[gb] Studio

I’ve been super-busy the last couple months on a lot of things in the studio: pushed a bunch of smaller projects out the door, one really big one, and continued work on some other big things that I can’t wait to share with you all.

As 2009 winds down, I’m excited for where [gb] Studio is headed. In particular, I’m looking forward to kicking off January with the fine folks at Carbonmade. For those that don’t know, Carbonmade makes it wicked-easy for designers, artists, photographers, and anyone else to put together a slick online portfolio.

The official announcement went out this morning from their end. I’ll be working on a lot of different things related to the next version of Carbonmade.

I’m looking forward to working with their team and excited to see where things go.

( ps – be sure and check out my own tricked-out Carbonmade portfolio: gb.carbonmade.com or get your own )

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I randomly made a couple iPhone Wallpapers for myself this morning and thought I’d share them.

The first, Risk is a bit inspired by this Andy Rutdledge post (and corresponding desktop wallpapers), though my desire to remind myself to take risks is somewhat more personal in nature.

The second, Metal is based off a photo I took this morning with my phone for my hello mopho photo blog.

Adding the Wallpaper
to your iPhone

To put either on your phone, follow these simple instructions:

1. Visit this page in your iPhone.
2. Decide which one you want to use.
3. Using your finger to press and hold your chosen image.
4. Select Save Image from the menu.
5. Go back to your Home Screen
   and select Settings.
6. Select Wallpaper and choose,
   Camera Roll.
7. Scroll down and tap on the image.
8. Tap Set.

More Wallpaper Images

You might also enjoy this set I released at about the same time last year, along with a corresponding design tutorial.

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I’m currently working on a book cover design for none other than my dad, Chuck Blakeman. We’ve got a few different designs we’ve narrowed it down to, and I thought I’d have some fun by throwing a couple of them out on Twitter to get some responses.

The above aren’t all of the ideas I came up with, but representative of the 4 different directions of the design choices.

I put out a couple tweets asking for opinions and started getting responses almost immediately.

So far, what has surprised me the most is the polarization between the grey covers and the more colorful covers. It’s almost a mutually-exclusive response. If you like the grey cover in the first set, you’ll like the grey cover in the second. If you like the white cover, you’ll like the blue/yellow cover.

I’m not sure what to do with that information yet, but it’s fun to see the strong pattern in responses. What would you pick?

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Today I had the privilege of speaking at Andrew Hyde’s new conference, boco. My Backstage business parter, Reid Phillips and I gave a super-short, but hopefully super-awesome talk on the state of the music industry, and specifically, how change is a constant force in any industry.

I unfortunately had a crazy day and couldn’t attend the conference in its entirety, but what I did participate in was fantastic. Andrew has such a knack for bringing together interesting groups of people. I left with the reminder of how important it is to constantly push ourselves into new areas. It’s easy for all of us to stay in our own little interest-area groups. I loved Andrew’s format of mixing tech with music and food. I hope this is the first year of a long-standing Boulder event.

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Anyone who follows the Quotes section of my blog knows I read the Lefsetz Letter pretty regularly. A quote in one of his most recent posts called Update grabbed my attention:

“Don’t know if you’ve been following the movie business, but the studios have taken back compensation. Rather than give eight digit salaries and profit participation from dollar one, they’re making almost everybody, actors and directors, wait for their money (if it comes in at all!)…”

There’s nothing too earth-shattering about this shift in the movie industry, it’s also happening in other areas like music, as he argues. But I think it’s representative of a more fundamental shift to something I’m calling—for lack of a better term—the Responsibility Economy.

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Last week I launched a splash page announcing the Lilly’s Table project. I’ve been working on it for some time, and part of the plan is to give you all (my 2 or 3 faithful readers) some insight into the process of designing and building a web application from the ground up.

This is one of my favorite types of projects: I’ve been involved with Lilly in everything…

This is one of my favorite types of projects: I’ve been involved with Lilly in everything from the business development side, to the product design, and of course, the actual site design & development. One of the initial design pieces I worked on was the visual brand for the project. In this first post discussing the branding process, I’ll show a bit of the work we went through to arrive at the final logo for Lilly’s Table.

