I’m having my favorite sunday morning right now, tea and my laptop on the kitchen table. I came across a great video on where apple draws it’s inspiration, by a german industrial designer Dieter Rams.

This is my first introduction to Mr. Rams and I’m feeling very inspired and excited, this guy knows his design and is very sober and honest about his work. His approach can easily be translated to web design as can any design principles, all design resides of a canvas of sort, be it an actual canvas, computer screen or your home. Design must interact with various elements to be considered successful. In web design you design the content, make the content accessble and beautiful.

Good design is emotional.

Mr. Rams has an excellent list of 10 principle of good design, I think we can all take this to heart and sharpen our design skills.

1. Good design is innovative
2. Good design makes a product useful
3. Good design is aesthetic
4. Good design makes a product understandable
5. Good design is obtrusive
6. Good design is honest
7. Good design is long lasting
8. Good design is thorough, down to the last detail
9. Good design is environmentally-friendly
10. Good design is as little design as possible

Design should not dominate people, it should help people — Dieter Rams

Be sure to check out the front page with christmas ornaments.

Namaste very much
gummisig

I used to create the pattern myself by creating a square pattern and saving it by going, Edit / Define pattern. This method works of course but it´s a drag doing and not all that efficient.

There are a bunch of tutorials around the web on how to do this with the brush. But I find that method to suck somewhat when your doing typical web designer work. It´s very inflexible.

Enter the styles palette
So the quick and easy method is just to use the styles palette. It comes with built in styles and some variations on dotted strokes.

Definitely not rocket science but a much faster and more elegant way to do this. Easy to copy stuff around and change as needed.

There are several versions to chose from, stroke weight, pixel spacing and other stuff. Be sure to try this out and save your self some valuable mouse moving time.

This is a list of the designers, graphic, web or other kind of designers.

Egill Harðar

An icelandic fellow designer and friend. I remember starting out designing stuff and he was very prominent at the icelandic web design stage in particular.

Alli Metall

The story behind Alli is pretty similar as Egill, was really doing remarkable (and still is) stuff when I was starting out. And we used to play golf together when we were younger. If I remember correctly I used to beat him consistently.

Jonathan Gerlach

Similar story as with Alli and Egill, Jonni is just a great designer. Make sure you swing by his site and look at all the juicy stuff. He works mainly in web design.

Jeffrey Zeldman

Can you really call Jeffrey a designer or just an amazing css nerd? Anyway his book designing with web standards changed the game for me

Jason Santamaria

Heard about this guy from Mr. Zeldman and thankful for it. Really helped me appreciate typography and attention to detail. Be sure to check out typedia while your at it.

Rob Morris

An australian bloke  which I´ve sent a few mails to and he´s always responded with kind words. His site greatly influenced the design of mine. I love his stuff.

James White

Those flares and diagonal lines just captivate me. And his use of subtle colors always make me happy

Tim Van Damme

This guy is just amazing. I heard of him through Elliot Jay Stocks whos another great designer. Tim designed the 24ways site that is one of my all time favorite sites to look and read.

There are probably more guys and gals that I cant remember at the moment. But man, these are some great ones, dont you think?

No designer is an island, or a designer island for that matter

The title of this entry can mean different things to different people. To me it means that no designer is an island. I´ve wanted to write something along these lines for some time, so here goes.

I was driving home from a gig I had one day and a thought occurred to me of how strange it is, as a designer, to say “I designed this”. It´s not really true. When you give it some thought it´s quite impossible to design something by yourself. We are totally dependent on other people and our environment for everything, absolutely everything.

If we take a very narrow view of it and only look me, Gummi, we will see that I cant even get up on time without the help of a cellphone manufacturer. Sony Ericsson made my cellphone. Then only looking at the design part, try to imagine all the people that made Photoshop. And then all the people that affected the people that made Photoshop and so on. None of them would be able to get to work without the help of other people, get food, be inspired, love or just be alive. I think is was the Buddha that said something like: “this is because that is”. It was called the law of co-arising.

Ubuntu, not the operating system, but the philosophy is also all about this. People are fully dependent on each other and would not exist unless the other person excised. There is no up unless there is a down, no black unless there is white & no designer without Photoshop There is no musician unless there is a listener and so on.

Or as the Zulus would say, “Umuntu Ngumuntu Ngabantu”, which means that a person is a person through other persons. We affirm our humanity when we acknowledge that of others.
Quote www.buzzle.com

So the next time I open Photoshop I´m gonna try and remember that things are not as they seem. Try to feel appreciation for the opportunity of being a designer, and be thankful for the incredible “fact” that I am here and now doing what I´m doing because of the help of all the people that ever existed and the fact that a star sometime exploded to make this moment possible.

My mind can never comprehend the complexity of this world, but I sometimes feel like a real part of it. Like this world is part of me and I am part of it.

No one or no thing is here by accident.

That´s me, sitting in half lotus

There is not end to the fun it seems. Smashing Magazine, one of the best if not the best design and web design magazine´s on the web, featured gummisig.com in their article about best practices for effective design of about me pages. So it seems I got something right when designing this site.

It´s funny they picked that page especially and mentioned the photo. The photo was taken by my wife in the kitchen on my cellphone. It was always meant to be a temp image until I got a real picture taken. The publicity the site has gotten has caught me somewhat of guard and I haven’t gotten round to taking a new photo yet. One friend said about the photo, “ok, you are a pale Icelander but you really should get a better photo” , what can I say, I´m not that photogenic.

Much love to Smashing Magazine for featuring me, they are the coolest and I´ve been reading their stuff for years. So this is fantastic to say the least. But I´d better stop bragging about being featured here and there and start writing some real blog articles. I just looked at my blog and it´s almost only featured stuff. I really want to finish my writing for the making of gummisig.com, that will be a fun read.

My nice little cup of glory

CSSstyle.me selected gummisig.com to be one of 3 most stylish websites for the month of june. It´s all very flattering.

The other sites listed are also very nice and groovy looking. All this attention to my site is really giving me good vibes for the work I´m doing. I wake up everyday looking forward to start working. So thanks a lot!

Head on over to cssstyle.me and have a look at the glory. My site is also listed here

First there was a thumbnail in Becoming a Professional Creative which is a nice post to read if you are thinking of joining some other guys and gals in the design industry. A very good read, highly recommended.

The second feature is Sites of the week, where gummisig.com is mentioned in the Blog / Portfolio section. I´m so proud.

The left navigation after upgrading to 2.8. Quickly fixed

Just a quick update to my last post. I did an automatic update to gummisig.com just a few moments ago and it went jazzy smooth like expected. The only small thing that happened had to do with the widgets. Since they got a huge upgrade, I´m guessing, the id for the pages widget changed in the html. A few quick fixes with Coda and everything was just lovely again.

I´m now just looking forward to a more stable, zippier wordpress experience.

But being relatively new to the whole wordpress universe I´m finding all this very exciting. I just love wordpress. It was very nice to see that they have made a very good introductory video for this version. They also explain the whole jazz thing, very smooth, very smooth indeed.

What has me most excited is the new handling of widgets, multiple instances with out any hastle. And they just look jazzy smooth.

So I was wondering if anyone reading this had already upgraded to 2.8? Care to share your thoughts? Enlighten the rest of us?

Be sure to check out the video and also head over to wordpress.tv where there is loads of video wordpress goodness.

Thanks to Winold Reiss for the illustration in the background, may he rest in peace.