MoveSeniors.com redesign

I want to take a moment to announce the relaunch of moveseniors.com. The previous iteration of this website was confusing to navigate, visually unappealing, and lacked a sound information architecture. Important content was difficult to find and a wealth of text was rendered as images—hidden from search engine spiders. Our goal with this redesign was to improve SEO, ease of navigation, accessibility and overall friendliness

The site needed to provide resources for aging adults transitioning into smaller homes while also serving as a training portal for aspiring senior relocation professionals. My roles in this project included information architecture planning, front end design, (X)HTML/CSS construction, Javascript implementation and content management. Click here to launch the site.

Moved by type

Beautiful typography, thumping backbeats, retro aesthetic. Does it get any better? This "typographic orgy" from Sebastian Lange rocked my world when I first saw it. Clearly I'm a sucker for typography in motion. But this video experiment for the song "flickermood 2.0" by FORSS turned me into a full-blown junkie.

OwensArtwork.com Gets Painted Anew

As a gift to my good friend and celebrated artist Matthew Owens, I offered to redesign his website. The previous iteration didn't reflect his sense of style or personality in the least. It felt like someone altogether different—a crafty homebody masquerading as the erudite, talented and slightly peculiar artist that many Chicagoans know and love.

Unfortunately, politics got in the way of launching the redesign and kept it in a holding pattern for the last year and a half. That is, until today. The new version of owensartwork.com launched with dark motifs of moody grays, painterly details, and a background scanned straight from a Jean Paul Gaultier shirt—nothing could be more Matthew than that.

Julie's Pseudo Birthday Gift

We all have tough months. Mine was February. The aftermath of the holidays, some unexpected expenses and a dip in freelance work left my wallet thinner than usual. I can handle living on a shoestring. However, my fiancée's birthday just happened to coincide with this perfect storm of financial wallops, leaving me empty handed in the gift department. Not good. So this year, in lieu of an actual gift, I designed her this five panel, vertical accordion folding card and she loved it.

Nikon D60

Shortly after the holidays I treated myself to a fancy new camera. The Nikon D60 entry level digital SLR had been calling me ever since I saw the photos taken by a fellow traveler on our trip to Peru. The deep, saturated colors that she captured on her D60 were all I needed to convince myself that dropping several hundred on the camera was an absolute necessity. Not to mention the fact that every designer needs a good camera, right?! See here, here and here.

Below is a selection of photos captured on the new DSLR since January. If you want to follow my photographic endeavors, here is the photostream.

Happy Holidays from Studiostein

Viva Las Incabators

A friend recently told me that in film making you will spend roughly six hours in the editing room for every one hour of completed footage. Over the past two weeks I had the opportunity to test this theory, and found that it is extraordinarily optimistic. Last month Julie and I took our first vacation in five years to hike the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu and along the way we got about two hours of footage. Editing it down to a thirty minute movie took me at least twenty hours. Granted, I'm a film making novice with a computer not optimized for video editing. However, I prefer to convince myself that the reason it took so long was because I did such a damn fine job on it. I hope you enjoy the finished product.

Harmony

Here is my Word It submission for April. This month's word is Harmony: a consistent, orderly, or pleasing arrangement of parts; congruity. In addition to interpreting the definition, I did a little deconstruction. Harmony became Harm/on/Y, so I literally placed the word harm onto the letter Y. I also considered a treatment where harm was being done to Y, but then remembered I was at work, and if I didn't get back to my billable projects, harm was going to be done to me. Enjoy.

Wanderlusting

I've never been a huge Bjork fan, but I am always impressed by the limitless, childlike creativity that shines through in everything she does. Her latest video, Wanderlust, is one of the most visually arresting experiences I've come across. Like walking into another person's lucid dream, Wanderlust is somewhat disturbing, highly ambiguous and completely overwhelming. The colors sizzle and the contours undulate as you travel through this amalgamation of Tibetan folklore and hallucination. This shouldn't be surprising. In the directors' words, the creative process "involved using psilocybin mushrooms…and going into nature in kind of a perturbed state."

Wanderlust, much like Bjork's early video for Human Behavior, evokes an intimate sense of place. Whether its stomping through a moonlit forest glen in the stomach of a life size teddy bear or careening down a river on the back of a Tibetan yak in the painterly Himalayan sunlight, you will certainly leave these videos with a sense of having experienced something profoundly unusual. You can view Wanderlust below, but I highly recommend watching the large format version here. And keep your eyes out for the 3D version to be released soon.

Illustrating the Holidays

On a rare occasion I get to wear the hat of an illustrator. Its something that I always enjoy, but hardly ever have the opportunity to do. Consequently, I've never developed my own style of drawing. Yesterday I was asked to create some holiday related marketing pieces. The client was intent on focusing the design around highly obvious holiday subjects: Santa, turkey, fireworks, and so on. I learned quickly that the royalty-free stock photography reserve of holiday themes is just downright bad. I figured, the only way to make this project work without compromising too much on aesthetics was to embrace the cliche and illustrate them by hand. Here are a couple of the illustrations that were settled on:

The Propagandizer is back

I've been ignoring my obligation to provide society with more propaganda, political and otherwise. But at the urging of a good friend and mentor, I finally got off my lazy butt and designed up some new spin for all to download and paste up in their neighborhood alleyways, coffee shops and store fronts. To see the latest blitz of social manipulation from Studiostein, go to www.propagandizer.blogspot.com.

