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The Archive thing

Look at the top of the header of the new look. I added a new page called Archive. Check it out. It con­tains a list of all arti­cles on this site. Major­ity of the arti­cles are in Ice­landic, but hey, Google can trans­late it for you.

I am writ­ing mostly in Eng­lish now unless it’s some­thing only rel­e­vant to Ice­landic read­ers. Take a look at the Archives, maybe you’ll find some­thing there you missed before.

6 links to help you get into grid based design

I got a request from a designer who wants to get started with grid based design, or at least wants to know what it is all about. The ques­tion was like this: Can you rec­om­mend a good primer on grids? Seems to me all mate­r­ial I find on it is way beyond what I’d call basic.

The ques­tion was asked on Twit­ter, so my answers were lim­ited to the 140 char­ac­ter bound­aries. There­fore I split the answers into six sec­tions like this:

Grid design 01. Let’s start with this nice expla­na­tion on base­lines, the key ele­ment (a PDF): http://bit.ly/c2jlBc

Grid design 02. When you have selected your main lead­ing you should adjust it to the page using : Easy­Grid­Cal­cu­la­tor

Grid design 03. This Easy­Grid­Cal­cu­la­tor helps you make a grid and columns based on your leading/baseline.

Grid design 04. When fin­ished cal­cu­lat­ing you can think of every­thing in doc­u­ment grid units and the fun starts.

Grid design 05. Links to what I have writ­ten about mak­ing grids in Illus­tra­tor: Grid Sys­tems InDe­sign comes soon.

Grid design 06. Good source with links about design­ing inside grids: Design­ing With Grid-Based Approach

New look, not just for the looks

This site was just moved between servers at my host provider. The rea­son for this was that the SQL data­base on the old server was out­dated and pre­vented me from updat­ing Word­Press. Why not just update the data­base? Well, there was some del­i­cate stuff on the old server and it was too risky to update the server just for me. So I was offered to move over to a new machine. Con­tinue reading…

Grid Sys­tems – Easy Grid Calculator

Cal­cu­lat­ing a grid for a lay­out can be time con­sum­ing. It’s not only the cal­cu­la­tion itself but plan­ning and lay­ing out the whole thing is a task that even­tu­ally will take some time. How many columns is fairly easy to decide on but decid­ing the mar­gins, top and bot­tom may prove to be harder.

Spend­ing time on mak­ing the per­fect grid will save you time in the end and in most cases also make your design look bet­ter in a much eas­ier way. How­ever, try­ing to reduce the time spent on cal­cu­lat­ing the grid is worth while. Peo­ple often feel so pressed to start the job that they don’t think there is time to do the math.

Con­tinue reading…

My own book­store… so to speak.

I just added a new cat­e­gory to this site, Books or Books I like (I have not yet decided what the title will be). It’s an affil­i­ated linked show­case of books that I already have and like and I will add some oth­ers I would like to have or which already are on my shop­ping list.

I know for myself that I like it when some­one I trust tells me about a great book and I hope you like it what I rec­om­mend some to you.

Of course I will get a few cents if some­one buys a book using these links but I thought I should tell you upfront. In the next few days I will add more of my books and also some oth­ers to give you a hint if you want to buy me one.

As you may already know my inter­ests are in many cat­e­gories, so don’t be sur­prised by the selection.

Diode lamp shows dark­ness and daylight

This is a con­cept for a diode light unit which I sent in for a com­pe­ti­tion held by The Illu­mi­nat­ing Engi­neer­ing Soci­ety of Ice­land and Orku­veita Reyk­javíkur (The Munic­i­pal Energy Grid). The final results of the jury are in and this con­cept got an hon­orary men­tion as being both tech­ni­cally and aes­thet­i­cally pleas­ing. Although I didn’t win the main price I just wanted to show you the piece.

I will soon present few other things related to this basic idea. And also a kind of a sis­ter piece which I am design­ing too. The pic­tures here are made in Illus­tra­tor and Photoshop.

Con­tinue reading…

What type are you?

What Type are you, pre­sented by Pen­ta­gram. Try it for fun.

Con­tinue reading…

Sim­ple way to con­trol your email – your own way

Blogs and arti­cles about per­sonal pro­duc­tiv­ity have been very pop­u­lar last few years. They present ways to make life a lit­tle eas­ier by look­ing into every cor­ner of our daily activ­ity, ana­lyz­ing our behav­ior and try to find bet­ter solu­tions for every action.  

I have read quite some of these. My main prob­lem with all this good advise is that I some­times have a feel­ing that the author is tak­ing his own nat­ural behav­ior and tries to make a sys­tem out of it. Then tries to get oth­ers to adapt to their sys­tem. I find a lot of those great ideas just too strict. Too much work to make the sys­tem and too much work to main­tain it. And what I really hate is: There is no way for me to keep that kind of a tidi­ness up on a daily basis. Don’t get me started on Empty Inbox, please.

Con­tinue reading…

How to make a cir­cle color spec­trum in Illustrator

So you want to make a color spec­trum like this, using Illus­tra­tor? Here is how you can do it.

Start by mak­ing a new doc­u­ment in Illus­tra­tor. The size does not really mat­ter because Illus­tra­tor is res­o­lu­tion inde­pen­dent. I pre­fer to have my doc­u­ment in RGB col­ors because it gives me the free­dom to move it over to diver­sity of dif­fer­ent color pro­files later on. Besides RGB has wider color spec­trum and thus brighter colors.

Con­tinue reading…

Hunungsskinka með 30% afs­lætti við kassann.

Það er flott að fá þessa fal­l­egu skinku með 30% afs­lætti við kas­sann og nóvem­ber er ein­mitt rétti tíminn til þess að fjár­festa í slíku kjeti og eta það.

Ég veit ekki hvort ég hefði tekið eftir þes­sari mein­legu villu í þes­sum annars girni­lega miða, en það gerði Kjar­tan Már Hjál­mars­son sem sendi mér myn­d­ina. Bon appetit!