Onyx Design Weblog

Market Endeavour Organic

Fabian — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 17:09:33 +0000

Market Endeavour Organic is a website showcasing the organic brands distributed by Market Endeavour. Onyx Design completely designed and developed this Wordpress-based website.

Visit website: www.me-bio.com

Think Inside The Box

Fabian — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 17:02:12 +0000

For RAI Amsterdam, Onyx Design developed an online survey about their new catering brand in the form of a micro website.

Visit website: www.thinkinsidethebox.nl

Maasland Vleeswaren

Fabian — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 22:59:39 +0000

Vleeswarenfabriek Maasland did a complete restyling of their brand, including a new website. Onyx Design developed a corporate theme with a modern appearance.

Visit website: www.maaslandvleeswaren.nl

Market Endeavour

Fabian — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 14:33:22 +0000

Onyx Design fully redesigned the Market Endeavour website. The design is clean, simple and professional. The website is driven by Wordpress, giving the client the ability to update their own website.

Visit website: www.market-endeavour.com

Dansklik

Fabian — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 16:52:17 +0000

For the Dansklik project, Onyx Design developed a website for Susan Tonnaer, a dance expression and yoga teacher. Onyx Design worked together with a photographer and a graphic designer. The website is powered by Wordpress, which makes it easy for the client to update the website.

Visit website: http://www.dansklik.nl

Interview: font designer Douglas Vitkauskas (VTKS)

Fabian — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 14:23:06 +0000

Douglas Vitkauskas (also known as VTKS) is a famous font designer based in SÃ£o Paolo, Brazil. He has released a lot of his awesome fonts for free. One of his latest fonts, VTKS Revolt is the third popular font in DaFont’s free font top 100. Every single free font can be found on Dafont.com. The rest of his work (including paintings, premium fonts and logos) can be seen on his website, www.vtks.com.br.

How and when did you get started as a designer?

I started to paint when I was twelve years old, at a small school of arts called CANDIDO PORTINARI, named after a great Brazilian painter.

In 1992 I bought my first personal computer, with CORELDRAW 2, I already
worked as free-lance designer by that time. I took a basic course of Corel in the same
year and about two years later I began to use a program like Photoshop (I think
the name was something like GALLERY OF EFFECTS). Soon, I became interested in typography and I began to do research in books that I found at some specialized stores in material for artists.

With the birth of the internet and the improvement of the computer science
equipments, it was easier to develop some works with different typography.
But it wasn’t until that I became aware of the software FONTOGRAPHER that I began to develop some sources to use in my works.

Over time and by reading some more books on typography, I was perfecting my knowledge. Because of the growth of the internet I tended to release the fonts and see works of other typedesigners and I discovered new programs to develop fonts.

What motivates you to distribute a lot of your fonts for free?

It is an excellent way of letting people know my work, and it is also quite interesting to know that in some way you are taking part in the art of other people.

Where do you get your inspiration?

The great majority comes from old posters, the types there are more designed as an artistic work for a difference.

Other inspiration comes from the Punk age, or, as we say today, Grunge: also seeking an air of distressed style.

And finally the tattoos, which perhaps have been my first example of how the types may be us and value the work.

What software do you use to make your fonts?

I use Fontlab and FontCreator to create them.

Do you have any tips or tricks for beginning (font)designers?

Always believe that you can and must improve yourself and your talents, we never know everything about something, but we can learn and to know more above on what we think that we dominate.

I believe we can always improve like people or professionals. If we want to know how someone made something and we do’nt have the information, we must try to make something equal or even better. This way we will discover new things that make us different as professionals.

We must try to touch of the soul of the people who observe the work. It is not always possible, but that’s what makes a professional better than the others.

If I am not mistaken, Shakespeare said:

The more I think that I know, the more I know that I know nothing.

Thanks Douglas for this interview and also for all your free fonts that are available on the web! Please visit www.vtks.com.br if you want to know more about Douglas and his work.

5 Best Sources for High Quality Free Fonts

Fabian — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 12:52:58 +0000

There are so much free fonts around the internet, that it’s hard to find the best of them. It’s looking for a needle in a haystack. Luckily there are some great websites and blogs where you can download really good, free fonts. See 5 best sources for high quality free fonts:

1.DaFont

DaFont is just the best site around, if you’re looking for free fonts. They have over 8,000 fonts, organized by theme (typewriter, cartoon, western, chinese, etc.) so you can easily find the font you’re looking for. Wat are you waiting for? Go and grap some fonts over there.

