IntuitiveDesigns

Koldo and I have talked extensively about why things just don’t feel right with the world these last few years. What happened to people’s sense of community? And does it feel lately like each person is their own island? Some days that best thing that happens to me is a nice friendly smile. True, things have to do a lot with your own perspective, but doesn’t it feel like things have changed?

A few weeks ago I came across this article, “7 Reasons the 21st Century is Making You Miserable” by David Wong. I felt everything it said on so many levels. It was thinking, “Wow, we’re not crazy after all. All these things we’ve been talking about and feeling are not just our imagination.”. Point #3 in the article talks about how bad text messaging is as a form of communication.

I moved to Spain over 6 years ago from the U.S. Since talking over the phone can be expensive for international calls, I’ve done a fair share of the communication with family and friends over the internet. I can’t even begin to imagine how many things got lost or misunderstood in transit on both sides.

We also do about 99% of our communication with clients by email. I spend a lot of time trying to communicate in a clear and positive way, but I’m sure a lot of things just haven’t gotten to the recipient how they intended and vice versa. It’s regrettable sometimes because when things go wrong, it’s hard to pinpoint where it started. Sometimes it’s hard to imagine what the person on the other end is like and how they think of you as well.

I have thought the last few years that the world feels somewhat more lonely. Online friends and communication by email, chat, and social networking just can’t replace a good social life and meeting people you love face to face. I decided that I needed a break from the internet and some more time just being in the “real world”. Not just to regain real contact with people, but also to tune out all of the negative news and constant barge of information for awhile.

So, I decided to take a mini-internet sabbatical last week. It’s a small step, but it helped put things in perspective for me. I decided that I would check and reply to emails, visit web sites needed for client work, and check job postings. The rest was out. No rss feed reading, no news, no twitter, no mindless surfing. I kept a small journal of my experience each day as a reference.

Day 1:

It was strange not checking my feedreader and several sites this morning. Found it really hard to ignore the orange notification icon for my feedreader. What am I supposed to read while I have my morning tea if I can’t have my news? Curiously, I only drank 1 cup of tea rather than my usual 2. I did get a lot of work done before 10:30 am. That’s refreshing!

2pm: Watching the unread feed number go slowly up….30. Still not looking at them!

4pm: 48 unread feeds. *whimper! I think I’m going to just shut down the feed reader.

8pm: Finished work for the day and had walk and dinner. Really really would love to check the news, but I’m not gonna do it!

Day 2:

Woke up more relaxed than usual, but still really miss reading my morning news. Opened up my feed reader to check job listings. It took forever to update it. 120 unread feeds, I am simultaneously excited and scared to see what the final count will be.

3pm: Missed reading the news again after lunch, habits are hard to break!

8pm: It’s after dinner, need to read something…I think I have an old e-book I never finished.

Day 3:

2pm: Ok, I broke down and checked the weather. It had to be done! How else would I know that it’s supposed to rain the rest of the week?

8pm: 302 unread feeds. I think I will be deleting many when I finally check them.

Day 4:

Did some apartment searching this morning. I am really missing my feeds at this point. Starting to wonder if this experiment was worthwhile. I suppose to make it worthwhile, you need to replace the feeds and internet with something else besides work.

6pm: Cheated and read a bunch of scientific health studies.

Day 5:

Wow, 415 unread feeds this morning. I’m scanning over my feed folders to see which are the most full. I’m seeing that the largest group are fashion blogs (205). I think that will be the first folder to clean up. I am very much looking forward to reading my feeds and news again.

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I think I’ve learned a few things from this. Here are some of the things I took away from it all.

1. I spend a whole lot more time reading feeds than I thought I did. I am an information junkie and I think that’s not a bad thing, but I realized that there are a lot of things I just don’t need. Today, I deleted several feeds and automatically reduced my unread feed count from 550 to 350.
2. I used to mainly read feeds in between tasks and in the morning and evening before and after work times. I think from now on, I’m going to read work related feeds before work to get in the mind set and entertainment feeds later at night after work.
3. I thought I would be more productive, but it didn’t really work out that way. The times that I used to read feeds, I just replaced by taking a break and doing something else like spending a few extra minutes cooking or doing bits of housework.
4. I missed the feeds and news a whole lot more than I thought I would. I didn’t realize how much I depended on these things to be informed about the world. I am not a big tv fan and definitely felt a hole.
5. There are too many other things to do than be stuck at the computer all day. I think I will try this experiment again some time, but replace the internet with some real social interaction. That could be very interesting.

So, in general I didn’t have the results I expected and I think I would call the general experience both good and bad. I guess the main question that comes to me from all this is “Is the internet really helping or hurting our social life?”.

I very much look forward to hearing your comments.

Photo by Ralph Dagza

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?

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!

Since we launched the new version of our web site in June 2006, we’ve been noticing that many design firms are copying and sticking our content into their site. They “borrow” all sorts of things, whether it is images, layout design, icons, or texts. Some of them have even taken whole pages with all of the content and including our prices and policies!

When we find someone using our own work for their own behalf, the most immediate reaction is to get angry and swear. This is usually followed by a “politically correct” letter letting them know about the legal consequences of copyright infringement. Fortunately, they have always proceeded in promptly deleting the offending content from their sites, most of the time blaming it on third parties such us “the webmaster”, “the copyrighter”,”the new boy in the office”…

Lately, we’ve been trying to take these unfortunate incidents in stride. Some native Indian tribes used to think that the power of a warrior is measured by the power of his enemies. This is quite the same. If so many people are choosing our stuff from so many design web sites on the Internet to use it on their own behalf it must mean that we are doing something right. I don’t want to sound arrogant, but when people want something that you have, I guess it means that you have something valuable. After so many incidents like these, honestly if I would notice that other people quit stealing or just getting influenced by our work, I would start thinking we’re doing something really wrong. So, at the end of the day, all of these people are working for us for free, giving us a free marketing service, because they work as a sort of meter to measure how good or bad our work is.

Personally, we would like to encourage the people who steal other people’s work to leave their own footprints in this world. 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.