Ragnar Freyr - Personal blog
To play a beautiful song for two people or a thousand is the same song, and the amount of thanks you receive isn’t part of that song.— Seth’s Blog: Don’t expect applause
I applaud this article by Rebecca Murphey. It shows that real front-end engineering is serious business and you simply can not expect to see that many unicorns in the magical forest.
Here’s a quick tip if you are designing noise textures for Retina Display. I was upgrading an app to the iPad’s Retina Display the other day and this had me stumped for a while.
There’s no need to try to make the pixels in the noise pattern four times as large. You simply need to dramatically increase the amount of noise and the proportional scaling will show similar results to the original background.
A lovely manifesto about the difference between liking something on the internet and loving something on the internet by Robin Sloan. The effort needed to actually read it was especially interesting.
On minimalism
An excerpt from a magazine interview I recently partook in:
Your works carried a sense of minimalism. Is there any special message you would like your audience to gain from it?
I do not consider the minimalism in my work to be a message in itself. However, I believe that minimalism is a strong vehicle for honesty in design — and life. It requires that one strips away the unneeded and keeps the essentials. One can not go too far though. Design needs to have soul — a flavor of some kind. It needs to be interesting. Minimalistic efforts shouldn’t completely devoid the work of warmth, play and aesthetic pleasure. Sometimes, a splash of color, a frivolous line, an image out of context or even something “just because” can be just the thing to make a design “click”. And that is, perhaps, the unpredictable beauty of it all.
Super handy. A nice PSD file of common Mac OS X Lion cursors by Tobias Ahlin.
Ragnheiður and I were interviewed by the wonderful Snoop-Around last month. Coincidentally, I also did the logo for them!
Might achievement, as a goal unto itself, be pointless? Could this need to have done something notable, simply be greed in a more socially-acceptable form?— Forget Self-Improvement | Deliberatism
In fact, I have found that it’s easier to know if people are getting work done when they’re remote. That’s because their work has to speak for itself. When you don’t have just being there at the office to hide behind, it becomes all about the work.— Out of Sight, Top of Mind | Inc.com
The wonderful Notknot pillows, by my super cool and talented wife, just got awarded Best Product Line of the Year by Grapevine magazine. Big congrats to you Ragnheiður! Yay!
The above photo is from the Randscharf - on the Cutting - Design in Island show in Museum für Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt, September 2011 to March 2012.
My Athvarfið poster was a part of the show and some of my other work was displayed in the show’s catalogue, published by Gestalten.
For the past 9 years I’ve been designing posters and marketing material for Breakbeat.is, a web community focusing on the Icelandic drum & bass, jungle, dubstep and breakbeat scene.
In 2004 we decided to start a fun posters project for the regular Breakbeat.is club nights. That was the birth of the Breakbeat.is Challenge Project. I designed the first poster and challenged another graphic designer to design the next one. Since then the project has been on-going.
At this moment the project portfolio contains over 60 posters from equal amount of Icelandic designers, artists and illustrators.
This, plus the posters by myself, Hörður Lárusson, Alli Metall, Sig Vicous, etc. is a quite a collection.
So, in collaboration with Breakbeat.is we decided to publish all the posters in a crowdfunded book. We made a crowdfunding site for the project, shot a horribly awkward promotional video, planned a gallery show and even appeared on Icelandic prime time television.
We are very close to our financial goal thanks to great friends, family and supporters. The book is almost ready and will go to print in the next few days. The whole thing will then end with a bang on the 24th of March when the book is to be published and the great Blawan will spin some records.
The reason we struggle with insecurity is because we compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else’s highlight reel.— Steve Furtick
Infection
Today, as I was walking home from work I got infected.
He was walking behind me, this stranger of a man, whistling an exceptionally cheery tune. His pace was faster than mine and soon he caught up with me. I felt a strong urge to give face to this cheerfulness. As he passed me our eyes met for a split second. He abruptly broke his tune, as if he hadn’t been aware of his whistling. We both smiled awkwardly.
I remarked on his jollyness in the kindest way and continued to smile. His reply was: “It’s such a great day. It’s just one of those days.”
We walked side by side for a few seconds. Not saying anything. Then I broke the silence by urging him not to stop whistling on my account. He started his song again and walked into a book store.
With a big smile on my face after this small encounter I strolled my way and curiously found myself whistling a cheery tune of my own after a few blocks.
Super interesting read about how Upstatement designed the new Boston Globe responsive website. I’m pleasantly surprised that they used InDesign for the static comps since I’ve often thought that Photoshop needed type stylesheets similar to ID. The ID template notion is also a great niche I hadn’t thought about.