2.Smashing Magazine

If there’s one reason why Smashing Magazine has grown so big (#11 in the Technorati Top 100), it’s because of their high quality freebies. Beside fonts, you can also find wordpress themes and photoshop brushes over there. They even have a special Font Category.

3.Fonts500

Fonts500 is a website with a overview of the best 500 free fonts, available on the web. For less than 3 dollars, you can even download all the fonts in one package. Visit the site.

4.Woork/The Daily Inspired

The Daily Inspired (formerly Woork) is also a really good place to look for free fonts. In the freebies section, Antionio Lupetti reviews a lot of fonts and het makes some good selections. See woork.blogspot.com.

5. Bittbox

Last but definately not least: bittbox. Jay Hilgerts spends a lot of time reviewing and making freebies and bittbox is the splendid result of that work. On this blog you can find every kind of freebie and it’s a good resource for every (web)designer. Visit the site.

If you know..

…another great site that should definately be in this list, don’t hesitate and post a comment.

Blog Action Day: Design of Charity Websites

Fabian — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 19:57:00 +0000

Today it’s blog action day. A day where we, bloggers, can start a worldwide conversation about poverty. WE can change the world. My contribution to this conversation is a review of the websites of the best charities fighting against hunger and poverty (according to the American Institute of Philantrophy). Let’s see if the excellent charities have excellent websites too.

Donate Now Buttons

The website should be one of the places where visitors can easily donate to the charities. So there should be a “donate now”-button somewhere on the homepage. Obvious, but not too obtrusive. Some designs have the buttons inside the menu, making them to stand out by giving them another colour. Other sites have the buttons under the first paragraph, or somewhere in the side bar. Every way is good. As long as the buttons stand out and call for action.

Flash for showing Photographs

A lot of flash is used in charity websites. For showing the photographs Flash is indeed a good choice and I saw some nice examples in the websites I reviewed. I think photographs really work when it comes to generating sympathy for the people that need to be helped. Using nice photographs in the webdesign is therefore a good choice and a good presentation with flash makes it even better.

Conclusion

The average website of a charity organisation is really good. These organisations spend a lot of time on good websites, which is also expactable, because the internet is so popular nowadays, that a lot of money can be gain with good use of it.

Let this blogging action day be a day to start the conversation about poverty and do something about it!

How2Launch

Fabian — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 12:29:59 +0000

“Hoe lanceer ik een nieuw product” (How to launch a new product) is the title of a marketing book, written by Jeremy Deacon and Margit Smeekens. Onyx Design developed a sparkling micro-website matching the book’s style.

Visit the website: www.how2launch.biz

Showcase: Social Media Buttons

Fabian — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 08:14:37 +0000

Social Media sites like digg and delicious have become of great importance for the traffic of a blog. Everyone wants to be dugg so every blogger adds social media buttons to their blog. But sometimes it’s very boring, all those standard ’share this’ and ‘digg’ widgets on every page. Luckily there are some designers who melted the social media links into their design. 29 creative examples:

1. CSSGlobe

Icons for Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit and DesignFloat. Unobtrusive and stylish.

2. Snook

These two buttons got a nice place in the article footer. The ma.gnolia icon fits great with the green colour.

3. Webdesigner Wall

The social media buttons are placed well and fit great in the design. The handdrawn ‘Digger’ makes the standard digg widget a great design element.

4. Woork

Woork has an ‘Add to delicious’ button in a nice, handwritten font combined with a speech bubble with the count. The compact digg button is more standard, but it looks good in this lay-out.

5. Ars Technica

Ars Technica uses a nice homemade digg button with counter.

6. I Can Has Cheeseburger

A few cartoony buttons in a own style. Very creative!

7. I love Typography

Four small black and white buttons with smooth rounded corners. Nonobstrusive and stylish.

8. Noupe

Noupe uses three small icons. The look good, but it bothers me a bit that they aren’t transparent.

9. Lifehacker

A few really small social icons.

10. Problogger

The icons themself are not special, but the list fits great in the columned design of the article footer.

Other Examples:

Opera Development Blog

The Watchmaker Project

The Trend

The most common place for the social media buttons is the footer. However, some designers are experimenting with other places like the post title or first paragraph. Plain text links are getting more popular too. There are still a lot of standard buttons out there, but the small icons (16×16 pixels or a bit larger) are getting more common, which I think is a good development.

I hope you got some inspiration and if you have encountered other creative and nonobtrusive examples, leave a comment and tell it and I will add it to the article.