Design update + New works and projects 22.06.09

Last night I pushed a bunch of updates to this site – most notably a homepage design tweak and two new sections.

Big, fat Acanthus:

So that big ‘ROCKETFUELLED’ type on the homepage isn’t really hard to miss, is it? This is a little snippet of some works I’ve been making with The Lady over the past few months. I’ll go into it in detail some other time but a brief description would be: Lino-cut letters (in Acanthus Black); letter-by-letter printing on newspaper stock; see how it comes out.

Projects

This little addition represents the biggest amount of work in this update. I’ve had these little things kicking around on my local install of the site for a few months now – mostly as rough ideas. They’re all sort of experimental / non-commercial things that I’ve been tinkering away on in-between jobs. I guess the common theme amongst all of them is that they sit within a tweaked version of the layout of the site to accommodate the content better.

OH: OH is short for ‘Over Heard’ and is a collection of favourite lines / quotes / etc., made into little design pieces. Constraints: ~10 minutes each; just one or two fonts. I collect such lines all the time in notebooks and things so everytime I get 5, I plan to knock one up.

Essays: This one took the longest to get my head around. Initially the idea was to try and create a more immersive experience for a typical photo essay. The typical format of writing next to a few pictures doesn’t really do the idea of a photo essay justice in my opinion. The other thing is, I often take low-fi short movies when I have my camera with me and I always thought they’d be good additions to a photo essay.

So, the idea was to fill the page with the main image / movie relating to each paragraph of a photo essay. I wanted the text to be forefront while the image created the atmosphere / context. I also wanted to do it in a simple, not-too-technical way.

Thus, we have an adapted layout with some low-quality images / animated gifs filling the screen. That’s all you have: a big image / animation and some big text. Hopefully this helps immerse you in the story a bit.

Video Walls: This is just a fun approach at collecting video favourites from Vimeo / Flickr (I love YouTube but all the button/etc. overlays just look ugly in vast numbers).

Drawings:

A collection of drawings / doodles / etc. from notebooks and things. I’ve been sceptical about sharing these but friends have told me I should, so here they are. The clever bit behind this section is that it’s pulled straight out of Flickr via the vdh_flickr extension by Ralph von der Heyden. This TXP Tips article helped me to achieve the layout / functionality with this plugin that I wanted.

Newsletter

I’ve also added a newsletter signup form to the sidebar. This newsletter will probably only be sent out a couple of times a year, when there’s anything particularly new or notable to tell you about. Sign up!