Back in October last year I received an email from Jon Hicks asking me about the Peculiar icon project. It was a surreal moment for me, since one of my favorite designers was asking me about a project of mine.
After exchanging one or two emails, I understood that he was actually writing a book about iconography. Later the book was finished under the name the Icon Handbook and included Peculiar as a reference project for CSS icons. I was pretty anxious waiting for the book to be available for purchase.
I think I finally made my father proud. He was working more than 30 years with movable type and quite liked the icons from the handbook. He even ask me to translate the interview with me.
I’m pretty sure any designer will want to have this book on his desk. I, for one, I’m honored to be included in it.
0 replies April 15, 2012 Hope for the Future
Back in 2009 I wanted to make a change in the way I use social networks. I simply disconnect from everything. It was a good thing to do because I managed to spare myself some time, otherwise it could be wasted on stalking pretty girls on Facebook. I’m joking, of course. No, I probably didn’t joke, but I’m sure you’ll get the idea.
It comes a time when a social site reach its maximum attention span and everybody tends to ignore why they came there in the first place. The place becomes unwanted for people that actually cared for what the social sites stood in the beginning.
A little bit of history
Before Twitter, Flickr was the only social network I needed. I was using it for everything: designs, posters, mock-ups, photographs, sets, experiments, even embarrassing updates from time to time. Then Facebook came along and promised to be the best at it. After some time I was disappointed by two facts: people joined Facebook because it was cool, not because they wanted to be part of a community. Second reason was that Flickr was acquired by Yahoo! — they didn’t get the fact that Flickr was a network of small communities that could interact between each others.
Nowadays we have another monster in the house which is called Google Plus. I was using it for a few months. It was really cool and addictive in the beginning because I could create myself some small communities called “circles” and interact nicely with each of them. But suddenly people are joining Google Plus in masses and all those small communities are now dispersed and they will increase to sparse to the point when nobody will give a crap anymore.
Dash and moving forward
Dash comes to cover a need for people that are interested on my online activities. There is a girl that was trying to be up-to-date with everything I did on the web. I created the “dashboard” to make her life easier. Strangely, it makes my life easier too. Because now I’m aware of what services I really need, the usage on various social networks and the openness of others.
Regarding the usage, I noticed that I no longer need Tumblr to showcase photos I take because its functionality was replaced altogether by Instagram. Also noticed that Flickr back in its glory days is now replaced by Dribbble, Instagram and Twitter.
Regarding the openness, I would have liked to include a feed of my favorites on SoundCloud. But they didn’t provide this basic feature. Instead you have to create a developer account, receive a token, understand the API and then get a XML of those bloody favorite tracks. This is not how the future should look like. The “big guys” of the industry should be the first to promote tools like RSS feeds for their users. Only a true open social network has a future, the others will cease to exist at some point.
3 replies January 7, 2012 Meaningful Labor
Can you choose what to do? I bet you do. We live in a world where the only way forward is to make choices. Letting others make the choices for us is a step backward.
The thing is that we are afraid of making wrong choices. It’s not a bad thing to always be right, but in the long run it can be a burden and it won’t get you too far. Making wrong choices from now and then can relax your thought, freeing you mind like they say in the Matrix. Can you remember that scene from the movie when Neo tries to jump from one building to another? He focuses on doing everything right and as expected, he fails harder.
Be stressed about the right choices you already made and don’t be worried that you gonna make some wrong ones too. The right choices are the ones that get you far, bring you satisfactions and you will almost die for to make it through. The wrong choices are there to keep you focused on what is important. I won’t tell you what is important because in the end, I’m not you.
After all that being said, he made the right wrong choice to write this entire article on his iPhone using Simplenote app.
3 replies December 14, 2011 Hope for the Future
Today, air planes won’t fall from the sky. Today is Romania’s National Day. The picture was taken at the parade. The push of a button makes you realize that you can save the joy, the excitement, the dreams of all people that are watching the event. Then you go home and feel lonely, insignificant, like nothing ever happen. The only thing you got is the moment you saved, the picture that lives in your mind, a memory that fades away slowly.
There is a saying: you can’t see the sky from the trees. What I’m gonna say is that without trees, there will be no sky. Without people, there will be no heights, no expectations from you. You have to climb on the back of other people to reach those heights — there is no other way around.
0 replies December 1, 2011 Les Fleurs du mal
I’m starting to see a lot of motivational and futuristic videos lately. They promote technology as the core of advancing society and it almost made me cry to see how untrue this is. Just watch Networked Society’s On the Brink or Microsoft’s Productivity Future Vision then wait a minute and think about. Is this what we really want from our future?
This future everyone talks about doesn’t really exist and it will never will. It’s just our imagination wanting to do more with less possible resources and more technology. But nothing changes, society is and will be the same, no matter how connected or educated we are, no matter how advanced technology will be in the future. Modern society won’t advance by playing World of Warcraft or by learning online Artificial Intelligence courses from Stanford, it needs an external threat that will bring us together, it needs something called “love” and it needs power to change.
Seeing technology as a threat is not the way – technology, the Internet, connected devices are just tools, tools that were here for thousands of years. When humanity discovered fire, it didn’t know what to do with it. That’s what technology is today, a sparkle for the future — a future were we need to learn to use intelligent machines for our own good. A future were we give up on wars, were we give up on being divided by cultures and traditions, a future totally different from what we imagine today.
1 replies November 14, 2011 Hope for the Future
