Next step for Typographic Verses

I’ve been really enjoying watching Typographic Verses expand and get tweeted about. But even more amazing for me is reading the comments from people who reblog certain designs and put a little note on why that particular verse is important to them. It’s great seeing Bible verses brightening people’s day and reminding them of promises that God has given them in the past. I love it. I want to start improving the site soon though. I started selling prints a while ago with short runs that I sold through Big Cartel. That was fun time happy nice. But the posting and order fulfilment was quite time consuming and I wasn’t really prepared for that. I’m currently selling through Society6, who do all the order fulfilment themselves. But that means I don’t actually get to see the prints myself and they’re just printed digitally. My aim is to redesign the website (probably still using Tumblr, I like the social aspect of it) and to really step up the quality of the designs. Making sure it’s really top quality stuff that gets posted and that most of the designs posted are printed too, and at larger sizes! Which means getting postage tubes (hurrah!), which cost a … Continue reading →

Posted on April 13, 2012 by ogvidius | 3 Comments

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

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

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

Bringing the Visuals Back to Digital Downloads

My website design for my music project (Maffiss) went live today. Or half of it did, at least. As it was a website for myself it was a great chance to do some crazy things and experiment. I went for a one-page (but not really) sliding site, which isn’t the most original idea but it was a first for me. I really enjoyed making it and I think it turned out really good. The other half of the website will launch when the EP launches on 19th February 2011 and this is the part of the website that I’m really excited about. One thing I always loved about buying CDs in the past was that you could sit and flick through, read and smell the booklet as you were listening to the CD for the first time. It was great to have some kind of visual accompaniment to the album and something to focus on and immerse yourself in as you listen. I believe this is something we’ve lost with digital downloads (I know there’s digital booklets with some downloads, but they’re often just PDFs of the CD booklet). My idea is to provide that same experience of reading the … Continue reading →

Posted on January 19, 2011 by admin | 3 Comments

Jolly Good Wallpaper

This was something I made for fun not long ago. I put it on Dribbble and Forrst and people seemed to like it. And so, as requested, here’s the wallpaper version for free download! 2560 x 600 1980 x 1280 1980 x 1080 1680 x 1050 1440 x 900 1280 x 800 Enjoy! And feel free to comment with feedback or send me any snaps of the wallpaper in situe on your desktop.

Posted on January 18, 2011 by admin | 2 Comments
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