Rotation in css-3. Or moreso it’s application in a baddass little poster experiment: http://www.everydayworks.com/css_typography/everydaytweet.html

And a sweet read on typograpy using css-3 that was well illustrated with some great usage examples: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/03/01/css-and-the-future-of-text/

It’s the kinda reads that make me look forward to my lunch breaks again!

My current morning practice is to get up a bit early and get in an hour+ of design work in, or read a good book to get my day off on the right foot. For the moment, that book is “inside Steve’s brain” – one that’s become increasingly popular around my company, and for good reason. As the company grows, they are increasingly looking for a brand to consolidate their array of products. And looking at the process of design, as the company shifts from one that makes software to one that is selling a brand. Increasingly, design leads such as myself are being looked to for advice – again opportunity.

This morning was Chapter 2: Despotism: Being a one-man focus group. Some really interesting take-always for me, especially considering I’ve been functioning as a one-man design show for years and the context of my new position. A lot of what I read has been reassuring in many ways – coming at design from a different direction than those building the product, gives you a unique understanding. Steve’s main asset isn’t that he understands the technology as well as the engineers creating it, but that he understands the users and is always pushing design. This is a strong concept for me, as it helps me think about where my value as a designer is to a company that writes software and needs that outside voice to help understand how to package and interact with the things they create.

So as the date approaches for me to hit that airplane and leave California in the dust, all sorts of shit is coming to mind that I’m going to miss that I probably didn’t think too much about when I went gun-ho after a job in South Carolina. And on the eve of my last full weekend in the south-bay, so we start the sad list of things I’m going to miss:

1. Living on the beach in some sweet digs
2. Surfing every morning
3. Sunday Morning breakfasts w/ Heidi
4. Avoiding yoga
5. the 4 mile commute to work along the coast
6. the ability to bike to work (not that I do because I’m too lazy and would rather enjoy #2)
7. surfing on my lunch breaks
8. surfing after work
9. Saturday morning: shotgun a beer, surfing for 2 hours and on to OB’s for breakbast + bloody marys
10. Followed by the beach and pub crawling the south bay on bikes
11. the Poop Deck on a sunny Saturday afternoon
12. Sunday Fun-day
13. Grant’s boat on clear Sunday mornings
14. My Trader Joe’s home-made pizza
15. ‘course, good friends and a few beers on the weekend
16. sunsets down 42nd Street…

Spent a portion of my morning re-building Depeche Mode’s “logo” for an upcoming event my agency is producing for W Hollywood Residences. Quite crazy, but I never thought of rock music as needing branding or really what might go into a band’s logo. Perhaps this is common in the industry, but the logo and “brand” seems to shift for each album that’s produced. I guess there is a bit more at stake with a headline band than the garage-band w/ album art designed by someone’s brothers friend.

While I can’t say DM was ever a band I truly dug back in the day, the Violator album cover is burnt into memory. The juxtaposition of the title “Violator” next to the stark visual of the red rose creates incredible tension and was brilliant. More so, it speaks towards the music.

The new brand appears a mash of 80′s glory – large abstract bars of colors – with abstract images and colorful gradients that are the pop-art of ’06. Much like the new music is almost more 80′s now than it was in the late 80′s. The logo cleverly uses these to “bars” to try and spell the “D” and “M” of the band name, but not quite legibly. One aspect I don’t know the answer to, is how much influence the actual band members have over establishing this look, or if it’s cooked up by their record label and stylists behind the scene.

In all respects, a coherent brand. And while I’m personally not in love w/ the aesthetic, it does do an excellent job of leveraging the old glory of a band who’s been out of the loop for a while aggressively trying to make their look contemporary.

