Category: Observed.
The other day I was checking QBN, and saw a thread titled ‘Free Portfolio Website’. The thread with the spam-sounding title turned out to be an invitation to beta test a new CMS ‘4ormat‘ (yes, I know it doesn’t add up) geared towards the ‘creative professional’. This one is the latest addition to a list that includes Indexhibit, Indxr, Cargo, Krop, Core, and probably more that I’m not aware of. Suddenly every Tom, Dick and Harry with a bit of PHP knowledge and a copy of Photoshop is building a bespoke system that allows designers to create homogenous portfolio sites.
First of all, there’s nothing wrong with the portfolio CMS. For most its an incredibly useful (and timesaving) tool to publish their work online in a structured and direct manner, foregoing unnecessary visual clutter for a focus on content.
But.
What started as something that grew out of a personal need (Daniel Eatock needing a system for his portfolio, and then releasing it to the world as Indexhibit) has become the goal in itself it seems. Your portfolio is only as good as the CMS you’re using. Me? Yes, I have accounts at Cargo and Krop — but I still have to use them. The reason why I don’t want to make the jump is because despite the qualities of both systems there would be more focus on the fact that its a Cargo or Krop portfolio instead of a Muller portfolio. See what I’m getting at?
When Indexhibit was launched, it felt like a real invisible tool that would allow you to publish your work: no fussy styling, no branding — just the work. With each subsequent system that gets launched the CMS branding becomes more prominent, taking focus away from the work. The success of Indexhibit sparked a trend of portfolio systems, some hosted (Cargo, Krop, Behance,…), others where you need to put in some extra work (Indexhibit, Core,…), with people racing to get private beta invites (yes, guilty as charged) to see what the fuss is about. While some systems make perfect sense —Krop is a job board, so why not integrate a portfolio, and Cargo grew out of a modular gallery system — while I get the feeling others are being created as a means in itself. Is it the new black?
Is it because designers are inherently curious about new technologies & services, or are we just being trend whores who want to be able to say “Oh yeah, I host my portfolio on the XXXX system” and hop from system to system — which kind of defeats the purpose of using them in the first place…
Published between 1980 and 1986, Epic Illustrated was Marvel Comics’ answer to Heavy Metal Magazine and adult comics. For 34 issues, Epic provided a platform within Marvel Comics for artists and writers to go beyond the usual work-for-hire mainstream boundaries and explore adult-themed genre fiction (mostly fantasy and SF) whilst maintaining the rights to their work. Personally, I’ve always loved Epic slightly more than Heavy Metal. Maybe its because the material published was just slightly different, more US centric than the French legacy that permeated Heavy Metal at that time. The unique thing about Epic was that, because Marvel owned it, you sometimes found the odd super hero story in it — most famously the unfinished Last Galactus Story by John Byrne — where creators were free to explore characters outside continuity. For the most part though, its pages served you some awesome sci-fi stories (never been much of a fantasy guy personally, although P. Graig Russell’s Elric adaptation is beautiful) like the surreal Abraxas and the Earthman by Rick Veitch, The sacred and the Profane by Dean Motter and Ken Steacy, Generation Zero by Pepe Moreno and Archie Goodwin to name just a few of the serialized stories (not to forget Jim Starlin, Kent Williams, Bernie Wrightson, Michael Kaluta, Barry Windsor-Smith,…).
Twenty years on, Mam Tor: Event Horizon™ (1 and 2) would recapture that energy that Epic had created — if only for 2 issues.
Here’s a few of my favourite covers (a full list can be seen at Cover Browser)
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Here’s a confession: I don’t own a game console. Coming from a male designer that must sound pretty weird. Almost every guy I know owns one — well, at least one. Especially my fellow web designers/developers. I’m more of a comic book guy (d’uh). I do get the appeal though, and often entertain getting an X-Box, or a PS3, but I don’t have the patience to sit through a whole game. I can take racing games or a beat-em-up like Street Fighter, but thats about as long as I last. When my brother Tim got his PS1 all I did was sit with him, watch him play and look at some rendered cut scenes. I like my computer games to be simple, just like when I vegetate in front of the TV: for a little time I want to have a mental rest and just let information or entertainment wash over me before I crawl back in front of my computer and stress the few brain cells I have left. The only time I really played games was on the NES, with its simple side scrolling 8 Bit action.
So here are (in no particular order) my all-time favourites:
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Earlier tonight Liz asked me to help her with some preparations for a photo shoot she’s doing tomorrow (shooting some horribly expensive bling bling watches) and she needed me to write product facts in little notebooks and agendas to serve as props. In itself its not that weird, usually when someone I know needs ‘fancy’ (or legible) handwriting they’ll ask me to do it. However Liz asked me to write some notes in cursive (hand)writing… and I struggled like a 7 year old in grade school. I really had to pace myself and consider the movement of my hand and carefully draw the letter shapes. All because I’ve been writing in block capitals for the last 20 odd years or so, just like my dad.
