Calvin Blog Carl
Calvin Ross Carl • Artist and Designer • Portland, OR
I write about #art, #design, and what is happening in my #studio.
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Calvin Ross Carl, established in the state of Washington in 1985.
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I drew this out for my buddy David Carroll today.
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Today we did our first BBQ of 2013 at our house. My mother-in-law gave me an old Cooper meat thermometer last year.
It wasn’t very trustworthy for checking temperature, but it does have a beautiful face on the dial. So I decided to recreate it.
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Seals for the City of Portland, Oregon
There are only a few things I love on this planet, and one of them is my beloved city of Portland. So while having a free moment today, I decided to design a couple seals for the city I love so deeply. I have a feeling designing these will become a regular occurrence.
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Don’t avoid a project’s technical requirements. Embrace them. Enjoy the focus they provide and the ideas they inspire.
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Alongside my new paintings, I have been kicking around the idea of creating my own fabrics for use in sculptures. Or else I will just start a line of super trendy handbags. One or the other.
This is the first yard I have received. I designed the pattern which was then inkjet printed onto cotton. Not too bad for a first try.
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Interactive Guide to Web Typography →
The title of this page is technically “Interactive Guide to Blog Typography”, but this thinking should really be applied to virtually all web related type. This is good advice for beginners, and a great reminder for old pros.
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Farewell Waggener Edstrom. Hello Epipheo.
After nearly three years of the funnest job I’ve ever had, next week will be my last with my friends on the Waggener Edstrom design team. I decided the time has come for a new adventure! So on February 4, I will be uniting with the creative force that is Epipheo as an experience designer.
The Experience Design team I worked with at Waggener was a whirlwind of talent, hilarity, and genuine friendship. It is because of them challenging me (and just being better than me) that has allowed me to become the designer I am today.
So thank you to:
- John Weiss, for being crazy enough of a boss to trust me and hire me there,
- Chris Kalani, for being the reason I even got hired at Waggener,
- Tyler Sticka, for being a craftsman of a designer and teaching me how to say what is exactly on my mind,
- Therese Bartolini, for showing me how to be a true UX designer,
- Erik Jung, for basically showing me every new awesome development thing over the last three years,
- Andy Orsow, for a serious amount of laughs and all those romantic coffee dates,
- Josiah DePaoli, for always be willing to hash out ideas with me,
- and last but not least, David Carroll, for being the most adventurous and most fearlessly critical designer I know. Oh, and thanks for going to Epipheo too and hooking me up there. :)
There are a million other people I’ve worked with at Waggener who have been amazing, so thank you to all of you. I’ll be at Epipheo’s office the Pearl district. So let’s do lunch, coffee, and/or beers sometime.
It’s certainly a little bittersweet to say au revoir to Waggener, but I can barely contain my excitement for my first day at Epipheo, which must mean it is the right place for me. Thanks for all the laughs, learnings, and long walks (I had to keep that whole alliteration thing going with words that start with “L”).
Now as Jay-Z says, I’m on to the next one.
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Culinary Treasures is an old cookbook from 1979, written be the female residents of Holly Hill, SC. My wife and I discovered this book at her mother’s house. It contains dozens of recipes for fruit cakes, casseroles, and weird jello molds. A lot of the recipes depend upon unnecessarily processed foods like canned vegetables, Cool Whip, and even baby food in one. It’s surprising just how much our ingredients have changed in 30+ years.
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The Reason Why New Myspace Will Fail
This text is from Myspace’s “Library” page (which I suppose is the page to find all the songs, friends, and whatever you like) when you login for the first time:
You don’t have any connections. Check out the Discover page to connect to people and content that inspires you
Here is what the page looks like:
Let’s list the problems:
- What the hell is a “connection”?
- Why would I go to the “Discover” page? What am I “discovering”? “Connections”? My friends?
- When you say “connect with people”, who does it mean? Am I connecting with my friends, bands, celebrities, and/or strangers?
- And no human uses the word “content”. What does content mean? News, books, movies, music, what?!
- Even worse, below that text there is a little boxes of album covers telling me to “connect with a song”. Does “connect” mean I am going to just “connect” with a piece of music? I have no clue.
Overall, there is an incredible lack of clarity about just what Myspace is. And since this can’t even be explained clearly in their introductory tutorial text, I imagine the company is just as clueless with this new thing they made.
And honestly, I am a little disappointed. I sign up for every single new social networking site (hell, I even have a Microsoft Socl account), because you never know what will be the great next thing.
Once upon a time we asked people why they would go to Facebook, when we already all have Myspace. But Facebook came along with a clearer focus we understood, and we all waved bye bye to Myspace. And Myspace still hasn’t learned their lesson.
So remember everybody, copywriting is interface design. And every word helps influence the way visitors flow through your website. Something tells me after looking at the new Myspace most visitors are just going to flow right back to Facebook.
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The "Completely Redesigned" iTunes 11 is Out Now →
Overall, looks much nicer and they removed the mostly pointless left sidebar, which always took up too much real estate when compared with how often you actually interacted with it. Design-wise, it’s occasionally a little too valueless, so it has some of the same hierarchy problems as the Rdio design. But hey, the iTunes Store is actually fast and useable again!
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Fantastical Calendar for iOS →
Downloaded it immediately. Then promptly moved the iOS Calendar app to a folder labeled “Apple” where I tuck away all the crap Apple iOS apps I never use.
Fantastical doesn’t place importance on a day’s location on a calendar. Instead it just provides an easily scannable, well designed list of events, and just shows it in relation to the next couple days near the day you are viewing. Much more sensible.
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In my free time lately, I have been sketching and designing endless, repeating patterns. Someday I might create a website to house all of the patterns. In the meantime you can just the download the pattern on here, or just click the image above to get the tile used for the pattern. Use it wherever you wish.
Oh, and for reference, here is the sketch I did today to plan out this pattern.
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