Cosmicblend

Saturday, January 24th, 2009

Motivating Myself.

I have held the domain cosmicblend.net for a while and recently acquired the .ca and .com. The intention has always been for “cosmicblend” to be the extension of my freelancing services. Like many other people find myself constantly busy and never having time to actually do anything but sandbox development on this domain.

I have pages and pages of sketches and mindmapping plans for where I want cosmicblend to go. Lately I have been reading lots of case studies I find they provide a light into the creators mind, considering this I have decided to motivate myself by making one large topical case study out of cosmicblend.

It’s time to make the development of this space a priority, committing this in words for all (and surely very few) is my attempt at lighting a fire under my butt. Let’s see how it all plays out.

Update 15 odd minutes later…

So I’m unable to upload images at the moment, I’m using Wordpress 2.7 and have read about this issue already now to remember where I read about it.

An answer to the image uploading issue can be found at www.cyriac.me

Tags: branding; development; social transparency; typography; web design

Posted In Cosmicblend Case Study
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Friday, February 20th, 2009

Missed Week Three And Four, Going To Miss Week Five (sort of).

I guess you could call this a week five update. I’ve been pretty busy that’s what caused missing week three and four. I’m heading out now for a nine day snowboard trip (what a rough life).

Anyway if anyone has stumbled across what I’m doing here the first thing you may notice is the writing quality (not very good). I’m not exactly a brilliant writer to start with and I have decided to treat this case study like a traditional hand written journal, it’s a stream of my thoughts. There will be no consideration or focus during this case study on SEO optimized content or “You” targeted content.

In the future I will move back toward targeted commentaries but for now I’m having fun here and working on taking this somewhere “I’ve been to busy” isn’t a valid excuse any more.

P.S. Looks like I will have to set-up some akismet features, sadly and not surprisingly I already have recieved garbage spam comments.

Tags: development; social transparency; web design

Posted In Cosmicblend Case Study, Cosmicblend Photo Log
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Saturday, January 31st, 2009

Photo Log Week One

The state of the cosmicblend website one week in.

The appearance of Cosmicblend One week in.

Tags: branding; development; web design

Posted In Cosmicblend Case Study, Cosmicblend Photo Log
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Saturday, January 31st, 2009

Week One: Typography

I have decided to first focus on typography, often overlooked and rarely done well. Typography is one of the most under appreciated aspects of web design, I believe that the font stacks picked for you website are a critical extension of your brand. If you would like to see an excellent presentation on typography take a look at what Jeff Croft put together. Cameron Moll also wrote an article to help us non-typographers pick practical typefaces.

I’m be no means a typography, I am however someone who greatly appreciates a well picked font stacks on a website. For Cosmicblend I have decided to break a little from the classic “browser safe” fonts, Cosmicblend is going to use:

body { font:120% Baskerville, Times New Roman, Times, serif; color:rgb(75,75,75); line-height:1.5em; }
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 { font-family:"Gill Sans","Gill Sans MT","Helvetica Neue","Helvetica",Arial,sans-serif; line-height:150%; }

This choice has not been made for the sake of breaking from the norm but rather because it was once mentioned to me that the most common task performed online is reading. Anyone looking for the services I provide will likely look through this website, they may even view it through any one of the emerging smartphone devices. The goal with this font stack choice is to create a pleasant, classic and hopefully timeless feel on the Cosmicblend website, I will not fiddle with the typefaces endlessly or even annually.

I understand the need in the web development/design community to annually (or at whatever interval) update the look of your website, however I also find strong appeal in the “Slow Design” approach. Ideally Cosmicblend will stand on the line dipping it’s toe in both ends of the pool, likely the font stack selection used for Cosmicblend will spend more time in the “Slow Design” end of the pool.

The font stack isn’t all resolved yet, perhaps later today it will be. While still on the topic of typography and design approaches I would suggest taking a peak at Travis Gertz’s Play Experiment or at Jason Santa Maria’s inspiring personal website.