Recently while redesigning Z-Up (It’s still a mess), I realized halfway through the process that my design didn’t fit the branding of it at all. See, for Z-Up, I used the whole cardboard box metaphor, representing the files that one can upload onto it. For my “redesign” of it, I started going for the whole airmail envelope look, with the diagonal stripes on the borders. Yes it looked pretty, but I soon realized that it just did not go with the branding I had established for Z-Up. It was poorly thought out, and done on a whim, with little thought to how well it works for the brand.
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Category Archives: Art
Good Designers Complete, Great Designers Discard
4 CommentsTypography
2 Comments
DSC_4544, originally uploaded by daniel.zabolotny.
Flickr apparently has this neat feature which lets me blog directly from it. I figure it’s going to be pretty useful for posting some artworks on my blog.
Guitar, Anybody?
6 CommentsI made a fully-detailed guitar in Photoshop class at school. No, I didn’t use a tablet. It was all done with an Apple mouse, using the pen tool, on a Power Mac G5. I based it off Schecter’s C-1 line of guitars, but it’s not pixel-accurate because I didn’t trace it. See it after the jump.
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A Few Pictures
4 CommentsI don’t have much to write about right now, so I’ll post some pictures/artwork instead.

The average McDonald's worker
I drew that on Wednesday when I was slightly bored. The whole thing took me less than 20 minutes, thanks to my Wacom and Photoshop.

The new guitar
Hard Drive Tales
Today, Mac OS X popped up and reminded me that my hard disk space was running low. I opened up Finder, and found that I had a measly 400mb of space left. Now I could have just started deleting all my movies and music, but I decided to find a better solution to this never-ending problem. I dug out my old 500gb external hard drive, and found that it still worked quite well. All I had to do was format it to FAT32, in case I’d ever need to access it with a PC. In about 20 minutes, I filled up 100gb of the hard drive, so I don’t know how long it’ll last me…Other Stuff
There are only 3 days of spring break left, until I have to go back to forced-labor camp school. I’m also going to the NYC International Auto Show tomorrow, and I might even take a few good pictures while I’m there.Apathy
3 CommentsI’ve begun working on a new theme, which will be called Apathy. The whole theme uses only one image, and a minimum of Javascript, to ease those loading times. I’ll be making the theme available in 9 different colors, selectable through the theme options in WordPress. I’ve also decided to include one of those “About me” blurb that everybody seems to be having these days. Of course, you can turn the blurb off completely if you don’t need one. The design itself is very simple and neutral, hence the name “Apathy.” Anyway, enough blathering on about it, here are what you all really want to see- some pictures.
Those are all the color variations, and below is a full-size image of the theme (click to see full-res version).I expect the theme to be done soon, but I have no specific release date just yet. Keep checking in for updates on my Twitter.
What if…
10 Comments…Microsoft ripped off Apple’s website? I was wondering the same thing today, and being bored out of my mind, I decided to put together a mockup of that in Photoshop. It took me about 2 and a half hours, but it turned out quite nice. Behold:
Click on it to see all 1440 × 684 pixels of goodness.
