Category: design
Style for the Dark Side—or the Light Side? (help!)
This Star Wars webcomic of mine (from a comic I drew as a kid) kind of disgraces me as a designer! But it’s such a hard style to get right, for the particular, unusual content which it carries. I’d love to get your input.
Turn to the Darkside — or — the Lightside?
Ordinarily, I prefer not to ask people for their opinions on my work, but I’m just too close to this thing and… it’s also complicated.
The webcomic is built around a comic book adaption that I did as a kid between early 1978 and about 1983. So between the ages of 9 and about 14 or 15 years old.
The current look is my CSS-tweaked version of a very plain and basic off-the-shelf Comic Press skeleton template. It’s difficult to get much more creative with it in terms of layout etc., so what I’ve done is mainly adjust the typography, colours and forms of the various widgets and content boxes, like rounding off their corners.
The Design Problem to be Solved
The problems as I see them from a webdesign point of view are mainly all about the fact that what’s being displayed/presented/exhibited in the website is pretty rough looking, at times very tatty, stained, and even partially eaten by Silverfish insects! The paper is nearly 4 decades old. But most of the drawings lack finesse. What this means is that:
- A ‘clean’ minimalist gallery-style website isn’t really going to fit the tatty looking content. It’ll make the content look even tattier by contrast.
- When I do a slightly tatty looking site design (like my other alienage11.com webcomic) it just makes everything look like crap 😀
My feelings about the current Dark version
Identity Design: Equinox
Whilst I was Lead Designer at Equinox
Pencil sketching
Some loose pencil sketches and a quick reference to an encyclopaedia gave rise to a meaningful use of curves, with an interesting positive-negative interplay of forms.
Swooshy, satellitey things…
There were a hell of a lot of swooshy-logos doing the rounds in 1990, and a glance through the appointments section of the paper (before the recession recently hit) evidenced that the plague hadn’t abated: Continue reading
B*W: Architectural Design & Style #1
I think I know what type of house I’d like to live in these days. Something like this one, up the road from my own:
1970s Dublin house
A couple of weeks ago, I stopped the car by this house and took a snap. “That’s the one!” I gasped.
I even like the 1970s railings!
I’ve been enjoying having a go at designing two of the houses featured in the strip so far. The first that I attempted was Jim’s bungalow in the strip < PREMATH with the number ’77’ beside the front door. I really enjoyed that one, putting in everything that I liked. However, I didn’t really think very much – or at all – about the house as a whole.
Jim’s seventies house and crazy paving
Jim’s cool 70s bungalow. I particularly enjoyed the crazy-paving and the 77 by the front door, and the fancy concrete block wall. No, actually, I enjoyed all of it. Continue reading
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