This year’s Graphic Designer Bundle from PhotoDune & Graphic River is pretty awesome. There are so many useful photos, fonts, icons, graphics, etc. I was lucky enough to have one of my photos included in the bundle (below).
You might remember that I was also recently interviewed on the Envato blog. Well they also recently made one of my other photos the free file of the month for October (shown below). Let’s just say that I’m feelin’ the love from Envato/PhotoDune lately!
At the car show, we got there quite early. I was tired, but man was that a great time to take some landscape/scenery shots. The car show was on September 11, 2011 and they had placed American Flags at the entrance to the car show. I found a cool angle where the sun was behind the flag illuminating it.
I was also lucky to have captured this moment, where a veteran is saluting the flag as the military march through, right before the singing of the National Anthem.
I had the pleasure of photographing a car show a few weeks ago in Kansas City. I’ve never really shot classic cars, or any car for that matter. It was a fun challenge to take some good photos of the 100+ classic cars, trucks and bikes. Here are some of my favorites. The 2nd car below was the grand prize winner!
“Drawing is speaking to the eye; talking is painting to the ear.”
“When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”
—Steve Jobs
This weekend, we were in Kansas City to help Rebecca’s college roommate put on a car show with her church. I photographed the event for them and had a hard time getting good shots of the bikes…. They aren’t very photogenic with all the pipes, wires, plastic, etc. I decided to get at least one good photo of the bikes… by getting a bit creative.
I’ve talked about this in the past on this blog. I was reminded of this debate from a past professor who re-blogged a post by Frank Chimero.
So, should designers be coders? The answer is, “Yes, to an extent.”
I say ‘to an extent’, because we can’t expect a web designer to be able to do everything a programmer can. These are two different career paths. We can and should expect there to be an overlap between these separate fields. This overlap mainly lies in knowing HTML and CSS. (now you know what the question marks are for in the graphic). So designers should understand code and be able to write HTML and CSS.
Adobe’s recent release of Muse has surely stoked this debate even more. Muse promises to rid the need for a programmer/coder (you know, the way that Microsoft Publisher rids the need for a designer). The problem with this is that Muse promotes a lack of coding knowledge and as a result web designers are still uneducated about coding and their websites are worse off because of it. Websites are not digital versions of print design. They are living documents in 4D – changing based on user interactions, responsive design, dynamic elements etc. For more on why Muse is not the answer to web development, read Elliot Jay Stocks’ assessment.
The point here is that web designers should understand and be able to write HTML/CSS. As a comparison, take this example I mentioned in the aforementioned blog post,
“…an architect should understand how a house is built. Otherwise, the architect has become a meaningless decorator of a medium he doesn’t understand.“
Frank Chimero says it like this,
“Design decisions are not only affected by the characteristics of the content being designed, but also the qualities of the format. The best way to understand the characteristics of the web is to speak its language.“
What are your thoughts on this? Should web designers know how to code? How extensively?
Want to know where to start learning how to code? Check this out: Don’t Fear the Internet
I couldn’t help but notice a few striking similarities between current GOP candidate websites and Obama’s 2008 campaign website and the current White House website.
It seems that the new political design trend is going to be glowing backgrounds. Most of the candidate’s sites use a glowing blue background of some sort (see newt.org and michellebachmann.com)
The designers for Ron Paul’s website must have been inspired by whitehouse.gov because the navigation typography is almost identical. The flag icon on whitehouse.gov links to the homepage, while the home icon on Paul’s site links to the homepage. While not similar in design, the unique idea of using a homepage icon in that particular position is pretty similar given the other similarities.
However, I give props to Ron Paul’s web guys for actually making the navigation real text and not images, like the White House site. To be fair, whitehouse.gov has their full sitemap in real text in the footer.
This one is minor, but I had to mention it because of how similar other elements are between whitehouse.gov and Ron Paul’s website. The right column on both sites are the same exact width as well. Inspired much?
Also known as the 40-year-old virgin portrait look. This is only funny because I really want to imagine the photographer holding up a picture of the Obama 2008 website and directing Bachmann to pose similarly. I feel like she forgot where the camera was one other time too… I kid, I kid!
Of course not. There is no copyright infringement here. Is it funny when you notice it? Yes. Mostly because of how different these candidates are from President Obama in every other way.
Here’s to great design that draws some of it’s inspiration from Obama 2008!
