Aerospace, of course, being the coolest word to put after any name.

Soon: sew-on shoulder patches! (heh, not really, though)

I’m not sure if it’s just the mix of my favorite things (matte black with gloss black embossing) or that that blue colour happens to be what I’ve been running with lately or what, but this is lovely.

via

When I started Twitter a little over a year ago Max was one of the first people to interact with me and it’s been really cool to exchange opinions and comments on each other’s work since then.

So, Max, tell us a bit about yourself
Well, first of all my name’s Max Steenbergen. I’m a 27 year old Dutch guy, working as an in-house UI & graphic designer for a company developing dashboard software for yachts. I’ve studied English for a bit, but quickly dropped out and went on to study photography instead. I’ve got a full-time job but next to that I’ve gone back to school to finally get a proper bachelor’s degree. Two evenings a week I’m back in the school benches following a course called Communication & Multimedia Design. Most stuff of what is taught there I already knew or is horribly outdated, but every now and then I actually pick up something new. When I’m not at work or at college, I’m most likely sweating my ass off and falling to the ground in the most unelegant ways possible playing volleyball.

How did you first get into icon design?
About 10 to 12 years ago I wanted to produce my own wallpapers so I started fiddling with Terragen, a piece of software to render landscapes. I quickly installed Photoshop thereafter to enhance the results Terragen delivered. I was quite happy with what I did back then, but after a few years of browsing the web and seeing all kinds of awesome designs I grew tired of my own limited skill set. I was especially intrigued by icons, like the ones by Louie Mantia and Sebastiaan de With. In the meantime I was hired by a local company (where I still work to this day) as the in-house designer thanks to some web design skills I picked up along the way.
Once there I started making tiny icons for the software we produce, and little by little those icons grew more and more elaborate & detailed. At the same time I got intrigued by UI design and started learning that field at the office. I bought lots of books on the subject, and found some great & inspiring people. What I learned then greatly helped in my job, as I often have to think of different ways to visualize data. It was then that I went from sloppy work to pixel-precise fiddling.

Could you describe your approach and philosophy to design?
Practically everything is done in Photoshop. Every now and then I mock up a very rudimentary mesh in Cinema4D to get the perspective of the icon right, but after that I recreate those shapes with Photoshop. I try to use as much vector shapes as possible, but once I get into the itty bitty details I quickly grab my Wacom and brush it in.
For app icons I try to keep things as realistic as possible. That’s just a personal preference and my way of working towards my other goal of being able to digitally paint and not have it look like crap. For smaller icons though I have no real philosophy. I first figure out what the icon should symbolize before I get to what it should resemble (big difference there). Minding every pixel here is key.

What’s the hardest thing about what you do?
Getting the lighting and shadows right is crucial when trying to achieve realism. Unfortunately enough, those two things are what I find hardest to do. You can’t just randomly add highlights or shadows wherever you like, you really have to stop and think just how that shadow or highlight would be shaped in real life (if there would be one at all). I recently made a jacuzzi illustration and had to add a shadow from the pool’s edge in the water. After adding it, it just didn’t look right but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why. Two days later I finally saw why: the shadow I added was convex when it should’ve been concave.

What’s the part that you love the most?
That’s right at the moment I reach for my Wacom pen to start adding in all the little details (though not every detail is brushed). I’ve learned not to be easily satisfied with my own work after seeing some of the icons I made when I first started doing it “professionally”. With my Guinness illustration I spent ages adding every little drop of condensation on the glass individually. It was a painstakingly tedious process, but the result was worth it.

Do you ever freelance?
I’m not a real freelancer – I’ve got a full-time job – however, every now and then I offer my services (or they are requested) to a client. Working on those projects is done on the evenings and weekends, and are —at the moment— merely for the fun of it. Whatever I earn with it are neat little extra’s that I save up to treat myself (like buying an iPad 3).

I hear rumours of a Dribbble app, care to share?
As I mentioned, I’ve gone back to school. For the semester I’m currently in, we have to design and develop a mobile app using web technologies (meaning HTML5, CSS3 and JS). The premise of the app was free to choose. I’ve always figured Dribbble clients lack 1 specific feature, so I figured I’d write it myself this semester. The app is called Longshot, and is a iPhone 4(s) specific web-app (I might target other devices later, but for now I’m focusing on my own phone). It’s actually nearing completion as far as functionality is concerned, but I still have to spend quite some time to the design. It’s up and running over here and requires to be installed to the homescreen as it needs the space Safari’s toolbars occupy. Still some work to be done, but quite useable already as it is.