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I’m excited to announce a project I’ve been working on for a while with the very talented Chef Lilly from Bella Cuisine. The project is called: Lilly’s Table and it will feature fresh and creative, seasonal, meal plans on a weekly basis, directly from Lilly herself.

I think Lilly and I first started to talk about her project toward the end of last year, so it has been in the works for a while. This fun little splash page is just the beginning. Be sure to sign up for the email list, or follow @LillysTable on Twitter so that you don’t miss anything.

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The writing is definitely on the wall for IE6. Some major sites and services are starting to drop support for it. Even so, I keep hearing the argument that IE6 must be supported because a good chunk of corporate America is stuck with it. From my understanding, they’re stuck with it because they have propriety web apps that only work in IE6.

From my understanding, they’re stuck with it because they have propriety web apps that only work in IE6.

Ok, fine. But maybe we’ve been approaching this the wrong way the whole time. Why can’t these companies install Firefox, or Chrome, or Safari alongside IE6? Tell employees to use IE6 for their stuck-in-time web apps, and a normal browser for everything else. What’s the problem with this approach? And why aren’t more people advocating it? What am I missing?

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This is a short one related to this tweet:

“worked ass off all week to try to get a little break, that really is a half-assed break, which isn’t much of a break at all. #doingitwrong”

I like what I do, so I don’t want this to come off too negatively, but the reality is that I tend to work too much and not schedule much time off. In the case of last week, I had some good friends getting married, and I simply wanted to clear most of my schedule for a couple days so that I could enjoy the festivities.

I’m not sure what’s worse sometimes, not taking breaks, or scheduling a break and then feeling let down when you can’t follow through
on it.

Well, stuff doesn’t always work out the way it should, and I had an interesting (to me) observation Friday morning, while working when I was hoping I wouldn’t be: I’m not sure what’s worse sometimes, not taking breaks, or scheduling a break and then feeling let down when you can’t follow through on it. The emotional/psychological consequences of option two are often more frustrating to me. I was expecting some time off, began to look forward to it, and then couldn’t actually make it happen.

Oh well; that’s life sometimes. I’ll try not to use this as an excuse to not schedule time off in the future…

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I’ll say this up front: I sincerely (and selfishly) wish I had written and posted this months ago. I posed the following argument to a friend not long after I had become hooked on Twitter, and frankly, had I written about it then, I would’ve looked like a genius at the outset of the fix replies debacle. Instead, you’ll have to take my argument for what it may (or may not) be worth now:

Twitter will feature-add itself out of existence.

Huh? Let me explain: Twitter is brilliant because of its simplicity and the way it lends itself to being an open and public messaging/broadcasting platform. These basic tenents are what differentiated it and helped it become what it is today among a host of other more “traditional” social network sites.

I would go so far as to say that the ultimate genius of Twitter is its lack of features.

I would go so far as to say that the ultimate genius of Twitter is its lack of features. There are no groups, there are no sub-sets or tiers of users. No special treatment. Up until Twitter “fixed confusing replies” (as they originally put it), everyone saw what everyone else wrote (unless they chose not to). You are valuable to people on Twitter if they listen to you and find value in what you say. On some level, Twitter stumbled into what it is today. It would be hard to come up with a more simple structure for a social network if you tried. Simplicity is the genius of Twitter. But there is a problem…

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Earlier this year, my friend Andrew Hyde and I worked on a video for the band, The Autumn Film. Before going further, check out the video. In this post, I’ll go over some of the behind the scenes: a making of, of sorts.

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“Honestly, anything is better than our new stuff with the pink and the huge heads, looking more and more generic by the day.”

Designers love to redesign. I should know, I’m one of them. But let me rant for a moment: Good designers can do an excellent job of taking a fresh approach to something. The best designers know when to clean the slate, and when not to.

I ran across the designs featured above in an article over at the ISO50 blog. I love these designs. They’re really fresh and they’re really fun. But it was the commentary that caught me: “…anything is better than our new stuff with the pink and the huge heads, looking more and more generic by the day.” Is that really true?

