Thoughts on Digital Life

Last year I did a boomerang. I left my job in February, only to return in September. This was never my intention, but it happened. Returning to an old flame isn't just one big party though. When you return, you might find yourself in a different situation. With ths blog I'll try to give some insight into what it's like to return to a former job. Acknowledgement of skills The fact that both you and your employer have reached another agreement means you both acknowledge eachother as a decent partner. There is enough trust to build upon one another once more. There must have been a spark, otherwise you wouldn't have been discussing a second term in the first place. Be relaxed about it When re-starting be sure to make it a smooth start. Don't go in there shouting what should be done or shouldn't be done. You have to earn back your place in the team. Rushing or being demanding won't help you settle back in at all. Know you have once deserted the team and

My career has been a strange path so far, but it has certainly been quite a nice ride. Yet again, I'm changing the scenery and I decided to explain a little bit on the why. The snippet-resumé My resumé, or CV if you will, has become quite ridiculous. I've got loads of short-term employments on it over the past 6 years, ranging from two years to 9 months. And that sucks. Big time. When I started my career I worked at a place where I could have worked forever - until they went bankrupt... I've been in that same situation once again since. Both of these employers could have been my employers for my entire career if the finances didn't go bad. I've often changed jobs. Sometimes for the right reasons, sometimes for the wrong reasons. Once there was a mutual agreement that things didn't work out - that company was mostly copying great work by others and that didn't compute with me. And once have I been fired because I was too critical of the company

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

Part 4 of my summer blogs on visual design: pictures. Pictures to me are photographs, but also infographics, video and such. Because photography is the biggest thing related to pictures, my focus will mainly be the photography. Emotion A photograph captures emotion. Many of the pictures we know well capture an emotion. During my research the picture below appeared to be the most famous photo. I always thought it would be the lunchtime on a skyscraper (Charles C. Ebbets, 1932) or the napalm attack (Nick Ut, 1972) - but it appears to be this picture of an Afghan girl by Steve McCurry taken in 1985. Before you read below the image, picture an emotion with this photo and then read on to find out if it was captured as you felt it was. This is Sharbat Gula, 13 years old at the time of the picture. Her parents had died in the Soviet bombing of Afghanistan and she was living in a refugee camp in Pakistan. Doesn't matter if you got it right or not - you can most certainly

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