Its gonna turn out splendid

I’m working with some great people on redoing the design for an icelandic web conference called Iceweb.

I consider this quite an honor since it’s the only one of its kind in Iceland and there are some great speakers coming. My good friend @egillhardar designed the previous site and for 2010 there will be a new design.

One of the coolest parts of this is we are using google wave for project management, and we decided to make the whole thing public. Doing this is somewhat inline with the call for added transparency in politics, why not also web design

So enjoy following along as the design unfolds, we switched to english once we knew we wanted the wave to be public. So the world shouldn’t have trouble following along

ps
You can get even more of the excitement, even more of the action at www.icewebconference.com

Namaste
g

“Ohh, it´s not there yet, or I have to finish this one thinge here…” Have you ever heard something similar? I have, it was me before I launched my site.

I dont know why but I´ve always been like this. Maybe Seth Godin hit the nail on the head with that Quieting your lizard brain thing. It´s taken me years of practice to get over this type of deal (sometimes). Always thinking a lot and not doing. In fact I´m still doing this with my music, shit! But I can give some insight with this website and how it came into being.

Like all great peaces of art (I dont mean that) it was hard work. I sometimes get the impression from people, and I do this too, that great people that have succeeded in their field came to do that by shear luck on raw natural talent. Like Tiger Woods could drive the ball 300 yards when he first got a club in his hands. No it was hard work for him, and then he enjoyed the fruits of his labour, a lot !

But I postponed launching it for weeks and weeks cause I never thought it was ready. Finally I just said fuck it and launched the damn thing. It was supposed to be a soft launch, I wasn’t gonna tell anybody about it while I fixed the rest of the things that bugged me. Needless to say I was quite shocked when it got into Best Web Gallery and the visits sky rocketed. But nothing would have happened if I would have continued thinking about launching it and never launched.

What I´m trying to say is just do it! Dont think too much, dont let the fear of failure stop you from trying new stuff. Dont let the fear of what other people think of you stop you from doing your best. We always do our best and it´s good enough for the world in it´s entirety. If we fail, we just try again.

Since I´m still getting a lot requests for work I thought I might post a short update on my current work engagements.

As it happens I´m fully booked on a gig here in Luxembourg until the middle of August. It´s a biggie so all my efforts only go into this one gig.

After this gig I have a very big family gig coming up. My wife is do to give birth to our 4th child early September. This is of course a monumental occasion for any family, large or small. After this I´m gonna take time off to tend to my wife and new born, and the rest of the family of course. I´m planning on starting work again around the middle of October.

So if you are the patient type or the type that plans well ahead, please send me a line and we can take it from there.

Regards from Luxembourg
g

It´s strange for me staying in the mainland Europe countryside. Waking up each morning to calming birdsong and there must be a lot of birds here, happy birds, cause they are singing everywhere. And the movement of the trees in the wind is really something to see and sense and hear. We dont have all that many trees in Iceland.

I only had to walk 50 meters to see some cows in a medow, the redest cows I´ve ever seen Too bad the photos can capture the smell either, maybe they can soon though.

The very exciting airport in Luxembourg

Got some rather big news to share with yall. I´ve booked the whole summer from june to the 15th of august on a very big project here in Luxembourg, yes I´ve arrived in the European mainland for the summer.

My job will be to design a website (duhh), a client login area and then code the whole thing with beautiful html and css, not necessarily in that order though. I´m a big believer in not doing too much work in Photoshop before starting coding, that is when I´m also handling the coding.

Family
The hardest part of all this will be the physical distance to my wife and kids. They will be staying in Iceland the whole time and hopefully having a good time as I hope I will. But like said, the distance is great so we will try to handle some of that with the wonders of modern technology, thank you Skype, Google and Apple.

Work
I´ll be working for a local pension fund here in Luxembourg where there are some guys I now know thankfully. One of them I know quite well, used to play guitar together in the band dan modan. So I´m guessing I wont be lonely. I´m still gonna do yoga and meditate every morning to stay physically & mentally sharp as well as playing some golf. I hope I´ll be allowed to share some work in progress stuff with everybody as the work unfolds. I´ll have to talk with the people I´m gonna work with about that tomorrow during our first design briefing.

Now
So if you know some design enthusiasts in Luxembourg (might be yourself) please leave a comment and let´s have herbal tea. If your reading this from a distant or not so distant land please keep popping round, I´m gonna post regular updates during my stay here.

