion is; it’s going nowhere. Fortunately, Mozilla backs me up with proof.

Screening screens: why you don’t want to buy a Cinema Display (edited).

With getting a new Mac Pro, I was skimming the market for a good, affordable TFT screen that had some decent specs for designing. The most obvious choice that I see a lot with Mac Pro’s is the Apple Cinema Display, of course, the most iconic display Apple’s made to date. It’s also perhaps the least updated Apple product in the last 5 years, with only a few price drops in recent years.

I thought it would be nice to share my process of finding my perfect monitor; make a little comparison of the specs of all sorts of displays that would fit into my price range, regardless of brand or appearance, and draw my conclusions. My requirements are very simple; I’m not going to get a screen over € 700,-, it should be able to be reasonably good in delivering a full color gamut (high contrast and gamut), it has to be a TFT (LCD) screen, and it would be nice if it doesn’t look awful.

Edit: It’s wise to read the comments of this entry to get a balanced view of things. I am no expert on LCD panel types, and for a the type of panel the Cinema Display carries, it’s a very affordable display.

Continue reading Screening screens: why you don’t want to buy a Cinema Display (edited)….

The Airport Disk Debacle.

I got a nice Airport Extreme router, with gigabit ethernet, 802.11n-draft wi-fi, and a shiny USB port. Since I also keep most of my stuff on my external USB drive, I figured it wouldn’t be a bad idea to hook up my movies and music to the router, so I could watch movies and listen to my music wherever I went, and regardless of the computer I was on. I set up the Airport, plugged in the disk, and walked back to my laptop.

Continue reading The Airport Disk Debacle….

Boyhood Crush Confessions.

Gedeon Maheux voiced the idea of confessing your boyhood crushes on December 6th, and I decided to participate - if only for my mental health in that I am not the only one having had a crush on cartoon (and Star Wars) characters in my boyhood. Although I could only dig up a limited amount from the dark recesses of my memory, this may go down the slippery slope of geeky crushes, so don’t say you weren’t warned.

Continue reading Boyhood Crush Confessions….

But what do you have to hide?

Excellent movie I had already seen, but I figured I wanted to share with people who feel less strongly about this.

To put in office:

Just to remind myself of the power in our hands and the threads on which this world of ours hangs, I’m going to hang up a print of this in my office tomorrow.

Efficient power. Incredible physics. And a press of the button could make this happen.