I watched a fascinating presentation on mapping technologies and their use in the BBC yesterday. The highlight for me was an amazing video showing all the Open Street Map edits made in 2008. The Channel 4 / MySociety / Stamen project, Mapumental was also demonstrated (well, just the Mapumental YouTube video actually).
It's a really useful tool. Here I'm showing a few Cardiff examples.
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A simple mashup of the Twitter cartoon bird identity and 'Y Ddraig Goch' that appears on the Welsh flag. It's not finalised yet, but it's nearly there. When I look at it again in a few day, I'll probably spot exactly what needs to be tweaked to make it just right. Of course, feedback at this stage is often useful too. :)
I'm thinking about putting him on a grassy backdrop, to imitate the Welsh flag even more.Comments [2]
I've been slightly tweaking a nice WordPress theme to use for my blog, and I wanted to use some nice minimalistic icons. I had in mind the excellent Picol project icons, but on closer inspection they were a bit mismatched and when I saw them in place they looked like they had come from several different icon sets.
So these were heavily inspired by Picol, but a little more rounded and consistent with each other. The set took less than an hour.Comments [0]
Anil Dash made an interesting comment in the most recent This Week in Google podcast, that Google should hire the flickr designers away. I think that suggestion is pitch-perfect: both sites have a minimalist aesthetic, but flickr can be almost a joy to use, whereas Google can be unintuitive and frankly a little fugly.
Design is a feature. I also learned that flickr was developed from a web based MMORPG the company were working on, Game Neverending, which goes some way to explaining how flickr has such a satisfying reward structure.Comments [0]
This is a finished image, but I'm not uploading it to flickr because I'm going to rework it. For starters, I'm going to remove the top foot that is poking into the spiral, and then maybe experiment with some other fun details.
The Droste illusion is fascinating, and I'm still experimenting. I'm planning to produce some real head-twisters.Comments [1]
I did a bit more work this week, but not as much as I would like. The PSD is in a bit of a state at the moment, so I've cut out some details to show off, including some application windows.
Note the terminal tab at the bottom, so Linux power-geeks can change the desktop to something that lets them really get under the hood!
I've also allocated a little space that Google could use to display ads - I need two more, so leave suggestions in the comments. Winning suggestions will be used. :D
More next week. Enjoy.
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Last night I stumbled across this Photoshop mockup I have 2/3rds completed of a potential GUI for a Google operating system. This was created before Android, Chrome and Wave existed (as far as anyone knew) and is based on nothing but my own thinking.
I rather like the look of it, so I'm going to finish it off over the next few lunchbreaks. You're welcome to share any thoughts you have on the subject in the comments. :)
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I bought my first Munny last weekend. Since then I printed out a bunch of small templates and have been doodling designs. My favourite so far is a Cyclops-robot thing. I'd like to find a black marker that will work well on the surface.
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I had an idea for a project today: to take photographs and composite in highly two dimensional illustrated characters. I'm sure this has been done before (Who Framed Roger Rabbit? etc.), but the image of a Miyazaki-style sea strider popped into my head, almost exactly as I've rendered it here.
I'm not sure about the result. Think I'll have to try a few more and develop the style a bit.
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