Revolution

Here is my Word It submission for March. This month's word is Revolution: a forcible overthrow of a government or social order in favor of a new system. I had actually been developing this icon as a new logo for the Propagandizer, but decided instead that it was better suited for this purpose. Enjoy.

The Story of Stuff

After a two month blogging hiatus in the wake of a busy holiday season I'm finally back with Stuff to share. A friend of mine emailed me this video with the statement "Watch this movie when you have 20 minutes and an open mind." In all honesty, I have an open mind—very much so in fact—but I'm still weary of any call-to-action that requires it: Greenpeace representatives for example, standing outside of my local coffee shop hoping to accost unsuspecting passers-by. I avoid them at all costs. Nevertheless, I clicked on the link in my friend's email.

The video called The Story of Stuff is a "fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns." With well executed and witty animation by Louis Fox, and Ruben DeLuna, this film is entertaining, educational & powerful. Watch the full video by clicking here, or view the first chapter below.

Happy Holidays

Just a quick note to wish you Happy Holidays and say thanks for visiting my blog. This site rarely gets more than 10 hits in any given day, but I value each visit more than you know. Above is a slightly adapted version of the post card that Julie and I sent out to our usual holiday mailing list. Thank you to Michael Schwab for providing the inspiration.

What type am I?

My obsession with Typography is overwhelming. I often interrupt my girlfriend, Julie, mid-sentence to enthusiastically point out a billboard type treatment or poor use of Helvetica on public signage. She humors me by feigning genuine interest, and I appreciate her all the more for it.

The latest trend in typography; chunky, geometric, illustrative wording with the counters removed, has me both enthralled and perplexed. When executed well it can make a bold graphic statement, but it also has the allure of a fad so ostentatious that it's days are numbered. In spite of my better judgment, I found myself so caught up in this über hip typographical style that I started re-designing the Studiostein logo in it. It took me only about an hour to render all the letterforms—an indication that this style doesn't require exceptional finesse. I knew there was tweaking to do, but I felt confident in the design overall. So I presented it to Julie, who I jokingly refer to as my Art Director (I pretend it's a joke, but she's actually very deserving of the title) and waited with baited breath for her response.



Okay, my breath wasn't actually bated. I knew Julie would see through the stylistic excess and realize that this type treatment didn't actually connect with the Studiostein identity. She was right.

Eye magazine creative director, Nick Bell, wrote that there are two types of designers; "agents of neutrality" and "aesthetes of style." While I often fantasize about being the latter—designing exclusively for the sake of expressing my raw creative vision—I think it's more accurate to concede that my purpose as a designer is to communicate the client's message. I reserve self gratification for one side project in particular: The Propagandizer.

While I'm still trying to develop a unique visual language to call my own, this exercise (and Julie in particular) helped me remember that my style isn't dictated by fads. I think it's critical to stay current on design trends and to incorporate them sparingly, but in the end they all pass.

Studying Schwab

Back in school we used to get away with replicating other artists' signature styles by deeming the work a "study". This practice was often encouraged, but as we became upperclassmen with unique visual styles of our own, it died out.

For this year's holiday card Julie and I decided to revisit this activity and borrow the charming and timeless look of Michael Schwab's illustrations. While I will refrain from posting the finished card design, here are the studies:

Word it for November

Drumroll please…here is my Word It submission for November. This month's word is Next: coming immediately after the present one in order or space. As if enough typographic solutions to "next" involving arrows and X's hadn't already been submitted, I proceeded boldly with my own take on the arrow-X treatment. Is this X headed in next, or is it headed out? Ponder that.

My Favorite Typefaces

My original intent was to begin this post with a butchered rendition of "My Favorite Things" reinterpreted to express my love for all things Type. But I figured everybody involved would be better off if I forgo the shenanigans and dive straight into the post. There are many typefaces that I love, but these are some I've found popping up in my work frequently over the last five years. The obvious trend—lots of slab serif or no serif at all.

The Edit Aesthetic

I just finished a small stationery re-design for a non-profit association that, in their best interest, will remain anonymous. The back of the letterhead features a list of all the board member names which require annual updates. Herein lies the subject of this post. This particular client constructed an elaborate and aesthetically satisfying piece of her own by listing the edits in a Mind Map-ish sort of way. I love the look of it and in spite of the visual complexity, I understood it all.

Kinetic Artwork

As a kid I had a fascination with the incredibly complex and always whimsical devices I would later come to know as Rube Goldberg Machines. Although in my youth I simply though of them as really cool ways to make breakfast (Pee-Wee's Big Adventure) or open your front gate (The Goonies). There is a great DIY aesthetic to the engineering of these devices that commands our attention no matter what age we are. And they remind us that the tangible world of physics, chemistry, engineering and sheer dumb luck still offer spectacles that computer graphics and super-slick art direction can't beat.

These are some of the more noteworthy Kinetic art pieces I've come across. Included are two works by Theo Jansen, a Dutch sculptor who creates large kinetic machines that can be set into motion by slight forces, such as a gust of wind or a gentle push.

The Way Things Go - Peter Fischli and David Weiss


Honda Ad

Theo Jansen - BMW Ad


Theo Jansen - Animaris Rhinoceros


Japanese Rube Goldberg Machines