Author Archives: admin

A week off Twitter, Dribbble and Instagram.

Last week I decided to take a week off Twitter, Dribbble and Instagram. I’m back on it today, but I really enjoyed the time off. Here’s why. I’m about to get all philosophical on you here, but I think there’s a natural human desire for affirmation and encouragement. We like people to talk to us (usually), we like encouragement and we like people to tell us we did something well. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing, but it can become a bad thing depending on where we get it from. As a christian, the most important voice for me is God’s. I care about what he thinks about me and what he says to me, and his words are more powerful and penetrating than anyone’s. He knows me inside out, better than I know myself and when I hear him say something to me, it’s amazing. I think Dribbble in particular almost feeds on this. It’s what keeps people coming back to it. You can post something you’re working on and other designers will tell you how great it is, or give you useful feedback. That’s quite enjoyable and makes you feel like you’re doing something really … Continue reading →

Posted on February 16, 2012 by admin | 5 Comments

Typographic Verses

  Typographic Verses is a website I started to be a place to share designs I make of Bible verses. I opened it up for submissions after a few weeks and I’ve had some great designs sent in. I recently got a few prints done, and put them up for sale on the online store. Some of them sold out very quickly, and I’ll be getting more done soon!

Posted on January 4, 2012 by admin | 11 Comments

An Interview for Majestart

I did an interview not long ago for the super cool French website, Majestart. You can read the full thing over here although it’s in French, and Google translate makes me say funny things. So here it is in English! 1. Hi Jonathan! To start with, can you introduce yourself and tell us what you do? Hi! My name is Jonathan Ogden, I’m a christian, web designer, graphic designer and musician from Manchester, UK. I’m currently working as a full time web designer for a christian charity here in Manchester called The Message Trust, and I’m loving it! 2. Briefly, can you tell us when you started becoming passionate about creativity and the life journey you’ve been on since then? I’ve always enjoyed doing creative things, drawing as a child, doing short films, animations etc. It was during a graphic design course at college that I really got a passion for design, and seeing the kind of work other designers did really inspired me. I had no idea people were creating these kind of great designs, and I wanted to get involved. I got really into it and started doing graphic design and web design, set up my own website … Continue reading →

Posted on December 4, 2011 by admin | 2 Comments

Spec work? More like, rubbish.

I just posted a tweet saying: “As much as I think spec work is bad, the AntiSpec campaign feels like the wrong way to go about it to me.” And got a few questions, so I am hitherto expanding upon said tweet. First things first: I don’t like spec work. Spec work (or crowd-sourcing) is essentially like a competition for design work. It means companies / brands / people can get loads of designs from different people, and only one designer gets the prize. Big win for the person running the competition, big loss for 99% of the designers. I really like the fact that people are starting to speak out against it now and that sites like AntiSpec do exist. However, targeting specific crowd-sourcing campaigns to shout at feels wrong to me. Some spec work is run by big companies or people who could quite easily pay for a great designer, and that’s a bit rubbish. But sometimes they aren’t looking for professional designers, and professional designers hopefully won’t be taking part anyway. They may be looking for a very under-produced look, like a fan-made video. Also some spec-work campaigns are from startups, people with not much money and people who … Continue reading →

Posted on September 9, 2011 by admin | 5 Comments

Designers talk too much

“Hi there! My name is blah blah and I create beautiful clean minimal interfaces with awesome simple user-experience-enhancing gloss and shine that makes your face melt and rainbows come out of your ears.” I’m sure many of us have seen this somewhere, and are perhaps guilty of doing it ourselves. Let’s try and get in the habit of showing people what we do, rather than telling people about it. By all means say what you do, if it’s not clear, and explain the projects in your portfolio if necessary. But you only need to give information, not a description. Don’t tell them what it’s like, just tell them what it is. If people are looking at your work, they can see that it’s minimal, or clean, but they might not know who the client was, or why you decided to go for a particular style, or how you came up with the idea. More ‘show’, less ‘tell’. We talk too much. And I talk too much in my blog posts too. So I’ll leave it there! The End.

Posted on August 23, 2011 by admin | 4 Comments

Designers MX

DesignersMX is a great website that invites designers to share a 10-track mix of the music they enjoy, and the songs that inspire their creativity. I had the opportunity to do a mix and submitted this one called ‘Mountains’ with some nice melodic indie-folk stuff. It’s the kind of music I’m loving at the moment and I often play this kind of stuff while I’m working. You can hear my mix and loads of other great mixes on Designers.MX. The first mix I designed was really well received and I had a few requests asking for another! So I whipped up some new artwork and pulled together 10 songs that had been inspiring me and created the second mix: “Sailing To The Sun”. My third mix was called ‘Create’. A mix designed to give you a creativity boost! This mix consisted of 10 tracks picked from my ‘creativity’ playlist. Songs that stretch my mind a bit by being musically interesting and different. One of the things that helps me to be creative is listening to music written by creative musicians.

Posted on August 18, 2011 by admin | 1 Comment

Rivers & Robots Packaging

 

Posted on August 5, 2011 by admin | 2 Comments

Rivers & Robots Videos

Official music video for ‘Come Back / You See The Son’ from Rivers & Robots. Taken from the debut album ‘The Great Light’. Available on BandCamp, iTunes, Amazon MP3 and more. To buy, or for more info, see – riversandrobots.com This video was to announce the original name change from ‘Maffiss’ to ‘Rivers & Robots’ and introduce the project. Filmed with a Canon EOS 550D. This video was created to announce the release date for the debut album, “The Great Light”.

Posted on July 10, 2011 by admin | 6 Comments

Website Updates

You may have noticed some changes around here recently. I’m working on updating my portfolio site a little bit. I think the website works well and it has done for over a year so I’m not dramatically changing anything, but I needed to tweak certain parts to reflect my current style. Here’s what’s changed, what will be changing and why. What’s changed? Probably one of the first things you notice when you hit the homepage is the gigantic image at the top. I’ve made the featured images slider much larger now, taking up the whole width of the site. After all, this website is all about the work, so I may as well get right to it and show as much as possible! It’s currently only in effect on the homepage slider, but I’m working on getting all the work pages to have bigger images too. Another change is the white background. This is a little bit cleaner than the light grey one I had earlier and clashes much less with the images I post up. I often design things with grey backgrounds, and having an image on the site with almost the same colour as the background didn’t look … Continue reading →

Posted on July 3, 2011 by admin | Leave a comment

Rivers & Robots Website

The Rivers & Robots was designed with a mixture of vintage / retro styles and a modern look, to reflect the style of the music, which mixes traditional-style folk and harmonies with electronic production and indie music.   Click here to visit the website.

Posted on June 21, 2011 by admin | Leave a comment
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