Komodo Media » Inspiration

The Wonderful World of Illustration

I’ve loved illustration ever since I can remember. Most of all of my inspiration has its roots in Walt Disney’s work, but as I grow as a designer…and yes, illustrator, I am opening my eyes and appreciation to different styles of illustration. I spend most of my time on the web using Dribbble, a site [...]

Interviewing Dan Mall

Dan Mall, photo by Pete Karl II Dan Mall is an award-winning interactive art director, designer, and developer. He is an enthralled husband, Senior Designer at Big Spaceship, technical editor for A List Apart, and former singer/keyboard player for contemporary-Christian band Four24. Dan writes about design and other issues on Twitter and his industry-recognized site, danielmall.com. Read my interview with Dan Mall.

Interviewing Jina Bolton

Photo by Dustin Diaz, Flash Bullet on Twitter @ded.

Interviewing Mark Jardine

dConstruct 2009

Sweet mama, how can this page be so simple, yet so sexy?

Dragon Labs + Anand Sharma

Gorgeous beakers at Dragon Labs. Click the image for a full view.

Time for another inspiration post. This post is long, long due. I remember when I first saw Anand Sharma's work at Dragon Interactive. I was stunned by his clever gradients, pixel precision, cross-fading animation and level of detail put into everything. I remember wrongly thinking that his site used Flash because of the smoothness of his animations, and clever way of producing text shadows. No, he does it all in HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Squared Eye

Holy flippin' hamsters, this site is beautiful. I don't know if I've seen a site that I love every "square" inch, but I sure do with Squared Eye. From it's calming hues, to it's sexy image preview tool tips, to it's subtle fading navigation, I love it all! I love the cartoony, yet professional feel - something that I don't even know if I know how to nail yet. With it's generous use of white-space, large fonts, smooth-yet-subtle animations and the whale with ear-to-ear grins (I guess I'm loving hyphens), and gratuitous use of Archer, I dig this site big time. Do check it out. Do tell them that it is hot. Do make a site that is original, fun and smooth like theirs. Do subscribe to this site's feed now, 'cause more inspiration is coming. Rock the free world.

TimVanDamme.com

I'm going to write about a very obvious inspiration, which is Tim Van Damme's site: timvandamme.com. This site very obviously has design cues taken from Apple's design style, yet it feels it's own some how. Rarely do I see a site and am compelled to design based off of that inspiration. It takes something special, something I'm not even sure of the recipe for, yet something I love to spark me to model one of my own creations based off of that creation. Tim's site did that for me. I loved the simplicity and single focusedness of this site. I love that it serves one purpose. I love that it is clear and direct. I love that it is beautiful.

Weightbot

Check out my most recent design inspiration, Weightbot.

Inspiration from Cabel

I haven't been this inspired in a year, or around a year. Well, heck I don't know how long its been - but the last thing that inspired me this much was sneak peeks of Street Fighter 4's watercolor-y goodness. I was obsessed with the Street Fighter series as a youngster (maybe it was Chun Li), but enough about that. This post is about Cabel Sasser's wedding.