Category: design

  • Manic theme creation and why I switched to Genesis

    Manic theme creation and why I switched to Genesis

    Over the last three weeks I have been manically coding up a storm and developed six brand new themes, breathed new life into one and redeveloped a favourite. For all of these I made the conscious decision to embrace and commit to developing using the Genesis Theme Framework (affiliate link). Can I just say I’m glad I persisted? It…

  • An eye for :: tribal and native prints

    Firstly I don’t want to give offence by using the words ‘tribal’ or ‘native’ but I am seriously stuck for words when it comes to a better description. I hope you understand my meaning when I say I have had a serious eye for patterns and products inspired by native American, Aztec and African motifs and…

  • Illustrating in Illustrator :: not for the faint hearted

    Illustrating in Illustrator :: not for the faint hearted

    This is a book jacket cover for a project I did at Uni last year that I have been wanting to share this with you for a while now. The brief was to design a piece for a fictitious media franchise, which could have been a TV show, movie, animation or graphic novel. I thought it would be…

  • Any eye for :: neon

    Any eye for :: neon

    Ever since half the players at the Australian Open burst onto the court sporting energetic neon (thanks Nike), I have not been able to get neon out of my head. To be honest I thought it was something that I had safely left behind in the 80’s and until recently I remained convinced that this…

  • Can’t get away from: skinny fonts

    Can’t get away from: skinny fonts

    Can you believe it’s been 4 months since my last real post? When you blog again after a big absence it makes me wonder what the protocol is, do I just dive back in or do I explain myself? I might just dive back in if that’s OK? I’ll save the explanation for another post.…

  • Working on :: new patterns

    Working on :: new patterns

    Wow I’ve been busy – which explains why it’s taken so long between posts on this blog. I’m sure my blog was starting to feel neglected. Work and Uni have both been particularly demanding but I have had one win. I convinced my subject lecturer to let me create a surface pattern design collection for…

  • Working on :: trend research

    Working on :: trend research

    For those that know me well, you will understandably be surprised to hear I’ve been engaged lately in trend research. I have never been a dedicated follower of fashion and I oscillate between one of two camps; 1 – that the item I love and cannot live without is also so far out of my…

  • Working with :: style tiles

    Working with :: style tiles

    I was introduced to Style Tiles a few months ago by a colleague. As it says on their website, they’re good when ‘a moodboard is too vague and a comp is too literal’. He was proposing their use as a way to cut down the time it takes to produce full designs, when sometimes in…

  • It’s a triangle thing

    I have gone completely mad for geometrics of late, and to be more specific triangles. I’m sure this isn’t the first time I have expressed this obsession here but I really can’t get them out of my head. Is there a word for that? So in celebration, or just to fuel the geometric fire a…

  • Thinking about :: flat design

    Flat design is a trend that has become increasingly prevalent in web design since Apple announced their changes to the soon to be released IOS 7. In case you’ve not heard of it, flat design is just as it sounds; design that is simple with no use of gradients or drop shadows or the skeuomorphic…