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

New illustrations created using Adobe Photoshop. These were made as a part of a bigger website design project which I will share more details about on a later date. Hope you will enjoy it.

While working at Dumbwaiter Design we were challenged to create an internal motion spot that features our capability to do print work. It sounded really easy at first until we faced reality. We quickly realized that print and motion just didn’t go together that well.

We went through many phases of ideation and concept development. Storyboards were made for all kinds of concepts from CG driven, live video to hand animated. Every one of those sounded good but then it was not really that practical to do and it required a lot of resources.

After a couple of months and five different concepts later, I finally hit it. I was sitting at the office staring at my computer monitor and then it hit me. I got up and picked our Canon 30D SLR camera with some sample print pieces and went to our brainstorming room. I called Adam, one of our part timers and asked him to help me out. Here is what we came up with this test

Later on, we showed that test to the group and everyone’s eyes widened and their heart beats accelerated. So at that point we knew that we had something good in our hands and we had to make a more refined one. So we set up shop few days later and we started to shoot again. However, after a quick mash up and a quick edit we realized that we were far from being done.

We couldn’t put our heads around it and we didn’t know why this second try just didn’t work. We went back to the initial test, which got us excited about the spot in the first place and we closely examined it. We found that the animation was too smooth than we liked and the colors were too washed out. The print pieces that we chose didn’t stand out on their own in the piece as well. We needed bolder and more in your face graphics to stand own their own while the motion flow.

So we went back and we created fresh new print work that had bold and colorful graphics that would stand out while being animated. We shot the spot by holding the camera with our hands and not using a tripod to give it a rougher feel. After the shoot we did a quick cut and we were very satisfied with the result. Later on we did some color correction and design a simple soundtrack to go along. Enjoy it.

Robofunk is a poster I designed for Dumbwaiter Design’s Print Motion piece. Here it is, for you to use as your computer desktop wallpaper or on your iPhone. Enjoy and share the love!

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If you have any question regarding this wallpaper please feel free to contact me. All the artwork is the property of Dumbwaiter Design LLC.