See, my dad (an interior designer) wrote exclusively in capitals. And when I learned how to write, he’d take me to his side and explained that type and letterforms, like everything else, are constructed out of the 3 basic shapes (circle, square, pyramid for those just joining us) and therefore he’d show me how to ‘draw’ letters, instead of simply banging out cursive text so I’d learn to pay attention to the specific shape of each letter. And so I slowly started to mimic his writing and draw little pyramids instead of A’s and after a few years of practice I managed to bastardize his writing into my own. I still take great pleasure in handwriting, even though I don’t write long letters by hand, I will often doodle and practice writing the alphabet, numbers and random words to see if I can further optimize the letterforms.
Big congratulations are in order to my good friend Ashley Wood, who got the feature rights for his graphic novel World War Robot (for which I designed the logo) snapped up by none other than Jerry Bruckheimer.
Very cool indeed!
BLDGBLOG Book Launch, originally uploaded by moleitau.
Last night I went to the launch of the Geoff Manaugh’s BLDG BLOG book at the Architectural Association in London (I’m somewhere stuck in the back in the above photo). Not something I usually do because functions like that can, in my opinion, become quite stuffy and a bit pretentious (I’m not a big fan of gallery opening nights). But this intrigued me, in part because Warren was raving about it (and since we have mutual friends I though I’d drop by and say Hello to him), and anything that combines design, Sci-Fi and speculative thinking gets my vote.
Talking in your book about buildings causing earthquakes because of their weight and location is interesting. Extrapolating that fact into ideas of how to weaponize that, or force shut fault lines by clever urban planning is taking it to a whole other level. And thats just one tiny bit of a book filled with all kinds of amazing ideas of building a science fiction habitat.
So yeah, in a very roundabout way I’m saying you should buy the book (and also because its a very nicely designed printed object).
After 4 years my friendly nagging has paid of, and my wife Liz finally has a portfolio-slash-blog site (apart of course from Mr and Mrs M). Personally, I really like the way she photographed her work in a very informal, almost throwaway manner in our home, giving a sense of tactility to the work — instead of the current trend of shooting everything against a sterile grey background.
The Europe By Designers competition that ran a few months ago has announced its winners, or rather an exhibit of the 52 designs that were chosen. From the site:
EUROPE BY DESIGNERS is an international artistic project whose aim is to unveil a multitude of images of Europe from the inside and from the outside. Design as the expression of a cultural vision, a political vision or a simple and unposed feeling… Design and its diversity as a new way to catch Europe.
I was one of the judges, and so partially responsible for the selection that is now displayed. And to be brutally honest I’m surprised at the quality of some of the pieces that made it through. I know that an open competition yields a large fluctuation in work, but it looks like the overall sense of quality control seemed to be incredibly relaxed. Sorry to burst your bubble but thats how I’m seeing it. Personally, I think the list could be slashed even further to get rid of some of the tired and clichéd ideas and some badly executed work.
Am I too uptight? Should I be more lenient when I’m judging work, or were my expectations unrealistically high?
Here’s a funny one: Back in 2004 (seems so long ago) I was entertaining the idea to write a monthly opinion column for Computer Arts. I can’t remember what gave me the idea to do it in the first place (maybe I liked Jason’s column and thought “I can do that!”), but I felt I had opinions about web design that I wanted to get off my chest. I think I was at the stage where I was talking to CA about the possibility of writing it, and I’d even written a sample article. It was an article on the seeming decline of widespread Flash use, and how HTML-based sites were making a comeback. For some reason I decided at the last minute to pull out, because I didn’t feel I did the topic justice.
Anyway… for posterity, I thought it’d be fun to share the article and see if I got anything right and how much has changed since then. (This was obviously written well before the “web 2.0″ boom and the widespread proliferation of web technologies like AJAX and JQuery)
Opinion column.
Is Flash Dead?
By Tom Muller.The last couple of years have seen Flash seriously coming of age and used in one shape or form on web sites: from full blown sites using intense Flash scripting and database driven applications, to ‘in-your-face’ portfolio sites and interactive showcases; to today, where more and more designers seem to go back to HTML/PHP driven sites, avoiding Flash altogether.
Does that mean that Flash has seen its peak, or have designers grown up with the application and realized its full potential?
Cosmonaut, originally uploaded by helloMuller.
Space and astronaut imagery seem to be all the rage these days, with everyone re-purposing vintage NASA photos etc. I don’t mind that because I like space, and that whole era of the space race. Just as long as it doesn’t become over saturated, over used style quickly (which of course it will be — them’s the breaks).
Anyway — here’s a piece I did a little over 2 years ago which was going to end up in a short SF story and a collective project that ultimately never saw the light of day.