It’s well into October and the postcount of my blog has severely dwindled. I’m well aware of this, but a multitude of distractions and work has me working around the clock to settle things. But now, things are going to change.

I regularly had some problems finding time to write, and had a lot of time in which I sketched because I didn’t have computer access in travel or on locations. A week or two ago, I decided to bite the bullet and order an iPhone off eBay. It’s a laugh that with the current euro to dollar conversion rates, it is actually cheaper than the iPod Touch is in stores where I live (the Netherlands), and the device had me intrigued at the first unveiling. I’m an all-interface and user experience man, and having a mobile phone / iPod / internet device where even the icon looks to die for is like something tailor-made for me.

I’m also knee-deep in work, and this little device helps me organise along and keep in touch with people on the road. I’d say it is a good investment. Talking about work, if you happen to know or are an icon designer who is keen on the Cocoia style, knows the OS X aesthetic well, and generally feels at home making stuff that amazes people, drop me a line with your portfolio or some work – because it is almost time for Cocoia to expand beyond my initially set boundary of a single person (me) working on all assignments. Contact info for me can be found on Icon Designer

It wouldn’t be the ol’ familiar Cocoia Blog if this wouldn’t end with an announcement. I have been talking about the blog design a lot lately, and the design is almost ready for prime-time. Who knows, it might just be a few refreshes away in the next week.

I have an employer with whom I’ve got a very long working record now. That is, he’s one of my longest-running clients, with whom I also have a very good working and talking relationship. We’re always developing new concepts, whether it be in icons, interfaces or other fields of life unrelated to software (hi, D!). Lately, while we were exploring things, we were looking over websites like istockphoto – websites where people can upload and buy stock graphics. Most people I try to reach with Icon Designer and my blog aren’t the people who get their graphics at those places. When I am appealing to people who want to hire me to make custom graphics, it’s like they are pursued go to a very exclusive restaurant that caters to them. They could go to the Fast Food King around the corner and eat what everybody with a disregard for personal health eats, and that’s basically the choice at hand. Considering most people I want to reach want to sell their product, let’s say in this metaphor they are people who need to sell their body. It’s easy, fast and cheap to eat junk food. It’s also bad for them in business.

Now, I don’t want to generalize to say that all stock art is bad. Sure, some stock art can look very good. The problem with stock art is that it’s akin, but worse than, going to a company like “Logo Farm 2000”. This company doesn’t exist (hopefully) but they make a logotype for $200, in 2 days, with 99 designs to choose from. This company also doesn’t really need a brief for the design; a company name will do. With stock art, you buy something and integrate it into your visual identity; the imprint you leave on people, visually, and the emotions and messages you convey are a part of that. With stock art, you go off on your own blind faith in your judgement to chose whatever you like and put it into a context where you feel it fits. There are a few problems with this.

Design, especially in logo’s and icons, isn’t about ‘art’. Creativity helps make new, innovative, and inspiring metaphors and ideas to lay a foundation for a well-executed and polished design. Design itself is all about solving problems and finding a great solution for it. There is purpose in all things, in a sense that it is very akin to the development of applications. These two fields meet in the type design business, where people develop a lot of little solutions to make one, unified working whole for which they sell licenses, exactly like software. Although in the software and typeface business, there’s also a market to make custom software for a particular case, which is almost the same as the work I do.

Coming back to my point, if I design something for you, it wouldn’t be cheap. I have had enough email transactions in which people have had second thoughts about the price of my services. I don’t really make concessions (in rare cases) – I’d much rather point you to this post. It surely won’t be as cheap as a logo farm or stock art. The design I make for you will benefit from the working knowledge I have as a full-time designer; I’ve been living and breathing visual design since I was born, and have been sustaining myself with it for years. When I design something, I don’t feel like I’m sitting behind my desk ‘doing my job’; I feel like I’m doing what I was put on this Earth to do. I will strive to create something that you will completely agree to in every aspect; it will communicate to people, at a glance, what you want it to communicate. It’s a unique graphic, tailored to you. It’s also the visual identity of your product, or your company; something that’s hard to put a price on. You can look around you for examples of visual identities; they are ubiquitous today. I’d happily ask some other clients about what they think of the final product I delivered to them; I strive for something that will change your perception of this indefinitely. You’ll start craving the cuisine and never even bother to consider junk food.

Development, for applications, is considered blindly outputting code where the problem is -a- problem, and the only solution is the right one. Non-developers rarely see programming as a creative process, while it’s a very creative one, that touches art on as many (if not more) fields as design. Design, nowadays, is integrated into all the aspects of our life. Everything you meet has been involved with a process of designing visuals for a purpose. Think about type design again; making typefaces changes the actual appearance of our language. You can truly invent in every choice you make. It is exactly the same for software. They’re also goods which require purchase and installation to be useful; that’s much less akin to designing. If you develop software, every choice you take is important and has everything to do with design. Still think of it in black and white? Consider scripting ligatures in OpenType fonts. This means you have to script in certain conditions to make automatic letter contractions work. Great fonts have this. Is this design? Most definitely.

