"zengarden" in Weblog

Wow, the Zen Garden has done it again… The latest 3 designs are possibly my 3 favourites so far. Oceans apart isn’t anything groundbreaking but it’s incredibly elegant design very well executed. Start listening is a wonderful meeting of 50s advertising, wild west typography and modern design garnish. Lush. Finally, Springtime has a great feel to it with a novel use of horizontal tiling to allow the centered page to dominate the unused space. All round, great entries.

I’d been a little unimpressed lately with the proliferation of International Compliant design in one or two designs. CSS lends itelf to commercial-style design with straight lines and flat colours. That’s great for the industry (and it means that we can earn ourselves a living) but a site like the Zen Garden should be an opportunity to really try and push the boundaries - turn out pages that are interesting as well as elegant. There are enough examples in the Garden already that show that CSS can make it in the commercial world so it’s great to see some interesting designs coming out of the woodwork.

In a fit of self-indulgence I decided to Google my Zen Garden entry, Postage Paid. And I got some quite interesting results!

There was Dave Shea’s initial post about the batch of designs that Postage Paid occurred in. Nothing too much to write about that but it seemed to be a good place to start.

The result that I’m most pleased with is Shaun Inman’s comment on Andy Budd’s blog. I saw this at the time, being an avid reader of Andy’s, but I’d forgotten about it. I absolutely love Shaun’s work and for him to say that he was influenced by Postage Paid is just incredible. I know it’s a small thing but I really appreciated it.

I have no idea what the folk over at StijlStek.nl said about Postage Paid but I think it was something nice so I’m going to include it here. Maybe something about an original theme?!

By far the funniest mention was on a college kid’s site. Apparently Postage Paid was set alongside ZunFlower and Stone Washed for a design critique! And it was slated! I’m not too bothered about that - I didn’t expect the design to appeal to everyone. I wanted to break a couple of rules and turn out something a bit different, likely alienating my audience in the process. Having said that it was slated, I’m pretty chuffed to have been discussed in class, even if I did come off badly!

Woohoo! My Zen Garden submission made it… I’m dead chuffed about that and more than a little bit relieved.

I was trying to do something a little bit different to the other hi-design submissions they’ve had lately… something organic, instead of my usual clinical/minimal layouts. I started out trying to do a hand-drawn design but as I was searching through my scans archive for hand-writing samples I found this 7” packaging I’d saved ages ago. I loved the number of labels the people at the other end had managed to stick on one small piece of cardboard! Looking at it, it occurred to me that it could make quite an interesting basis for a design. And here we are!