WebAssist’s Roadmap Series: Having played w/ their products before, WebAssist helps web programers prototype more quickly w/ an impressive array of tools and information. Besides this, they provide some nice information about the what and why’s of web design. Their roadmap series is boiled down, 4-6 page basics of web design. Why is this handy to for experienced designer? Besides some nice refreshers of the basics, the one that really got me thinking was their explanation of SEO, boiled down to 2 pages. I stutter to think how many lengthy emails to clients explaining the basics of search-ability this would have saved me.

The result is it really got me thinking how I could improve my professional practice by creating a series of short documentation myself; Covering theses buzzword topics that clients always ask about. It would help clarify the process and educate the client BEFORE their web-site was designed and built.

Web Designer Wall: Always searching for great sites, especially ones that inspire the web design process. So many times, these sites are garbage “showcase” sites, where you get a bunch of screenshots without qualifying the WHY these sites are listed. This site provides great reading, looking at trends in web design, showcasing great sites as examples of those trends, and backing it all up w/ a great amount of the HOW with their tutorials. In particular, I’m, digging on their JQuery tutorials and thinking of ways to incorporate more Javascript animation into the sites I create. Kudos to these guys for elevating the web-design blog one more notch.

Design Observer: Collect a bunch of rock-star designers from a variety of disciplines and have them write, coherent, passionate articles? What could be better. Great inspiration, and a good read for that 4pm coffee break.

Core 77′s Design Directory: This is my Monday morning treat, their email newsletter id geared towards industrial design, but runs the gamut from furniture design to new sanitation ideas to save children in Africa. It’s the sort of stuff that gives me the brain jitters and informs the soul.

Was about to turn in last night, and stumbled across one of the funniest movies you can ever watch at 1AM. Pointless, yes. A stupid rip on Napolean Dynamite, probably. Stupid logic from the gods? Most certainly! Crack a beer and enjoy the wisdom:

All great men have mustaches!
- Rod Kimble, Hot Rod

Then again, they probably didn’t just spend the first two hours of their morning wearing off a tequila hangover by surfing. anyhow, nice site, some great work, and maybe the envy will motivate me to do something other than sit here: http://www.wsdia.com/

UPDATE: Now I know why they hit so far into my creative gut – they’re architects gone designers! nice little interview with them at Archinet: 

Architecture school is the highest test for anyone who wants to be a designer/creator. It’s an incredible test of your love for this profession, and you don’t love it…architecture school will definitely weed you out. The most appreciated skill I gained from Kent’s program was being able to communicate my ideas about concepts and ideas through heavy critique. This tool is vital for our studio in expressing our designs to our clients. Being able to critique your own and other’s work, and being able to take criticism, is something I am proud of.

So I’m just going to take a moment and try and reflect on where the term Information Junkyard came from…. 

Following graduating architecture school in ’98, the passion to create “something” was still burning strong. After relocating from Virginia to Seattle, Information Junkyard became the visual playground I used as an attempt to continue collaborating with my friends from school, as well as experiment and grow. It served it’s purpose, an outlet for all the bullshit photoshop experiments and pseudo-artistic ideas that haunted me after college. Then somewhere along the way, the things I did while screwing around, suddenly became a profession. And as it became my profession, the interest in coming home, sitting in front of the machine and dialing up an idea began to fade. What was once artistic, now became a career and finding that spark to create became harder and post fewer between. Could be said that a failed marriage and a shitload of beer also didn’t help too much.

So now, 10 years that initial spark, I find myself in a much better place in life. And I find myself at place where I feel like trying to share again, whatever the hell is in my head. Guess that’s what a blog is, right? The place where you hang your virtual hat? The junkyard for all those ideas that slip by in the morning in between coffee and some lunch? The dusty sketchbook that I use to carry everywhere with me, no becomes Helvetica Neue and the white glow of a computer screen.

With luck, no one will look too closely at any of this, as I have no intention of doing anything except recording the random shit that comes through my life, and occasionally posting a pretty picture or deep through that I’d probably be too embarrassed now to say out-loud. 

So, here we go. informationJunkard gets reborn for it’s second, painful time.