An interesting journey to say the least
Three months.
It has just come to my attention that that is the amount of time since the last post here. It is true, I lost sight of Designkai to some extent in a haze of bizarre journeys and unexpected destinations. While I am well aware most readers don’t actually care about my life or my whereabouts I do still feel it necessary to apologize for the sudden disappearance, particularly so soon after promising a barrage of new articles (a couple of which had actually been written but I have since lost… I am still working on that). Having said that, I am unsure of my time allowances for Designkai in the future, they may not be what I would hope. This is for a few reasons; the most important of which is that I have finished school and been flung semi-nude and shivering into the adult world (reminiscent of the Ren & Stimpy into). Due to this my days of being something of an educated hobo with an income have ceased, instead I am now required to hold a job, a growingly difficult social life, other projects which will hopefully have an income source (unlike this one) and of course, tertiary study… an abyss to where I can see much of my time heading. Although less abyss…y. Abyssy? Abyssie? You know what I mean.
Yes that right, I am now a design student at university. To be more specific I am studying ‘Visual Communications’ an apparently huge part of which is studying communications which are not visual at all. Who would have thought. The upside of this study? Well now I can only assume my articles on this website will have more a more educated insight into design and the world it saturates, particularly from a professional standpoint.
So yes, I am aware that it has been relatively inactive around here and for that I apologize, but at the same time I thank the apparent consistent flow of users through the website. I will attempt to make an effort at bringing this back in a big way, but I really cannot make any promises at this stage because I am still unsure of upcoming workloads, otherwise Designkai will probably coast along as it has in the last 3 months.
iPods suck. Right?
Some have said that I kiss some Apple arse, and that may be true. But there is a good reason for that. It works. I am not going to rant and rave about how Mac is the superior OS or the better hardware and things of the what not, no, I will save that for another post (:P jokes, each has its own benefits). I intend to have a rant about iPods right now.
The common myth that iPods break easily. Everyone has heard it from someone, seen it on the news, read it in a paper, magazine, etc. The numbers of broken iPods sure are astonishing, I won’t at all deny that. But you know what is more astonishing? The sales numbers. Lets use some pretty basic numbers as an example here. Lets say we take an MP3 brand called ‘mpMe’ (I apologize if this resembles anything real, that was of no intention, I was just pulling shit out of nowhere), and now lets say 1 in 10 breaks or has some faults which require it to be replaced. Now lets assume the statistics for an iPod are the same, 1 in 10 breaks. Now pretend in month, mpMe sells 40 MP3 systems, 4 will break in that month. Now lets assume apple sells 10,000 iPods in that month, 1,000 will break. 1,000 broken iPods seems like a damn lot of wasted money for consumers, but its not looked at comparatively. Also, the 1 in 10 statistic is not real, it was hypothetical.
Logic would state that the highest selling MP3 player in the world would also have the highest break rate just by sheer ratio, right? Apparently not.
I am constantly bombarded by people who claim iPods suck because they break easily. I won’t deny that they have faults (namely the battery or that short screen crisis they had), everything does, but what gets me is the people who tell me this at the sight of my iPod. At least 90% of people who have spoken negatively about iPod’s to me have never themselves owned an iPod, they just bitch and moan based on what they have heard or what has happened to people they know.
You frequently hear the horror stories ‘my brother got 3 and all 3 broke’ and shit like that. Is it ever possible that they just don’t take care of their iPods correctly? This Apple kiss arse post is not based on nothing either, it is based on own experience. 3 years ago next month myself and my two sisters purchased a 30GB iPod Classics (5th gen) each. Alas, on November 10th, one of the 3 broke. Took almost 3 years though. And it was by no means Apple’s or the iPods fault. No, instead it broke because my sister left it on the floor and stepped on the screen. I would expect my heel to do damage to any MP3 player on the market.
I have had some argue that it was because they were the newer ones that they lasted (yet they argue that ones that came out after ours are still crap…?), which is just not true. I have seen black and white iPod’s last 3 years without needing replacement, and how old are they! I have even been lucky enough to use a functional, and in use second gen iPod earlier this year.
I am not trying to force anyone into buying an iPod, its their loss if they don’t in my opinion. But iPod’s seem to carry a stigma with people who have never owned one and never will due to. I can respect someone’s decision to purchase an alternative because lets face it, iPod’s probably aren’t the best thing on the market, but they sure as hell aren’t the worst.