I have presented two matters in which I think people don’t see black and white and people fail to see the weight of custom design. I want to show you, and many others, that design is such an important matter, that we should be grateful for every developer, designer and artist out there. In reality, we are all working together for a grand goal; making everything better.

Yeah, I have this portfolio website, a certain one, not sure if you have heard of it, ‘pictogram maker’ or something similar, and I managed to be such an idiot that I;

A: Forgot to check if my vCard (contact info container) download link worked (it didn’t) and

B: Forgot to add a freakin’ EMAIL ADDRESS on my portfolio.

So I had a (you may start pointing fingers at me and laugh very hard) portfolio, showcasing work, you know, to people, who had no way to contact me. Literally no way. You may stop laughing now. Now there’s a way to make new clients.

Yes, it’s fixed now.

I’ll be committing myself to redesigning the blog to something that can last for the next year and represents my activities properly. Apart from the regular designing work, I think I have deprived and perhaps alienated my reading audience by reducing this blog to all my personal announcements and releases. I think people who have been subscribing since March or April have been disappointed in the lack of typography, graphic design, technical and personal (light-hearted) blog posts of general interest.

“So what does it all mean,?” I hear you ask. Light-hearted personal posts seem a bit of a drag, and perhaps you fear I’ll be filling up the blog with 40 posts per month again by making all of you very familiar with the 6 kittens I share my (home) office with. No, I’m not intending to go completely irrelevant in a week, but I do want to commit to having a fun blog you can actually find some nice content on that isn’t per-se exclusively mine or some sort of a public announcement. See the obligatory cloud on the right? The ‘announcement’ category has grown out to be one of the biggest. I should, you know, get a *real* site for that kind of stuff, and post news articles slash ‘press releases’ on that. I just want to show the things I think are worth seeing. Time for some examples.

My real-life friend and creative genius Jelmar, for example, has been working on type design well before I started this blog. I have featured him a bit before, but I think his developments are something that warrants him to start blogging; he’s an incredibly clever person in finding words, imagery or curves that appeal to you in such a special way that it sticks with you for very long. In terms of type design and typography, his latest brainchild was Ace, an unfinished design for a typeface he posted in his flickr photostream;

Although it lacks kerning at this point (in layman’s terms, letter-spacing) it is evident this is a very original and strikingly beautifully designed typeface. You can check out his website, Typehigh, for more of his typographic designs; I can assure you he’s got a very nice lineup of typographical styles already, as well as some great print design and photography.

When I was mentioning kittens, it would be a bit harsh for them if I were to completely disregard them on my blog. I mean, they’re very sensitive in this stage. I decided to toughen them up with my Canon dSLR’s flash. Makes them manly.

Fuzzy doesn’t even come close to describe them.

It’s also, speaking as a geek, a technically interesting thing to see that these, well, basically automatons at this point, who have just gained vision since two days, crawl about aimlessly and have now – completely by accident – found the exit of the ‘tent’ they once entered the world in, and thus, are crashing out of it like lemmings from a cliff, continually making a soft, whiny, meowing sound as they progress towards their certain plummeting.

It’s quite interesting to see, because they don’t seem to learn at all; I mean, they are basically unable to causally see the relationship between them moving forward and falling off the edge. Comically, they do manage to solve the problem; one could say they have a special ‘exception handler’ if they can’t achieve something after trying basically a hundred times. And it looks like this:

The Chinook- er, I mean, mother cat just comes to pick them up like a carryall did with harvesters in Dune. Brilliant hardcoded goodness.

Well, that’s more than enough kitten for September, in my opinion. I’ll be updating the blog very, very soon now (I’ve actually got the design done, so I would imagine little stands in my way to start working it into a wordpress theme) and I will do a lot more fun, loosely related and experimental posts in the time to come.

ps. – no kittens were harmed in the making of this blog post. No, really, I dimmed my flash.

I must be killing all of you with the excitement of the release tomorrow but I just wanted to show how great it is for me now that I happily run MarsEdit 2. It’s a great piece of desktop blogging software, originally by Ranchero (the guys behind NetNewsWire) but it’s been acquired by Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software. Daniel has done some great work on MarsEdit, from giving the interface some much-needed spit and polish (including some great icons) to Flickr integration, which allows me to share with my frequent blog readers that I, too, have a new flickr account with icon sketches and icon designs that I will also use a lot more in the future. Here’s an easily added image of my Flickr sets that I put into this blog post with a simple click;

The image above is the new Terminal icon replacement for the War on Bad Design set, which had been teasing the 110 viewers of my photostream since a few days already, and will now serve as the final teaser before everything will be new again. Stay tuned, and if you blog, check out the two-point-oh of MarsEdit here (it’s a free trial for unregistered users!).