Cre8tive Flow

Greetings fellow Web Designers, Usability Experts, SEOs and Internet Marketers - you’re going to get a kick out of this!

As you’ve learned in your workaday worlds, color choice is an integral part of building web pages, whether you’re setting a mood, calling attention to a button, or sending a branding message. Both color psychology (the way humans react to certain colors) and color symbolism (cultural meanings applied to various colors) may be taken into account when you’re developing the layout of a website, or honing it for ease of use or better conversions. But our industry is far from the first to get so serious about shades and hues. In the 1940’s, Dr. Max Lüscher developed his Color Diagnostic Test that is still being used today by colleges and corporations as part of a screening process.

Not easy to do?

Maybe easier than you think, if you are in the UK. Usually we stay away from talking ab out design contests here, but this one seemed interesting.

The Royal mint is looking for people to come up with New designs for a number of coins.

The winning designer will come up with six designs, for six different coins, and the potential prize is up to £30,000. More details at the Royal Mint.

I’ve always been a sucker for a well designed album cover. With the growing popularity of MP3s, iPods, and electronic distribution of music, one of the things I fear might go away is the art accompanying the songs.

And perhaps, that is one of the things that can save it.

Will CDs be around ten years from now? Will the idea of having a music collection stored on your computing device be commonplace?

It’s easy to tell when someone has copied something that you’ve written, but maybe not so easy when the copy is of a design or image.

A post at Design Observer, Bird in Hand: When Does a Copy Become Plagiarism explores this topic.

It’s a subject worth considering carefully. While the author doesn’t mention web sites, you may find yourself coming across an occasional site that seems to be “inspired” by another site.

There’s a number of links in the post worth looking at. I’ll pinpoint one of them, because I found it pretty interesting. A New Yorker article titled Something Borrowed: Should a Charge of Plagiarism Ruin Your Life?

Back in the year 2000, I worked on a presentation for an employee recognition ceremony for an organization of a couple of hundred people. The theme that we chose to use for the handing out of awards was the Olympics.

I had a lot of fun putting together pictures and images, and was really proud of my merging of “2000″ with the Olympic rings. I can only imagine the work that gets done in preparation for the actual Olympics.

When it comes to graphics, I like to try out things like making logos, optimizing photos, and building icons.

It’s harder than it looks, but with links like the one above from SimpleBits, it’s possible to understand why it’s so hard.

You can follow along at home, and watch the creativity that went into the design of the New logo for Thunderbird, the email client for Mozilla. An excellent peek into the creative process.