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 | 1 Comment

Do that thing

That thing you thought would be cool. Do it! So many times people have great ideas that they think ‘someone should do’, and do nothing about it. I probably lean too much the other way, in that I have too many ideas and want to do them all, but don’t have the time to do them! So I at least feel it’s something I can talk about. Many of my best ideas for projects come from a spontaneous ‘wouldn’t this be cool?’ moment. Typographic Verses was started one lunchtime when I wanted something fun to do so I started to make some posters of verses from the Bible. Shortly after that I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if I made a website for these? And a few weeks later, wouldn’t it be cool if people could send their own designs in? And then a few months later, wouldn’t it be cool if people could buy prints of these designs? And that’s where I am today! Still, it doesn’t always happen that way. I’ve got folders full of random ideas I had and tried and they didn’t work. But I think it’s worth the wasted ideas for the ones that did … Continue reading →

Posted on January 20, 2012 by admin | 1 Comment

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

Are web apps really the future?

Typing ‘web apps are’ into Google brings up the suggestion that ‘web apps are the future’. I was perfectly happy with this future but I’ve been wondering lately whether it’s actually true or not. Being a web designer, I’m all for things being on the web, and people using it more. But I think we have a responsibility as web designers / developers / whatever you are, to make the web a decent alternative to other non-web things. Take the Twitter app on the iPhone for example. I can pop that open and it swishes up in my face. I can swipe around, things animate nicely, they make cool clicky sounds and I generally feel a sense of contentment and well being in the depths of my soul as I read about things that people I don’t know are doing. Alternatively, I can open up safari on the iPhone and head to twitter.com. Twitter have put some decent work into making the web experience of Twitter very similar to using the app, in appearance. It’s just a whole lot more rubbish. It’s clunky, it refreshes all the time, you try and pull the feed down to refresh and the screen flicks around … Continue reading →

Posted on November 4, 2011 by admin | Leave a comment

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

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

Make Design Make Sense

Have you ever been to a website, and spent 10 minutes looking at all the little details and enjoying the design, without actually realising what the website is, or what it is for? Maybe it’s just me, being a designer, but it seems to happen quite often now, particularly when browsing gallery sites for some inspiration. I visit the website, have a look at the layout, geek-out over the fonts, highlight things to see if it’s an image or made with CSS/HTML, enjoy the colour scheme, the textures, the shiny little bits, the little animations, the composition etc. Then leave. Most of the time I don’t actually know what the site is. This is why it’s extremely important to make your designs make sense. You may have heard the phrase ‘content is king’, and it’s very true. People like good design, and clients like good design. However, redesigning a website should improve its usability, and should also see more people achieving the goal of the site. Redesigning is not just making it look nice. There’s two key ways that I know of, that help to make your design make sense (this applies to all design, but I’ll use websites for … Continue reading →

Posted on April 30, 2011 by admin | 1 Comment

Typographic Verses

Greetings, internet! I hope you’re doing well and behaving yourself. I recently launched a website called ‘Typographic Verses’ which is a place to put typographic posters that I design, based on Bible verses or lines from hymns. It was a great opportunity to combine two of my favourite things: design, and inspiring scriptures. Then the idea came to me that there are probably plenty of other people who could design some too, so I’ve open it up for submissions! If you are a christian designer, why not take some time to design a typographic poster to one of your favourite verses? You can submit it using this page. Make sure you select photo post from the drop down, and read all the gubbins. Check out the posters so far on Typographic Verses!

Posted on April 20, 2011 by admin | 2 Comments

Quick Tip: Pixel Perfection in Photoshop

Whenever I design a website, I always like to make it “pixel perfect“. This doesn’t mean I go through designing sites one pixel at a time, colouring each one in (although I do sometimes do that with particularly fiddly elements that won’t behave). One of the great features of Adobe Fireworks is the pixel snapping which makes it great for doing this kind of web design. However, if, like me, you design in Photoshop then you may have struggled with getting that pixel perfection that you so desire. Thankfully, there’s a couple of quick fixes and work arounds to get you on your way to pixel snapping goodness. Shapes When you’re throwing some shapes in Photoshop, you may find that the edges become blurry and have transparent parts thanks to pesky sub-pixel tomfoolery. As you can see below. The shape on the left looks like death. The shape on the right looks like delicious square pixel purity. Now these shapes are scaled up a lot in this image, with actual 100% size being shown in the bottom right corner. It’s subtle, but the square on the left is noticeably blurrier. The solution: when you have your shape tool selected, click … Continue reading →

Posted on February 11, 2011 by admin | 6 Comments
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