Thoughts on Digital Life

Here we go, the final installment of my summer blogs. I started 5 weeks ago blogging about colors, moving into typography, shapes, pictures and finally here we are at motion. Motion Webdesign has changed a lot since I started almost 20 years ago. In the very beginning we had frames, then we moved to Shockwave, making our way from Flash to HTML5 with CSS. It has become this responsive thing as well. Actually I feel it has matured. Looking at my design studies I am now using more knowledge from design as I did before. Since Macromedia (later Adobe) Flash motion has really become a part of webdesign. During these Flash days anything was okay. We didn't care about the filesize, loading times and all that kind of stuff. It had to look amazing. Actually now, we're there again - yet more matured. No longer do we animate for the sake of animating, we can now have it help our visitors. Guiding through the website Both small and big animations help guide a visitor throug...

This is the third part of my summer blogs on Visual (Web)Design. After looking at colors and fonts we're diving into shapes. What are shapes? When I'm talking about shapes I'm actually talking about a lot of things. Most notably I try to look at the branding. A visual guideline for a brand often has some characteristics. When I look at Apple for instance, the design is clean and simple. The logo itself doesn't have a sharp corner on it. So I would define Apple as a soft, subtle, clear brand. If you were to add sharp corners in an Apple design it would look a bit odd. The image above shows a hard shape and a soft shape. I generally look for these type of constants in a brand. If a brand is soft, the buttons will be rounded, I'll use lighter colors and such. If a brand is made up of sharp corners, I will adjust my design to match. Logo's Another part of shapes is the logo. A logo is usually a shape and some text. The stronger the shape of the logo...

In my previous blog-post I explained I am blogging all through the summer about Visual (Web)Design. This is part 2, where we'll focus on typography. Typography According to Wikipedia typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable and appealing when displayed. I feel typography is not often valued correctly. Typograpy is one of the key aspects to Visual Design. It helps in setting an emotion, when done well it helps in brand recognition. Looking at webdesign there are more things to take into consideration. Emotion Typography sets an emotion. Often people frown when I say this, but showing one particular font helps explain my message. Yes, I am using Comic Sans in this blog post! Which of the two words above looks more important? When you're using Comic Sans for the word 'help' I wonder how many people see the urgency of your request. When using the Impact font (especially in all-caps) it looks mo...

This summer I want to bring you a set of blog posts about Visual Webdesign. Recently I started noticing basic design knowledge is lost in the digital world. In the responsive era many webdesigns have become... well... kinda boring. Its all colored boxes. Many sites look quite similar. The only difference between the wireframes and the design is color. And I think Visual Webdesigners can do better. We've become lazy. This series is intended to stop designers for a single moment to realize we can do better. Visual Design is so impressive and so valuable to every project - that you need to get the basics right. Visual Webdesign I think there are 5 elements to visual webdesign: color, typography, shapes, pictures and motion. I want to dive into these elements one by one. My aim is to put a blog online weekly for the next 5 weeks - diving into one of the elements every week. This week we'll start with Color. Color There are many aspects to color. Did you kn...

Since starting at Capgemini, six weeks ago, I've been diving into Virtual Reality once again. I had experienced it at an employer before, working for Oculus Rift at the time. I also had my reservations because, being a designer, I thought the quality was too poor. Here's how Virtual Reality has been part of my life as a designer. QuickTime It all started somewhere in the 2000's when QuickTime started with 360 Panorama photo's leading to my first VR experience. It wasn't with goggles of any kind. It was a photo or maybe also a video that was created so you could drag your mouse and watch the surroundings. At the time that was pretty impessive and its a shame Apple has ended support for QuickTime for Windows. QuickTime has been a big part of my career in the past. Oculus Rift I moved over to the Oculus Rift. There were some technical guys who ordered it and experience with it. I created some models to be used on the Oculus. I haven't seen the Oculus ...