IntuitiveDesigns

Sometimes in life we mistake the purposes of the things we do in life and we confuse the means with the end. Naomi and I had an interesting conversation while we were walking in the mountains the other day. We were saying that we don’t think art and design are the ultimate purpose and reason why we are doing this. We think it’s just a path for deeper purposes in life. After all, our work affects what we are in more than the values that society uses to measure our success in terms of money and reputation.

To be very sincere, probably the biggest issue both of us have ever had in my life is having to deal with a lack of self-confidence. It’s a handicap that comes from family issues and the way we’ve been raised, but looking for guilty parties and complaining won’t solve anything. That’s why we feel than one of our main goals in life is to get rid of the feeling of lack of confidence and to learn to love and accept ourselves better. It is just part of our own path in this school of life in order to become free human beings and be in tune with life. But it’s a hard task.

People like us very often work very hard to please other people just to be accepted. It never works because they are never really accepting us, but someone else we pretend to be. That happens all of the time in art and design. It takes maturity for an artist to forget about everyone else’s opinions and just be oneself. Sometimes we are not self-confident and we try to adopt other people’s styles instead of standing up for what we really are. This is very often tagged as “lack of originality”, but I believe is just lack of self-confidence.

If you hear the words from the most renowned artists, painters, musicians, actors, etc… most of all they will tell you they dislike themselves. Many of the most acclaimed actors don’t ever watch their movies because they hate to hear their own voice and look at their own face; singers never listen to their most acclaimed albums because they don’t like to hear their own voice, and so on. The difference between them and the artists who never get any recognition is probably that they just place their ego apart and do their work the best they can because they realize they have a gift to make other people happy and on top of that, they can make a living with it.

So, even if they won’t watch the bloody movie in their life, they just do it and try to get the most they can from the experience. And they do it just being themselves with all of the consequences. You ask any of these reputed artists for an advice to young artists and most of them will tell you the same: “be yourself”.

How do we know we are being ourselves as creative people? It’s something you can tell when things come naturally. When we try to be someone else things get hard, tedious, and frustrating. Imagine that you do a wonderful imitation of someone else’s work. If people had to choose between your copy and the original they would pick the real one, no matter how good the copy is. Just because it has the original spirit and you can sense it!

On the other hand, sometimes we refuse to use the things that come easy and in a natural way just because they don’t fit our expectations of what the work should be after looking at someone else’s style or doing some specific work. Then, we end up trashing the best from ourselves and we don’t realize that probably that’s exactly what people really want to see. It’s not a matter of being commercial. It just has to do with letting your inner self come out in a natural way because that is always going to be what will connect with the rest of the people. They won’t like it more or less because it was easy, but because it came easy from you. It flowed. They can tell there’s something really personal there that came from your true self.

Of all the advices I have ever received from other artists, this is the one I always try to keep in mind: “Be yourself, no matter what they say”.

I was having an online discussion the other day with some designers about taking on jobs that we don’t feel comfortable with because they are against our values. Some of these things might include web sites with content about tobacco, firearms, adult content, etc. I’ve heard other designers mention that they don’t mind much what the project is, as long as they get along with the client and it pays decently. Everyone deserves to make a living the best way they can, right?

Personally, I don’t think this is a responsible attitude for several reasons. First of all, it’s about honesty. We, as designers need to realize that when we work on a project, we are directly supporting it, not indirectly. It doesn’t really matter if it’s behind the scenes, we are still helping shape the public’s perception about the subject we are working on.

The second thing we need to realize is that when we work on something that we don’t want to support, we are doing the client a disservice. We aren’t really into the project and as a consequence, aren’t putting in our best work. We’re just in it for the money and it shows.

Wouldn’t it be more honest to say to a potential client, “I’m sorry, I just can’t take this on because it’s against my values.” They might be surprised, but at least you held on to your integrity, were honest, and later slept like a baby.

What do you think?

The story starts when I re-discovered a song from my childhood by chance: “T.S.O.P” by Mother, Father, Sister, Brother. It’s a song that became very popular in 1974 and was nicknamed as “The Sound of Philadelphia”. In the U.S. it was the soundtrack for the TV show Soul Train. OK, so I remember how much I used to like this song and how wonderful these kings of funk and groove themes with trumpets used to be. So this morning I googled the soundtrack for Lou Grant, one of my favorite TV shows ever, and I arrived at this web site: www.televisiontunes.com.

I spent about five minutes on the site, they have a list of lots of popular TV series, and all the way through I have a funny feeling, some kind of Deja Vu like, “I’ve been here before”. So Naomi looks at my screen and she says, “But… OMG, they totally ripped our design!”

These people stole our design shamelessly. Our first reaction was to laugh really hard because I was in front of this design for five minutes which was literally stolen from us and I didn’t figure it out. OK, I admit I can be really dense in the morning. So we looked at it carefully and we noticed that they basically copied the CSS coding and just took out the parts they didn’t need. They ripped off the menu bar, they ripped off the background, they ripped off the font style, and they even dared to rip off the image of the arrow button that I created for Intuitive Designs!

