I’m really excited to announce that as of today, I’m no longer working in the world of freelance. Earlier in the week I accepted a job as Senior Designer at True Digital. I’ve been working with these guys on contract the last couple of months, and liked it so much I decided to stay. A company who are growing and have big ideas, big ambitions and already put out top notch work, I jumped at the chance to join their team. They already work with people like O2, The AA, BBC, nPower and Futurelab - so there should be exciting times ahead.

This means I’m probably going to be even busier than ever, and as this site doesn’t need to be my shop window quite so much any more, the posts here might be even more few and far between. But I’ll endeavor to post up new work as it’s completed, and any work-in-progress stuff deemed not too secret!

Whilst working on this (as yet still work-in-progess) site, I’ve started looking a bit more critically at blog format designs - specifically pagination. It seems an obvious thing to state, but blogs are in the most part chronologically based ie. the model for navigation is between ‘newer’ and ‘older’. But there are a lot of blogs out there which rely on the more standard western mindset of right=forward and left=back. The trouble comes when you try and mix these two concepts. If you have a link to ‘next’ on the right, what it’s actually doing is going backwards chronologically to older posts - so you end up with a situation where ‘next’ means ‘back’, in a sense.

So what happens when you try and remedy this by moving the ‘next’ (ie. older posts) button to the left - because left means backwards, right? Well, it’s a bit better, but you still end up mixing concepts and confusing your users. A good example of this is Brand New. Don’t get me wrong, Brand New is a great design blog about branding and visual identity. But it has pagination which tells people to go back to older posts by using a button which says ‘Next Page’, and vice-versa.

On this site I’ve tried to make this clear by labelling the pagination as ‘Older Posts’ and ‘Newer Posts’. In short, you can try and make navigation as intuitive as possible by using visual conventions, but sometimes where structural models clash you just have make use of better explanatory copy. Use of clear, concise and most of all short explanatory copy is an underrated virtue in web design - but that’s another story entirely.

(I’m aware that this post relates to parts of my own site still being polished off, so there’s a certain element of ‘People in glass houses…’)

When you sit in front of a screen pushing a mouse around to draw things day in day out, you start to hanker for something a little more tangible and tactile. Hence a while back, having been inspired by the amazing physical craftsmanship of some wood engravings I had seen, I decided to dip a toe in the waters of printing with inks rather than pixels. Except that I figured a cack-handed beginner like me should probably start with something a bit easier going, like lino. I quickly discovered quite a few things like ‘it’s all about how you prepare and ink the lino’ and ‘don’t put your steadying hand in front of the cutter’.

The results are very much “first attempts” and a bit unfinished, but as Robb over at Literalkid (who has just posted a rather brilliant new illustration) asked me to I thought I’d post them up here for the world to giggle at. Behold!

As quite often seems to happen with blogs there were a few posts, then after the first flush of enthusiasm fades nothing at all for months on end. Well in this case, there’s a pretty good excuse - on Weds 12th November my wife gave birth to our first child, Bella Marianne Bouttell.

Needless to say, it’s been rather…shall we say…. busy since then. But now the dust has begun to settle, and I think it’s time to start making posts again and even (said in a reverential whisper) actually finish building and polishing the site.

Filled-in typographic characters. Glassy, icon-like logo devices. Silhouettes filled with bright gradients. Baroque swirls and ornaments. Endless geometric almost unreadable display fonts born of fontstruct. Helvetica. More Helvetica. I could go on.

What do all of these things have in common? They’re things which, in their time, have gone from fresh and innovative to overused and endlessly imitated. There’s nothing worse for a designer than seeing this happen to something they originated or at the very least copied very early on. It’s flattering to be copied a few times, but become too successful and BANG!, you’re a design cliche. Saying “Yeah but I was doing A1 ‘Homage to Helvetica’ posters and taking photos of myself holding them up back in 2003″ just won’t cut it, even if they were foil-blocked and embossed*

*By the way, foil-block and embossing on beautifully thick stock does not automatically make a design awesome. It just makes it look expensive and, er… foily.

Considering that most designers, when asked, would probably want their work to stand against the march of the decades and be ‘timeless’, it’s surprising how many of us can’t help regurgitating whatever cool things we’ve seen whilst trawling through the endless design blog updates. I’m as guilty as the next designer, especially as the march of the years has only made my need to be “with it” more painfully acute.

But maybe I’m making an incorrect assumption here in saying that being part of a design zeitgeist is a bad thing. After all, particularly in my line of work, you can’t reinvent the wheel every time you embark on designing a website. Maybe if having a catalogue of current styles in mind which you can match to a particular project isn’t a great thing, maybe it’s a necessary thing in order to get the work done on time. Maybe that all that e-commerce site needs is a bit of CMYK paint drips and closely-packed hairlines that make your eyes go funny. You know, like those pictures done with string and pins in the 70’s. A bit neo-neo-new-rave, or something.

Well, this may be true up to a point, but the proliferation of photoshop tutorials on “How to make a glassy reflective thingy” say otherwise. They take the design process and turn it into those ‘Paint by Numbers’ pictures you used to get - there’s a certain amount of skill in not painting over of the lines, but it’s doesn’t quite make you Chuck Close. You miss out on the whole part of the process where you look at the needs of the client and the challenges involved and use those limitations to define the work, to shape it.

Graphic designers spend their working (and many non-working) hours searching for visual novelty. We want to find things that catch our eye and make us see things in a slightly different way. And then we want to copy them, and hope that noone else does.

Dot Matrix Revolution is an animation from Superbrothers, showing the history of the computer. I love the music, if fits the style perfectly (and reminds me a bit of the intro for The IT Crowd - also awesome.) Found via the always brilliant Drawn

There’s a nice edited transcript over at Design Observer of a broadcast by Adrian Shaughnessy about what it means to be a graphic designer.

Polish Film Posters over at Well Medicated (their title has the usual search engine friendly hyperbole). The lack of Trajan, montaged arrays of heads and super-condensed fonts is refreshing - but seems to have been replaced with a Saul Bass fixation in some cases. I thought this one for Fatal Attraction was particularly minimal and striking.