I think what it comes down to is how much you respect you’re iPod or technology in general. I know for a fact that a well treated iPod will last a long time. Hell I have even dropped my iPod from roofs and had it kicked in the screen and mine is fine, so apparently you don’t even need to show them that much respect.
I know (in fact I planned and hoped on it) that this post will probably piss some hardcore anti-apple enthusiasts off, its your place, stand up for what you believe. I will however direct you to my comment form below. I want to hear everyones story, the horrible stories about how iPod’s are lemons and the great ones about people who have owned their iPod’s since the mid Triassic period. Go wild! And hell, prove me wrong. Nothing like some food for thought.
WordPress 2.7! Will it impact me?
It is a well known fact that many of you designers (particularly web) out there are WordPress junkies, such as myself. Needless to say any decent new update, plugin, all the jazz will make you pretty excited. And often with good reason.
So I, like many of you, got pretty excited when I heard about WordPress 2.7 and needless to say, I downloaded the Beta and gave it a thrashing on my localhost. And what can I say other then ‘BRING ON THE STABLE!’. It is very nice, the main difference is the Admin panel (image at end of post) which is very customisable, allowing you to move around and even hide all the little useful bits on all the pages (admin home, writing post, etc).
But while testing, the question popped into my mind… ‘Will this effect how I design in any way?’. Naturally, my cursor dashed to my google search bar and my fingers hammered the question, but not much came up. Apparently it was either a question nobody had asked, or a stupid one that didn’t need to be asked. So I figured the best way to do it would just be to play on my localhost, and the verdict was… drumroll please. No, the template system and tags worked exactly the same thankfully. It has no effect on designing templates and old templates still work on it.
I then realized that it probably was a pretty stupid question, particularly after looking at the new features. Very few of which have anything to do with anything related to templates, and most of which are fixes and features that are either completely superficial, or perform out of common use and sight. So I slapped myself once again and went back to Photoshop.
In short, no, it doesn’t effect us as designers, but damned does it have a cool admin panel.
New section
Just a quick news update, I have added a new section to the website; the ‘Downloads‘ section. Do have a look, currently all that is there is a free WordPress theme, but hopefully I will be getting more up soon. This new section is also causing minor issues with my design, leading me to contemplate a redesign and a new layout… just a maybe though.
A decent downtime?
As some of you -if not all of you- will notice, there has been very little activity on the website recently and for this I apologize. I was pretty busy for quite a while there as I was in my last year of high school (yes, I am only young) and my final exams were approaching a lot quicker then I had initially anticipated and indeed hoped. But now with that shit out of the way (I sat my final exam day before yesterday) I have the time to actually do some work on this website (and other projects). So, expect more. And more importantly, expect better. I had pretty good feedback from the articles I posted previously and I hope to only better the standard. This should be helped a lot by a few key factors;
- For starters, now that I have graduated high school, the next stop is university where I will be studying, you guessed it, graphic design (visual communication to be a little more specific).
- I now have the time to work on more design projects and templates which will be for both personal gain and profit.
- I should (if all goes well) be starting a job in January designing for a local magazine.
.Know yourself, its important
I have been reading a lot more blogs then usual lately and its a lot of fun ill admit, people seem to know what they’re talking about. Even those who don’t, they get me thinking about why they don’t know what they’re talking about. The key of that is that they are making me think.
Although a lot of what I have been reading is about blogging itself, I can also see some key links to design in the advice a lot of these better written blogs are giving. One of the most important points which seems to be coming up a decent amount recently, and one which I myself have learnt a lot about through reading, is that your personality in your blog isn’t a bad thing. In fact, its a great thing.
3by9 (a personal favorite) wrote a post at the start of the year titled ‘I Know What Is King‘ which made some very important points about how the personality reflected through a website can often be more powerful then content, assuming the two are put together correctly. This is not only crucial advice to bloggers, but also to designers.
In my last post I briefly touched on finding, and then breaking your style as a designer. I will come back to breaking your style, first lets talk about finding it. Lets look at a situations, say your designing for your personal portfolio, a portfolio you intend to show at a job application next week. And this is a job you really want, if it were legal you would physically attack the other applicants to prevent them from applying, that kind of job opportunity. Since you can’t actually attack them (well, shouldn’t) you have to battle them blindly through the interviewer and outcompete them by proving your the better designer, and very importantly, the better person. A lot of designers will fill their portfolio with designs they think that the interviewer wants to see, rather then their actual talent. This may be good if your going for a single job, say designing their website just this once, but otherwise it may not be so powerful.