Don’t get me wrong, new designs are fun and sometimes very necessary, but the basic premise of the argument I always hear in the redesign of our money is this: “it’s boring compared to everyone else’s money.”

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At some point yesterday, between waking up feeling ‘meh’, and blaming it on allergies, and finishing my project-kickoff meeting with Chef Lilly, a sickness descended on my body. I didn’t really feel it until the excitement of the meeting wore off and I was able to relax a bit, but I could no longer blame it on allergies: I had a full-blown head-cold.

It became clear that I needed to rest. I’d had about 5 hours of sleep the night before (my own stupidity), but I had hoped to work productively through the afternoon and finish the evening with drinks with friends. My body had other plans.

I suck at the practice of resting.

So, I went home to rest. But here’s the problem:
I suck at the practice of resting.

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I love to see projects head out into the real world, to see people interact with the work that I do.

It’s not always easy to figure out, but it’s good to know what motivates you in the work you do day in and day out. For me, I’ve realized that more than anything, I love to see projects head out into the real world, to see people interact with the work that I do. I don’t even need the recognition or acknowledgement that I worked on the project (although it’s nice). There’s simply something invigorating about getting projects done and putting good work out in the world for others to see.

Lately, that hasn’t been happening for me. As I sit here and write this post, I have several projects waiting in the wings, in various stages of completion. Aside from some small successes (which I’ll hopefully be talking about here, soon), it feels like it has been a long time since something went out the door.

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A quick realization I had this morning: for better, or for worse, I have zero overtly positive feelings for pretty much all of the large corporations I do business with in my personal or professional life.

What do I mean? Basically this: most of the large entities I do business with exist as road blocks to getting to where I want to go. I don’t get excited about paying my Comcast bill every month. Nor at&t. I feel like the utility office in my hometown (Boulder) wishes I actually wouldn’t buy any water from them. I get the distinct impression my bank and all of my credit card companies would be better off without me as a customer. Same goes with the company that built my car (VW), the one that services it (Gebhardt Auto), It goes on…

Like I said, I’m not sure if this is bad, or if it just is. But for some of the smaller companies, who’s services I use, and who’s people I can actually have non-bureaucratic conversations with, for those companies? I actually look forward to paying them. I want to see them succeed alongside me.

Is it possible for a large company to have this kind of relationship with me, as a customer? Or is that just the price you pay at a certain size?

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This post contains some extended thoughts that came out of a post I read on the Less Everything blog regarding An Alternative Rails Maturity Model idea.

I originally read the post the day it came out and I’ve been mulling over it. Something was bugging me. Not just about the idea of a Rails Maturity Model certification, but even the idea of a guild of some kind as proposed by Steven Bristol.

…trade guilds, trade associations and standards bodies maintain the status quo.

Here’s the thing (and I think this is provable time and time again in much more mature industries): trade guilds, trade associations and standards bodies maintain the status quo. They do everything they can to do so, even when it’s not to the benefit of the industry or the clients/customers of that industry.

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“It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them too.” Great thoughts on inspiration and the creative process that is derivative by nature.

(via ISO50 Blog)

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Let’s talk tools. I’ll try to keep this one short because the point really isn’t to dump on HDR in general, but to remind everyone of a simple concept: just because you have a tool at your disposal doesn’t mean you have to use it.

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I was catching up on some design articles today, and while scrolling through Smashing Magazine’s Web Trends for 2009 I noticed one of our designs under the HUGE Typography category. The design is from the micro-store we created for The Autumn Film’s Red+White Sale.

It’s always fun when other people feature your work. I’m honored. Thanks to Smashing Magazine.

If you want, you can check out the original design and an article on the design process for it.

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I am trying to get back into the swing of writing these Wednesday design posts. I don’t know that many of you even read them, but it’s a good exercise for me and makes me think differently and view my work (and others) through a different lens. That said, I thought I’d ease myself into the new year with a post on somebody else’s work: Weighbot, the deliciously-designed weight tracking program for the iPhone.

This app is slick. I had read a review at one point saying this app was not only gorgeously designed, but had excellent ui design as well, so I thought I’d check it out.

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