Me and my fiance went to the clinic the other day for our sonar scan of our baby. I had been looking forward to it for a while, mostly because Eydis (my fiance) was thoroughly excited herself and kept reminding me, thanks honey

I snapped a few photos and a short video of the scan, and.….….… it´s a girl, most likely. You can never be sure about these things.

That makes us a family of 6 in September. 4 girls and two guys. My son and oldest was quite resolute on moving out if it turned out to be a girl. But we broke the news to him gently and he´s ok now, has no plans on moving anywhere anymore… for now at least

I´ve had a bunch of songs written for some time now, quite a long time actually. It´s always been in the back of my head nagging me to do something with it. So I´ve started recording.

Some of the songs are around 10 years old so it´s about time. Having a family and a career doesnt leave a lot of time for hobbies. But since our 4th child is coming and we left more time in between kids this time, there is a bit of breathing space.

So without further adue let me present the “band” Skorri Moggi. I´ll be talking about this a lot in the coming months so please bare with me. I promise to not neglect the design part of me in the mean time.

Here´s a short clip from the song I´m currently working on.
I´m awake / I´m away — Short demo by Skorri Moggi

…also make sure you follow Skorri Moggi on Twitter here.

me and @katrinjul minister of industry in Iceland

I´ve secretly and not so secretly been hoping to win this for 5 years now, so going to the award show and actually getting a reward was very uhhh… rewarding. My site won in the best blog, yada, yada category. It used to be called best single person endeavor category which I could understand, I dont get the new category name.

From what I could gather there were over a hundred entries overall and then they were filtered into categories. I might ad that I also had another website I designed and set up nominated for an award. That´s the newly launched www.sparnadur.is site that I havent gotten around to add to my portfolio.

I´d like to end with saying that I really like winning this. And I´m fully motivated to do it again Plus winning a reward on you birthday is always nice. It was my 35th birthday last friday.

There are some photos from the event and of the stuff I got on flickr, be sure to have a look.

Update
I forgot to mention that my good friend and youth golf partner, whom I beat on a regular basis, alli metall was also nominated for an award. How could I forget.

Here´s what they had to say, icelandic only for now:

Vefurinn sker sig úr fyrir áberandi leturnotkun og líflega hönnun auk þess sem efnið er skemmtilega fram sett. Innihaldið er skrifað af lipurð og einlægni þannig að maðurinn á bakvið vefinn skín vel í gegn. Vefurinn er gott dæmi um það hvernig fagmenn geta nýtt sér veraldarvefinn til að koma sér og verkum sínum á framfæri bæði á faglegan og áhrifaríkan hátt.

• Online backup. I use mozy for online backup. It´s super easy, reliable and it works. I´ve tried restoring stuff from their servers and it went gravy, no problems what so ever. Plus Mozy is real cheap.
• 0 inbox and gmail. I use gmail and I really love gmail. I used to use Apples Mail app but switched from that back and forth between it and gmail. I later decided to solely use gmail cause of the shortcut keys, and the fact you can upload multiple attachments, screenshots you know. I then learned a version of the 0 inbox method, try googling that. It´s basically about not having anything in you inbox that you dont need to act on. Everything else gets archived or deleted. I just love the E key in gmail, sends stuff straight to the archive.
• Online accounting. I use a local system here called Notando, it has a horrid interface at the moment but it sure beats writing out paper invoices and taking them to the post office. Also being able to send invoices every week or every other week keeps the cash flow going, which of course is extremely important for any small company.
• Using the same filing system every time. I´ve used pretty much the same filing system since I started working in this field. Starting out in 3d really forced me to keep my files organized. If you find something that works for you stick to it. I basically just keeps my psd´s in the root of the company folder I´m working on, sub folders for screenshots, logos, images etc. My main working tool is Photoshop so it made sense to have the psd in the root.

These are some of the things I do, of course there´s a lot more. Who knows, maybe I could write some more along these lines.

What do you do to simplify you working day?

• I have a ton of projects going on, to be honest too many, but I´m hanging in there. If there are some great designers out there that want to work with me, please send me an email.
• I´ve met a man! No not like that but a man I´d like to do more business with and who knows, we might open an agency at some point. More on that later.
• My daughter Regína has her birthday next week.
• We had dolphins swimming in the bay here in Keflavík
• I´m working for many large companies here in town
• I´m doing better mentally than ever before, thanks to yoga, meditation and consulting.
• …and my wife is pregnant with our forth child, how do you like them apples?

…so you could say that it´s good that I have a lot to do, especially with one more kid around the pregnancy corner.