Blog

Once upon a Mistake

There’s a fine line between confidence and arrogance, and my professional arrogance had needed to be knocked down. Let me tell you the story of my humiliation. It’ll be fun.

The Crash and Burn of Thus and Therefore…and then not.

Imagine heat clawing your face as your custom-made home burns to the ground. You want to close your eyes against the sting of smoke coming from the house-shaped hole, but horror locks them wide...

The Little Blue Robot (The post I was—honestly—medically prescribed to write)

I’ve been medically prescribed blog-writing. I’m not even kidding. A statement like that probably needs backstory. So here’s a story, because stories are fun—and in this case, kind of meta: Once upon a time, there was a little blue robot. He was a fanciful fellow, his head always in...

Photomanipulation: Surreal Desert

I understand, now, why people say it’s hard to stop getting tattoos once you start. Because that’s what I felt while I was making a surreal desert scene using photomanipulation, using only images freely available under a Creative Commons licence at Pixabay.com.  I’ll just add one more thing, I...

Book Covers: The Whys behind the Whats (Reasons for Design Decisions)

I design ways of communicating a message visually, for tangible outputs. That’s my job, summarily. It so happens that, while a contractor, I’ve usually done this with logos. Branding a company (or re-branding it) brings its own kind of satisfaction. The company’s not mine, but like its owners and...

How to read signs when you can’t read words (A look at Visual Communication methods)

Imagine what you would do if you woke up one day and couldn’t read. Letters on shop signs were nonsense to you. The words of your favourite novel were inane markings, no more rational than scratches on a fence. I didn’t have to imagine it. And that’s how my intrigue...

Networking: the Dark Side of Freelancing

Freelancers work in isolation. I’m not in a studio, or an office block. I’m not rubbing shoulders with other designers. There’s just me. Usually, I love it that way. It’s comfortable. But it does leave me short-resourced — I need to ‘network’ to find collaborators with complementary skills, like...

To Blog or Not to Blog? (My Examination of Motive)

I might quit blogging. It might be a good thing. A healthy thing. There have been a variety of reasons for my blogging, across the timeline, but right now there’s no other reason than this: I’ve published a blog post every week since June last year. That’s not even a...

The appeal behind Apocalypse and Dystopia in fiction

Dystopian worlds are braced within a malevolent system, apocalyptic worlds are breaking apart, and post-apocalyptic ones are picking up the pieces. They’re all hell on earth. And they’re all spectacular. I hadn’t examined the reasons why I like to read novels set in apocalyptic and/or dystopian environments. It simply...

How to read what a job ad’s not saying

Most people understand that when a real-estate advertisement promotes a property as ‘ideal for first-home owners’, they mean ‘nobody would live here if they could afford somewhere else’. And when those ads label a house a ‘DIY dream’, they mean ‘the roof is currently held on by duct tape’....

Thus and Therefore

Thus and Therefore