What attracts you most to Dribbble in the first place, anyway?
Two things, really. Primarily to look at other people’s work, be in awe of and inspired by it, followed by being bummed at not being at that level. Secondly to post my own work looking for feedback.
Dribbble is a great community with a lot of talented members, and personally I’m always looking for their feedback. As every community it has its share of “elitism” and groupie behavior, but I’m not too sure if that can ever be eradicated. Longshot though is my attempt of giving everyone a fair chance of exposure.

If you had any advice for young designers, what would it be?
My twitter buddy Michiel de Graaf —himself an awesome designer— recently tweeted something that I feel nails it: “As a designer you should be proud of your final result but never satisfied.”

If you could instantly change anything about our society, what would you change?
Ads. Begone with them. I understand why they exist, and don’t mind if there are some ads but literally everything has become infested with ads. Please let me pay for your service if it means I can use it without ads. Also quite related to ads these days is online privacy. I’ve grown quite skeptical when it comes to companies —especially social networks— treating personal data, especially after reading up on some of Facebook’s practices.

Describe your favorite colour using only nouns.
Spring. Sci-fi. Cold. Minimalism. Calm. Peace. Sky. Space. Dabadee Dabada.

Thank you very much,

The pleasure is mine.

It’s nothing new, of course. I’m sure most of you readers have been following this since last June when Microsoft decided they should blog about things in an effort to seem more open.

And I could write entire essays about the various things, from the recent logo debate to the timing of the recent beta release, but I really want to prod about the superficiality of the whole thing.

I don’t like it.

They wanted to make things youthful and fun and I feel like it’s tripped over itself on it’s way there. The tiles idea, from a cross-device cross-media platform view is brilliant. The OS is fundamentally similar between the desktop and phone versions because the tile underpinnings are so fluid and scalable. I like that problem solving. There are other, even better ways for the power user, but I think it’s a good thing what they’ve done trying out this format. I’m also glad that they seem to be running with this. I watched the first look demo from last summer and wondered how much of this would be taken out for the final production, much like concept cars get boring-ized before actually available. Okay, so these are nice things.

But the aesthetics. The raw, easy to change bits like tile colour. Where did they come from? I wanted to compare it to a local kids amusement place thing that we had growing up but it seems like they never had a web presence. Shame. It was garish. I remember thinking that even as a kid when we went there.

I was really excited to see screenshots like these:

Where there is unity and boldness and youth and vibrancy and that useful starkness that works so well for phones. Icons that has to be powerful to minimize language usage. But then they took that and stirred everything all together and made this soup of mismatched colour and style and I feel like the desktop OS end result is worse off for it. It’s just muddled.

The good news is that it should be very customizable (at least, we’ll find a way to force it, if not native) and the changes needed to streamline it aren’t that big of a deal. Icons. That’s easy, given everything else that went into the system.

I hate to say it, but the Vista Ultimate style would actually work perfect here. A nice unobtrusive background with those famous blues and greens popping as tiles? That’d be fun and elegant, bold and restrained. It’d be fresh and young without being childish.

Did I just write all of that to say that they should think about changing a few colours? So it seems. Twitter’s taught brevity might be a valuable thing to learn after all.

TL;DR Just wait and change the tile colours in the options because the default ones are rubbish.

First try, just a haphazard spewing of elements over the page. It’s busy and visually annoying. Simplify:

The new portfolio should be unveiled sometime around the end of the week and you’ll notice a very strong branding similarity between these last two cards and the site itself. Since I’m designing both simultaneously, it’s interesting to see how they draw off each other; I just thought of something while doing these cards that might end up looking really cool on the site.

So, not the final product. Just experimenting and playing. There’s a sale on the cool recycled brown pulp cards which would give it a nice texture. I’m not sure exactly how the ink colours will interact with the brown, but they’re cheap enough to experiment.

I’m definitely drawing inspiration laughs from this guy:

But although his result is ridiculous I do agree with the underlying statement. It’s not about who you are (CEO, grunt worker, etc) but what it is you can do for whoever you hand that card to. Draw crowds? Design things? Awesome. Say that instead.

