Wolf

20 years old

Antwerp

Male

Blog - see all 201

On the subject of overcoming inspiration overload 2 weeks ago

My comment on Viget's most recent article: Overcoming Inspiration Overload

I don't visit design galleries. I start drawing; and then I put my ideas on the screen. Every design is designed for the client, but there's always a good bit of Wolf inside there.

I like to think that separates the men from the boys - a clear mark. I strive not to take cues and bits from others [on purpose]. That is, random cues and bits. I will gladly listen to a well formulated design critique about one of my designs.

Of course what I end up designing is largely influenced by what I see and discover, but I don't go out hunting for visual interestingness on purpose before I start designing.

Then again, I barely do brochure sites, where moodboards and the like are helpful at least.

Short review of the Classics iPhone application 3 weeks ago

Classics is an iPhone app allowing you to read public domain classics like Alice in Wonderland and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn on your phone. The application will cost you €2,39 and is available in the app store since yesterday. I quote:

Escape into some of the greatest stories ever written and experience a revolutionary new reading platform, only for iPhone and iPod Touch.

Firstly, this application looks brilliant and obviously a lot of time was spent doing detail work on the icons, the alignment, making sure the animations felt right et cetera. This is the work of two guys who know their stuff: David Lanham and Sebastiaan de With (who also wrote an article about the app's interface on his blog).

The main reason one would buy this application is to read the classics on their phones. The reading experience itself is probably the most important part of the app. The paper and text color contrast is friendly to the eye. However, I found the lack of a horizontal view causing an uncomfortable reading length. Flipping a page every 20-or-so words is tiring. I would have liked a simple scroll-down-to-read-more mode akin to Safari and Instapaper.

Rearranging books on the shelf is well implemented but a bit of a useless feature with the current amount of books. The book selection itself looks good. I haven't read any of these but I am curious about Paradise Lost and Alice in Wonderland. More information at classicsapp.com.

Fear of looking like a copycat 3 weeks ago

Microsoft knows that the best place to put widgets would be a Mac OSX-like lightbox window that overlays on top of your screen whenever you hit the dashboard button.

Apple knows that the best way to redesign Finder would be to implement a tree structure like Windows Explorer does.

However, none of these solutions are ever going to be implemented. There is a fear of looking like a copycat, and the interface suffers.