This is the old design of our web site, since we changed it just a few days ago as you may know. Lucky for us. But it gets pretty disgusting to browse the internet and find people who steal your work. It happens more often than we would like. I wonder how yucky must be for famous people to turn on the TV or read a magazine every morning and find crap about themselves…

Once again we have to say what our philosophy is about being ripped off: life is an unique opportunity to celebrate our own individual identity. Each and everyone one of us are one of a kind. Each and everyone one of us can create our own print and that is a gift that shouldn’t be underestimated. By being ourselves and leaving our own footprint we make this world richer. It’s a celebration of life. Everyone should enjoy taking part of it and sharing their own goods with the rest of the world.

Here I leave an idea for their next design in case they want to have a different version of their most presumably ripped of illustration.

How important are fonts in web design? I would say they are essential and taking care of them will change the result of a web design 100%. When Naomi and I designed the latest version of Intuitive Designs, we decided to put extra care in the fonts we would use and give them the importance they deserve.

Apart from how important it is to work with the text, paragraphs and line height, I think choosing the right font for a web design is as important as picking the wedding dress for a bride. No matter how wonderful your design is, it can be spoiled very easily if you don’t use a font that fits well and helps to express the concept of the web site.

For the latest design of this web site, we knew that we wanted a retro feeling from the 50’s, it is the sort of the style that we decided to go for in the overall design. One of the reasons why we decided tom use this style is because we probably got influenced from looking a lot at old publicity and magazine advertisements from other periods. We’re always amazed about how great designers these people were. Here you can see some of the ads that inspired for our web design in terms of using a nice font. The illustration and design work is excellent in all of them, but the fonts in particular really stand out. Don’t you think they are really charming and irresistible?

These people worked the font as one of the most important elements in design and we truly think they almost did a way of art of it. Because of the importance given to the fonts during the period from 20’s to 60’s, a large quantity of fonts were designed. Most of them were really artistic. At the time, it was a requirement for a designer to be able to create good fonts. Today this skill is pretty much lost in the general profession, but on the other hand we can count with numerous wonderful designers specialized in font design.

So after having tried numerous fonts, we decided to use one from Borges Lettering & Design called “Bounce Script”. We absolutely love the fonts of this designer and this one in particularly fit our tag line like a glove! It made the sentence look beautiful, it brought harmony to the rest of the design, and it added the right uplifting feeling that we were looking for. I have to say that we made a couple of customizations on the font: we changed the exclamation point according with style line of the icons on the site, and we also warped a little the text to make it more vibrant and energetic. It is amazing how much these little details can do in design.

On a different level, I recently designed a customized font of my own from my own handwriting just for my personal use at my own web site KoldoBarroso.com. I am not a professional font designer, but I thought it could be interesting to have my own signature in my web site to make it as much personal as possible. I wrote a blog post in my web site about the process of using my own customized font, but the new design featuring the font is still under development and it won’t be on line until a couple of weeks from now.

The whole process of doing my personal font was really long and it meant quite a lot of work, but I think it’s really worthwhile since my calligraphy will always be the same and now I will be able to use it in my computer for the rest of my life. After all, we think if more artists and designers would put more care in the fonts the Internet would be a more exciting and personal place to be. We can hope!

It’s time for renewal at Intuitive Designs! We have just released our new site redesign, the 6th version we’ve had since we started the firm more than 5 years ago. This year our lives have been changed by important events and the design of our site needed to be in accordance with them.

One of the most important reasons for a big change is that because we are moving this year from Spain to the Seattle area, we wanted to get our business defined better and be prepared for the changes we’ll face. 2007 was a year of recognition for our work from both clients and other professionals and we feel really grateful for that. We are positive that once we are re-located in the U.S. things are going to be on track for Intuitive Designs, so we want to be ready. During the last months we have been doing a strong revision of our business goals and achievements and have redefined the shape of Intuitive Designs.

For the new designs, we decided to just be ourselves and nothing but ourselves. We have ended up with a design that we think doesn’t have a lot to do with most of the web site designs you see around. It has been influenced mostly by things that we love not only in our profession, but in our personal life as well. We have been influenced by vintage advertisements, retro decoration, fashion, music and other sources rather than what a lot of people are doing in web design today. And this is the result.

This new design is meant to be more clean and minimalistic, while focusing on the important stuff. This is something that is integral to the way we work and the way we feel about our profession. We also wanted to transmit the feeling that we are passionate about our work and projects. We are interested in working with people on a more personal level and felt that it was important to share more information about ourselves as individuals and how we work as well.

To build this new web site we have also fully applied our philosophy about web design in extreme detail; harmony, cleanness, functionality, simplicity, proportion, geometry, sincerity and honesty, expression of our feelings… These are some of the main pillars for this and all of the works that we are involved in. We really hope that we achieved it and you can sense it when you look at it.

In the former version of Intuitive Designs, we decided to use an analogy with something that could be compared to web design as a service, something we would love in a personal level. So we used this idea of being cooks, because both of us love to cook in our spare time. The idea was pretty fun and worked very well visually, but it didn’t quite represent the most important message of Intuitive Designs today. A message that would really define the basic spirit of the firm. And the message today is this: “Here your vision becomes reality”.

This is all we want to tell. Our passion is to get an interesting project and work together with the client in order to achieve the best we can according to it’s needs with creativity, illusion, and enthusiasm. That is the reason why we are in this business and we are not really interested in doing this any other way. Helping projects, visions, dreams and illusions become true is the best wish we can have granted. We believe that’s all we know how to do and all that we want to do.