A Feed Apart is the official twitter aggregator for An Event Apart. It was originally created by Pete Karl and Nick Sergeant at the AEA Boston 2009. After a resounding success and in anticipation of the AEA Boston 2010, Pete and Nick decided to have A Feed Apart reprogrammed and redesigned.

One day Nick approached me while we were working together at dwaiter and asked me if I wanted to redesign AFA… My answer immediately was “HELL YA!” My task was to create a new look for AFA. This included a logo, icons and a user interface.

The AFA logo and twitter avatar

I started with the obvious which is the logo. We were not sure if we wanted to go really far from the look of AEA or to stay fairly close, so we ended up in the middle. The new logo has resembling elements from the AEA brand while having its own unique look. I came up with ten different variations.

We all agreed that we liked number 4 to be AFA’s twitter avatar and number ten as the official logo. The logo got tweaked a bit too after some nice feedback from Andy Birchwood on dribbble (http://dribbble.com/shots/14991-A-Feed-Apart-Logo)

AFA Icons

One thing the original AFA was missing were icons. Since I love pixel icons and this was a great platform to use them, I thought why the hell not! So I started with my iPhone. I know some of you might think, oh he is going to do some research on iPhone icon designs. That wasn’t why I turned to my iPhone though. The reason was this C64 Paint XL app

I was able to use it to create a huge family of pixel icons which I ended up utilizing some of for AFA.

AFA User Interface

One thing that really helped me with the design of the new AFA website was the old AFA site. Pete and Nick put a lot of thought into the original AFA which made my life way easier. Nevertheless I had to improve the interface and find better ways to show sessions and other elements in the website. I tried my best to stay true to the simplicity of the original AFA while giving it a visual enhancement. I can’t wait till AFA goes live in May. Stay tuned

Snow Day 2010 from Ali Ali on Vimeo.

Quick shots of a snow day in Rochester NY. Shot with the Canon EOS 7D and 18-135mm lens

Random Moments from Ali Ali on Vimeo.

Experimenting with high level controls of black and white in this HD video that I took around my apartment in low level lighting.

Shot with the Canon EOS 7D
Lens: 18-135mm

Elias Ali Feb 04, 2010 from Ali Ali on Vimeo.