Web Design – Los Angeles, CA | Steve Gifford

My girlfriend and I were one of the lucky folks to get a drawing from film director Michel Gondry. A few months back, Gondry was offering to do drawings of people from their photographs for a mere $20. Naturally, he was flooded with requests, and had to cut it off, but we got in.

And the other day, we received the drawing in the mail:

I’ve just completed work on a new site built in Wordpress, for a local Portlander.

Mike Seng - Copywriter. Coffee Drinker.

You can view the site at MikeSeng.com.

I recently watched Helvetica, the documentary from Gary Hustwit. It’s a beautifully shot film about, what else, the ubiquitous Helvetica typeface.

Here’s a short excerpt from the film:

I watched the movie through Netflix, but it will also be airing on the PBS show Independent Lens on January 6.

As someone who finds himself unable to drive down the street without spotting poor typographical choices on signs and billboards, this film was a welcome open discussion into the world of typography and the psychological effect that it has on society.

I use Helvetica in a great deal of my work, as a result of my desire to create clean and efficient designs. Helvetica Neue is one of my favorite typefaces. One of the benefits of a font like Helvetica, I believe, is the freedom to combine it with a multitude of other typefaces, for effect. Helvetica provides the order and consistency, allowing for a second typeface to provide character. It was the strategy I used in designing this portfolio site, which uses Helvetica extensively.

The challenge for the designer is to be able to incorporate design trends into solid design practices. A designer who lives strictly by trends will find that their work looks outdated in only a few short years. But solid, timeless design principles prove that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Helvetica is 50 years old, and used now as much as ever. It’s the perfect font for the Web 2.0 design sensibility.

The most interesting debate in the film is the ongoing debate between designers who embrace Helvetica, and those who make rebelling against Helvetica a past time. Yes, I’m talking about David Carson.

Way back in design school, we had a project where we had to visually represent two antonyms through design. I chose order and chaos. If Helvetica is order, David Carson is chaos. As exemplified by his desktop:

It’s the next cover of Raygun! I kid, I kid. However, it is a nice look into Carson’s brain. This organization of information on his desktop very likely makes perfect sense to him.

This is the where the fun starts. With all of the restrictions of web technologies, and presentation of information, where can these two roads meet? With the popularity of blogs, and the requirement that text be laid out in a very simple grid, is chaos going to become non-existent?

I’m looking forward to experimenting, and seeing forthcoming designs that attempt to explore this marriage of antonyms.

It’s been a bit, but I wanted to post some of my thoughts about last weekend’s CyborgCamp. Thus far,one of my favorite aspects of Portland is the strong sense of community here, which hasn’t existed in some other places where I’ve lived. This was the second such “unconference” that I’ve attended in the short time since moving to Portland, and both have been very informative and inspirational.

In case you missed it, the discussions from Cyborg Camp have been made available online.

The discussion that really struck me was Bill DeRouchey’s discussion about the evolution of symbols. It is the first video on the list.

I do agree that Twitter is redefining the @ sign, however, I disagree that Twitter has redefined the # sign. The # sign has been used to symbolize content since the days of IRC (Internet Relay Chat). IRC was a text-based chat system developed in the late 80s, and was one of the very first of my uses for the internet, in 1992 (the first was Commodore’s Q-Link sometime in 1989.

IRC is still around, and uses desktop clients now, but back then, it looked like this:

I spent hours and hours watching this.

Many of the same symbols were used: the @ sign represented a channel operator, but the # sign represented channels. To join a channel discussing IRC, for example, you would enter #irc. So, in that sense, the symbolism has remained constant from the IRC days.

I see Twitter as IRC 2.0, in many ways. Aside from the # symbol, the basic experience of Twitter is very similar to using IRC. The discussion is one big ongoing, line-by-line scroll.

This isn’t, of course, a knock on Twitter, but a credit to IRC. The method of communication was simple and effective, and it was bound to make a comeback, in some form or other. I just think that Twitter (and social media in general) is receiving too much credit for redefining the landscape. I think it’s more accurate to say that we’re 40 years into this movement, rather than just entering it. The advent of the internet (which occurred the same week as the moon landing) was what began to redefine how we communicate.

We also discussed the effects that this is all having on literacy, what with all of the LOLs, ROFLs, OMFGs, and whatever other sequence of letter strings you can get away with. I believe these things are just growing pains. We’re going through the virtual equivelant of what the invention of the printing press meant for communication. Ultimately, we will be the better for it. English is a bloated language, anyway. Do we really need so many variations of the same words? To become more literate, we would be well-served to pare down our vocabulary, a bit. That isn’t likely, so all of these things are really just adding onto what’s already there. Which is an overload of information.

All of the discussions were excellent, and I will write more about some of the other topics later. I’m looking forward to attending many, many more of these.

After a few late nights, and a lot of caffeine, the redesign of this site is complete. Now with blogging!

My goal was to make the site easier to update, and give it a fresh look. I chose to use WordPress as the CMS for my site. As my PHP skills improve, I will be able to easily enhance the site’s functionality.

I learned that being your own client can be difficult, sometimes. It’s easy to be overly critical of your own work. The content becomes too precious, and it’s easy to second guess yourself.

Please have a look around at my portfolio. I welcome your questions and comments.