Your better bet, in this case, is to fill your portfolio with the things that you are strong at designing. Nail those pictures and make them absolutely brilliant because its your strong point and quite simply you can. It will give a better impression that you know what your doing, as opposed to if you produce a bunch of half as good designs because its what’s ‘in’ at the time. To put it simply, the person looking at your portfolio, in this case the interviewer, doesn’t know what your strong points are. They will just see a lot of well produced works. Unless they all look the same. And here is where the ‘break your style’ part comes into play.
Breaking your style is very important because it allows you to experiment with other styles, and who knows, you may just find a style which you love more then your own. A more likely situation is that you will find bits and pieces from other styles which you love and will start incorporating in your own works. Having a style which is a mish-mash of other styles is a particularly hard thing for any designer to pull off, but if you can, its bloody impressive and it makes you stand out from the rest. Why should your artworks be similar to that of everyones who work in that style? It shouldn’t. In truth, being in a well known style isn’t even important, and making your own style can be pretty powerful, but again, a very difficult thing to pull off.
Ok, so this article is straying a bit from the title i’ll admit so i’ll get to the point shall I. If you can’t find yourself as a designer, how can anyone else. You better then anyone know your capabilities, so if you show works that hardly flatter you, the person looking at your work isn’t going to be thinking ‘this isn’t shabby, but he can do better with something he enjoys’ because they don’t know that. You do, and its your job to prevent this type of thought towards your works. And how better to do this then represent your personality through your works? Works that represent you will always be your most powerful, and often your most impressive. This is largely because its a topic you (should) know a lot about because it is you. Why not sell yourself through the message of your artwork, as well as the quality?
Design Update
Ok, as I may or may not have mentioned, the previous design which lasted about a week was only intended to last that long. It was bland, boring, and pretty colourless. So over the last few days I have been working on this, and I am proud to say that it has been released. And yes, it has more fancy features;
- Firstly, the link when you click on the comment count from the front page of the website or a category page will not take you to the comments, as intended.
- Beneath every post is a ‘More’ section with features for readers to share the posts, as well as stay up to date with them. Please, if you feel an article is worthy of being shared, do so. It can be immeasurably beneficial to the development of a new website such as this.
- My comments are now blue, so it is easier to see my replies. This is a feature that was mainly put in for the sake of tutorials so that users can find my posts easier should they be looking for support with the tutorial that may already be covered in discussion.
.Discouraging world of a designer
If you’re anything like I am as a designer, its likely that you spend a lot of time browsing the internet and the various design communities that it caters to. These communities hold mass amounts of designers and its not unlikely, nor hard, to run into a designer who you feel is better then you. Due to this, designing can also be very disheartening at times because of the amazing amount of designers there are out there and the world, and the even more amazing amount of designers who are absolutely brilliant. It can really make the skill, which at heart you know is a strong one, seem insignificant and subpar. Read More…
Again? Are you serious…
Welcome to v14 of Designkai.com!
To anyone who is a regular here, they will most likely be confused as v13 was only released a very short time ago and was only up for maybe… a fortnight or so. This was because the database was having apparently irreparable issues with content and comments so I decided I would take it down and re-content it from scratch. However, while it was down I began thinking (thats never a good thing). Anyone who has visited Designkai previous to this version will be aware that it also included a portfolio and blog for myself, and was essentially a website about myself and things I enjoyed talking about, which was more or less shit. In my mind, this was very unprofessional, so I decided to make a drastic change. For the first time, Designkai would no longer serve as a portfolio for me. Ever again. I decided I would split my portfolio into a separate website which is completely stand-alone as just a portfolio. This should be running soon.
However, during this drastic overhaul I figured it would be worthy to re-build the way Designkai handles and presents content. The new Designkai, as of now, will serve as more of a resource/article website for designers or people who like to read the ranting of a madman often bored. But don’t get my wrong, I don’t intend to keep it as just me writing, hint hint. So what will be the benefits of the new Designkai? Lets have a look shall we;
- More interesting articles – they will now have a point, they will now make a point and they will now hopefully fill a small void of information as well as provide an informative and hopefully useful view on the world, although generally restricted to the world that is the internet.
- More structure – yes, much more. The articles will be researched, thought out and drafted to hopefully avoid the general bullshit that previous versions of Designkai was oh-so-good at pumping out.
- And finally, more useful – I can only hope. My aim is to provide you with the information you were looking for, and if you weren’t looking for anything, provide you with an interesting read.
