Dan » Art

Good Designers Complete, Great Designers Discard

Dan — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 03:42:12 +0000

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.

After mulling it over for a while, I made the decision to completely discard what I had done so far and start anew, this time taking the branding into consideration. Yes, it was quite painful to just toss away hours of work (it took a while to get the borders right, and they still didn’t quite align), but it was a move that had to be made. Being a great designer doesn’t only mean making pretty layouts— it’s knowing when to discard parts of/entire designs if needed, for the purpose of making the end result even better. Sure, this is a step backwards in the redesign of Z-Up, but I think it’ll benefit it more in the long term.

Plus, having Z-Up look like an airmail envelope would be quite confusing to newcomers; they might associate Z-Up with email, because an envelope does not imply storage, whereas a box does.

Typography

Dan — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 02:22:12 +0000

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?

Dan — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 01:37:43 +0000

I 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.

On a sidenote, I’d like to say that I discovered the use of the pen tool about a week before I made this.

A Few Pictures

Dan — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 05:43:44 +0000

I 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

I finally got around to taking a decent picture of my new guitar. All that’s left is to practice constantly until I develop some kind of skill.

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

Dan — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 07:37:09 +0000

I’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…

Dan — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 03:33:19 +0000

…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:

Microsoft Website + Apple Website

Click on it to see all 1440 × 684 pixels of goodness.

New Theme?

It seems that just about every web designer out there has released WordPress themes, so I thought it would be interesting to have a try at making one. It will most likely be a minimalistic theme, which I feel are lacking amongst all the fancy themes out there. I already have a name for it, and a pretty good idea for the design. I won’t reveal too much today, so stay tuned for a full post about the upcoming theme. And before all you cheapskates ask, yes it will be free.

Snow Day!

Dan — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 17:40:01 +0000

For the first time in about 4 years I finally have a snow day. Although I still have work today, but there probably won’t be too many customers in this weather. After I shoveled all the snow, I took my Nikon D70s and took some pictures of the snow.

The houses across the street

Looking down the street

Looking down the street.

I’m hoping for another snow day tomorrow…

Also, expect another blog post today.

G3 and more…

Dan — Sat, 24 May 2008 22:30:18 +0000

Remember how I mentioned a new name for my webcomic yesterday? After some thinking and googling, I came up with a short, simple name for my webcomic. G3. A new site will follow, and I’ll probably have it up and running by Monday. I finally got the hang of inking, and colored this picture in Photoshop CS2. If you squint, it almost looks good.

By the way, I also tried out WordPress 2.5.1, and it utterly sucks. The dashboard looks so unprofessional, and it just looks unfinished. Even though my WordPress 2.3.1 is pestering me to update, I’m not doing it until they improve the quality of WordPress 2.5.1.