My cards are sort of different, and this is where I’m skirting the lines of the new media. What is a business card in the days of simple Google searching? I’m fortunate to have a unique name in that SEO-wise I’m sort of automatically there, my problem is that it’s an awkward word to remember. If nothing else my card should have “Letkeman” on it. From there you can find everything else about me. I’ll make it one step easier: a URL.

Contact information I’m debating. For all intents and purposes I don’t have a phone number. Fax machines were outdated before I was born. That leaves email and snail mail. I don’t really have a practical fixed address being a student and no one mails anything anymore anyway. Email. There’s a contact form on the website. Do I include one on the card anyway? I wonder if there’s something psychological about sending an email from their preferred client instead of trusting the internet and it’s forms to send the message for them. Something more personal to have that ‘direct line’ either real or perceived. It’s also a subtle call to action. There’s a card with one option: go to the address. From there the CTA path is learning more then hiring Brennan. But we can bypass all of that with the direct email. Communicate with me, it says.

So, that’s part of what I’m up to this week. It’s a holiday; I’m excited to use all my free time to work and get things knocked off the list.

Simply fantastic work. The above were taken from Justin’s official gallery but personally I like the snippets found in the Dribbble.

I love that vaguely Fallout future retro whimsy with references to the rockets and plasma weapons next to cantilevers and Eames lounges next to art deco style backdrops. It’s so mismatched and comes together brilliantly.

The ever awesome XKCD recently posted this comic – and he’s right. It occured to me that Americans don’t have No Name Brand, which is literally just name brand stuff repackaged into glorious yellow boxes with crisp black Helvetica.

We call it Helveticola.

There are entire stores that sell this as their primary brand and it’s doubly awesome because it’s actually cheaper than the ugly graphics branded counterparts. Who says good design has to be expensive?

Granted, occasionally the foods don’t taste the same; things like mayo and ketchup. But really, it’s pretty impossible to mess up Cheerios and I suspect quite often the foods come from the exact same factory.

The branding itself is effective. It’s easily recognized and conveys the item for what it is clearly and easily. I’m not sure about American packaging, but our laws require both French and English, so I suppose that’s really the only extraneous part when living in provinces that are majority English speaking. That’s still different than being superflous, though, French is still effective and practical for the other half of the country which maintains it is good design.

Whereas other brands might have pictures of the contained food on the outside of the package, No Name usually just makes little windows into the contents. It’s simple and elegant. Occasionally there are foods that dont look like what’s contained (like cake mix is just powder, but the picture on the box is a finished cake slice) so they will use pictures on some items. Also, of course, packaging that cannot have windows (like aluminum cans) will have a wrapper that may have a picture of the contained. For the most part, though, it’s glass jars and plastic bags which lend themselves well to such simplicity.

So, Randall Munroe, there’s your solution. It’s the answer to a great deal of questions and I repeat it again for clarity: move to Canada.

Same deal as last time: super comfortable American Apparel shirts, with print, sold at prices actually cheaper than buying them retail. Sweet deal!

Comes in eight snazzy colours, two genders and five sizes.

Check them out.

As soon as mine ships I’ll definitely take better photos of it – these are terrible, I know.

To keep my minimalist dymaxion map company, a new print!

Surreal robot-legged fruit are the new wolf sweaters, so tell all your hipsters friends that it’s stupid and then they’ll wear it because it becomes ironic and artsy.

The stretched canvases from Society6 are a wee bit expensive, in my opinion, but the shirts are really reasonable. Printed on ever-comfortable American Apparel shirts (seriously, I own a bunch of them – best T shirts in my closet) they’re actually cheaper than buying a straight up, plain shirt from AA directly. Not sure how that works, but who cares! You’re getting the savings passed on to you. And, a super sweet surrealist printed shirt to boot. Awesome.

Check it out and maybe buy one? You do want to be the envy of all your friends, don’t you?

Of course you do.

My first foray into dataviz.

For a class assignment we meticulously tracked our media consumption in predefined categories for a week and then made some way to display the information. Mine turned out slightly more complicated than my classmates’ did, but I opted to do a full 24 hour breakdown of each day instead of a daily total for each category. There’s actually four axis of information on that 2 dimensional graph, a feat of which I’m slightly proud. 7 days x 24 hours x 6 categories x the quantity out of 60 minutes. It’s a lot to cram into such a small space!