Kai Chan Vong Head to my Tumblr site

Great week so far… and now I’m off on the train up to Newcastle to visit some of my friends I went to uni with.  Oh and if you’ve never seen the West Wing, you really should check it out.  It’s truely awesome.

So, I went and took part in a great event on the Sunday organised for the Hide and Seek ‘08 festival.  When I first saw about the event I thought… great, I’m going to get chased and wet by some 16 year old with a supersoaker.

Fortunately it was nothing like that.  ‘And I saw..‘ was an event where you go around the South Bank and search for stickers with number on.  It’s probably the only time that people could look at a girl’s chest and say, “Can I have your number?”  I only said it twice.

I went around with PHP Developer, Jo Carter of Pod 1 fame.  Who, by no surprise to me… won.  She spotted 60 stickers and texted them all.  Not bad considering we started at lunchtime and finished 6 hours later.

If anyone hears about the festival next year, I recommend you check it out.  It’s really a fantastic event to take part in.

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Yesterday was amazing, helping out and being photographer for Flash! Flash! Flash! Photography @ London Astoria, it was great fun! They played alongside Attack Attack, the 1920s and the Lost Prophets… who luckily have a great logo.

Other companies, however have lately been slacking a bit… big mistakes!  Google being what I want to talk about first of all and why they’ve gone for the favicon with a small g.  The reaction on Digg from it all was exactly in line with my own views, that the small ‘g’ just doesn’t work.  It isn’t them, simple as.

Whilst looking at my news feeds, I realised the logo was extremely similar to the Guardian’s logo on their site.  With the exception being that it’s slightly cut off bit underneath it. Uncanny huh?  Picassso once said, “good artists copy… great artists steal”.  It happens in Design all the time.   Some people will deny it and claim it’s rare, but if happens in every medium today.  You just probably don’t realise how much recycling goes on.  But it’s important it happens because it creates patterns and design, art, entertainment etc all improves because of it.

Now it gets better with the icon, if you invert the colours (blue and white), you’ll realise it’s even more  like the Guardian’s logo.  Which now has none of their or child like innocent looking brand values exist in the new logo… the whole blue, yellow, red.. gone! Just like that, it’s turned the google to being a smart and sophisticated brand.

Moving on from Google for a moment ( I do think Google are brilliant, however the logo thing seems very weird!) to Agency Net.  In their logo you would expect an ‘A’ and ‘N’ or something similar, right? They’ve done that, plus trying to be too clever and horizontally flip the small ‘n’ all in a serif font. Which happens to look incredibly like ’sr’.  Even worse, when you’re given it or see it at an angle, because of the curves all being so similar it looks like an ‘SS’.  ‘Ass’.  And that was my immediate reaction when Larrisa Meek gave me her contact card at Future of Web Design.

I’ll stop there.  These are things are something we can all learn from, because it reminds us all to think about  what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.  Fortunately the web is a really easy medium to fix your mistakes.

With Google, they have great brand and I don’t get what’s wrong with keeping it all inline. Consistency is always key, because people never forget with it and are even subliminally affected by it.

As for the Agency Net logo, it’s a case of not trying to over complicate something for the sake of it standing out.  I think the main problem is that they’ve tried to be overly artistic with the typography and then not thought about how important and easy it is to screw up by tempering with it.

It’d be nice to hear back from any of the companies mentioned or to hear what other designers think.

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So… get ready for this one! It’s been a long weekend.. I’ve been…

• Playing with some stupid wmpnetwk.exe file consuming all of my windows boxes’ process power
• Seeing Jools Holland live at Tunbridge
  
• Promoting my team’s Nom Nom Nom page -a food competition I took part in
• Missing out on what Mr. Doggett calls the greatest FFFP event ever
• Almost getting to the end of Alias (season 2)
• Photographing/Chatting to my grandparents. They came to visit this weekend, as did my mom’s friend Camilla from Sweden

And also redesigning the look of my Tumblr site and doing some markup (from scratch) for it too. I hope to pull the design over for the blog (it’s hosted by me, so I can do a lot more fun stuff with PHP!) at some point and try to improve all those ugly HTTP:// requests I’ve been sending out.

To give you an idea of what it might end up as, check out how the footer looked at first. It now looks like this on the current iteration.

I found a few interesting things out whilst playing with PNGs. Firstly, PNG-8 is slightly lower in file size to that of GIF. whilst PNG-24 is slightly higher than GIF. When I used the 8bit version, in Safari the colour of the background came out ever so slightly darker than the GIF. So I’ve stuck with using GIF. If anyone else has any better understanding of why it did it (I didn’t have transparency on the PNG), let me know!

Below is the mood board & look of the footer:

Influences pulled from comics such as Spawn, Venom, X-Factor (Sunspot) etc.  From the days when I was a mad comic addict.

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