This week I attended  a design meet up! One topic that came up repeatedly was web design and its future trends. There has been a lot of uproar over it, especially with Apple officially calling out Adobe and refusing to incorporate Flash into it’s most recent releases of iPhones and iPads. Steve Jobs has essentially declared that HTML5 and standards compliant websites will be the wave of the future.

I’m not necessarily sure that Apple is stepping away from Adobe in the interest of public good, but I do know that Flash right now has its limitations. Any time you run scripts that require plugins in your code, you risk not reaching the part of your audience that may not be able to or does not want to install these plugins. So you need a way to make sure your content is still accessible to everyone. This is impossible to do with flash, unless you go to the trouble of duplicating your content in HTML (and if you go that far, why not just use HTML to begin with?). As more and more people use things like iPads and smart phones, mobile design becomes more and more important. Content must be delivered quickly and efficiently.

I use flash a lot in my design work right now, so it’s hard for me to imagine it ever going away. In fact, I’m fairly sure it will stick around for quite a while longer, but I am interested to see how things will evolve and adapt.

I’ve been delving deeper and deeper into wordpress theme design and modification. So this entire month has been a fantastic learning process for me.  It’s a complete work in progress, but I am amazed at how much customization can be done.

Last work I was working on a banner for one of the premier scooter clubs of St. Louis.

30 Days Scooter Gang is a club that prides itself on the camaraderie of its members as well as a love for smaller displacement bikes. For the most part, members have bikes between 49cc and 250cc engine capacity and favor the classic vespa style. I designed a 6′x2′ foot banner to represent the club using a vector illustration I created of a vintage vespa and taking design elements from their existing patch and website design:

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Valentine’s Day and Chinese New Year fatefully fell on the same day this year. In fact it seems like the entire weekend is an observation of several holidays what with our local Mardi Gras celebration happening on Saturday and Monday being President’s Day, also. I thought it would be fun to create a multi-holiday greeting card, so I settled on the two I considered the most fun and created this thoughtful lol-tiger-esque card just for kicks. Earlier I posted a sneak peak of
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A sneak  peek if you will:

Valentine’s Day is literally around the corner, and I’ve been putting forth a good amount of effort to create a pair of Valentine cards. Today I finished with the one and in the style of the fashionably late, I should finish the second one on the day after Valentine’s Day. It’s the thought that counts, right?
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I’ve been experimenting with origami recently, and while I enjoy making animals, especially birds, I think I enjoy making boxes more.  Perhaps it’s a latent, cat-like tendency of mine. Today I made a single sheet box with a lid made of flaps that fold into itself which ended up on my Thing-A-Day blog:

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You can do it with photos. You can do it with illustrations. Why not logos?

At least that’s what iStock seems to be saying. iStockphoto is proposing to offer stock logos for single purchase use to its customers. I first heard about this new venture through the site Logo Design Love : “iStock opens can of nasty worms”. According to the news release on iStock’s website, the logos will be available for download as fully editable .eps files, can only be sold once, and must be exclusive to iStock and will sell between 100 and 750 credits. They’re are considering offering some small customization depending upon what the client wants and what the artist is willing to do once the client buys the logo. iStock will give 50% royalties for the first 6 months and after that the rate remains to be seen.

I scanned some of the comments below the article and was surprised to see a lot of positive feedback. Logos are integral to a companies brand and image. I don’t really understand how a company can select a logo that will become their essence out of a stockpile of designs that were created without a thought in mind about what that company really stands for. I’m interested to see how this will really unravel out. There are plenty of places where a company could get a cheap logo designed (not that it would be any better quality than a random stock logo) And even sites selling stock logos already, such as The Red Door Studio. Is this really as profitable or exciting as some think it will be?

So there is a competition going on at work for this years holiday card that we send out to clients as well as the birthday card and anniversary card that get circulated out to employees on their special day. I’ve been doing so much screen work, that I really wanted to take the opportunity to design for print again. Plus I wanted to try out some of the skills I’ve been gleaning from all the tutorials I’ve been looking at. These are my entries:

I’ve been into the grunge/distressed trend although I haven’t been able to use it much for most of the stuff I do. So I tried to incorporate it a little bit here without getting my designs too dirty. I just wanted them to feel a little rustic. Even if none of my designs get chosen, I had so much fun making them. I think I want to try doing one for my own personal use. I’ve already got holiday cards for this year though, so maybe I’ll do some Valentine cards when winter rolls around.

I already mention SmashingApps.com as a design resource for tutorials and inspiration, but I wanted to mention a couple more that I’ve become aware of recently.

Smashing Magazine is also an excellent resource. You can find tips and more tutorials. There is information on designing with CSS and links to freebies (wordpress themes, icons and the like). They also have a showcase of work if you are looking for inspiration and ideas.

I also wanted to mention some of the free stock photo sites that I have been using for a while.

Morguefile.com – contains a variety of hi-res images that are royalty free for personal and corporate use.

Stock.XCHNG – also has a good variety of hi res images, I personally think the quality is also better than what you would find at morguefile, but both are good if you can’t afford to pay for stock photography.

Well, this will be my first design post in a while—

These are supposed to function not only as a logo, but also a patch, so I was trying to keep the design practical as far as something that could be used on the web as well as on someone’s jacket.

I think I like the first two as a set. But I wanted to have a color option as well.