Sorry, but you’re just not my type.
I made a t-shirt, actually my first one, in the mangacurta.com project, a portuguese version of Threadless, a voting site for designer T-Shirts.
Go check out the project and while you’re at it vote in mine. But be fair, I don’t want pity votes.
offf is an International Festival of Post-Digital Creation Culture. What’s that you say?
Imagine the best graphic/web/motion-designers, digital artists, reunited in a single place talking about multimedia and design. Interested? If you’re reading this you should. And this year offf comes to Lisbon.
Designers are often seen as some dudes that like to sketch a couple of monsters on a paper, and that they’re day job isn’t really that serious, so there’s still a lot of clients that don’t take the design area as seriously as they should, because they don’t understand the importance of the image as a way to communicate, be it branding, advertising, web site design, whatever.
So, there’s always “that client” that thinks just because his nephew knows how to work in Frontpage, or actually knows some html, he can make him a completely free website, so we should make him a discount, since he’s being all nice and is actually willing to pay us something. Well, no way. And my response to that kind of client is “get your nephew/daughter/cousin/brother and let him do your website”. The last guy that told me that has a “online soon” sign for 2 years now.
Because of this problem, there are a couple of designers that get some way to make people understand that design is a serious area, it can be all colorful and full of designer toys, but it’s an important area, specially to the companies needing to brand themselves.
Daniel Mall compares a designer to a hairstylist, but don’t worry, it’s actually pretty good because it makes it easy to anyone to understand why we are needed, and why you shouldn’t be careless with your brand.
See Daniel’s post here.
There are going to be some changes around here, I need to “clean up the house”, expression that I don’t really know if it’s used outside of portugal.
Anyhow, this blog will continue, but I will focus on design, my work area, and I guess I’ll leave tech for another site where I’ ll be hanging around (japplo). So I’ll drop the “web” and “technology” from the header, and the only way you’ll see “web” in here will be in “webdesign”. This is necessary to keep me on focus and to help me promote myself. As a designer, people need to know exactly what I’m into, because if I go to a webdeveloper blog and I see a lot of cooking recipes and origami tutorials, I’ll doubt of his dedication to his job (give me a lol here).
Something that is really confusing me is the language I should use here. I chose English because it’s pretty much universal, and this way I’m not limiting myself, but I know that many Portuguese aren’t that confortable with this language and I don’t want to put them apart, but a 2 language blog is NOT an option. It bugs me a lot to read something in 2 different languages, just the fact of them being there together saying the same stuff in different ways it’s creepy.
A portfolio is in the making. I’ve been saying this for sometime now, but I guess that now it’s for real. It’s always school and clients work first, so my personal work always stay a little behind. As soon as I have some time, I’ll pass from wireframes to real webdesign.
In the meanwhile go see me at deviantart in http://antoniopratas.deviantart.com, I have some stuff there, and everything will be in my online portfolio in a hopefully near future.
I am available to freelance, so if you’re interested in working with me drop me a line here and we can arrange something, wherever you are in the world.
Thanks for reading
Japplo.com is a new technology website from Portugal, where I’m the co-founder, along with Hugo Ribeiro.
There you will find various articles talking about technology, apple, linux and gaming, and almost every relevant news in the computer world will be there, so if you want to be updated and be aware what’s happening in these tech days, keep watching us.
Well, I most certainly do, and while “lazying” around my feeds, I found one that fit in the context. Leo Babauta from ZenHabits.net wrote this post, Unproductivity: 8 Fantabulous Ways to Make the Most of Your Laziest Days, where he gives some great tips on how to work on those days that you’re so lazy that you feel that the only thing you can do is watching TV Shows.
Read it and then read his blog, he talks about health stuff, like eating better, forcing you to exercise, and talks about GTD.
Do you twitter? I twitter. Wanna twitter? Come to twitter and twitter all you want. You can grab later twitterrific, twiteroo or twitbin to watch your twitters without having to twitter all the time.
I had the opportunity to watch in the past 8th of November a talk with Carlos Coelho about his latest book, Brand Taboos. This was one of the best talks I’ve ever watched. He studied in IADE, founded in 1985 the company Novo Design , that 19 years later turned into Brandia, one of the biggest branding management companies in all Europe. Carlos is a brand specialist and usually writes about that subject. 
Carlos has founded a new company, ivity-corp with Paulo Rocha, designer and co-author of the book Brand Taboos. In this book he talks about branding in the best way you could get. Imagine a guy talking with you and joking all the time, but in the meanwhile, explaining to you how a brand is born, live and flourish, and what you can do to help it and what you shouldn’t do so that you don’t destroy it.
Carlos Coelho is definitely very experienced and in the way he talks, he assures that the audience understands him in the easiest way possible, like the example that creating a brand is like making friends to a bird. You have to go slowly and be patient, because if you rush it the bird may run away and never come back, that’s the same with the consumer and the brand. If the brand goes too quickly and hard against the consumer, the consumer may never come back to trust in that brand.
I hope you read his book if you’re interested in branding and how to build a brand, because sometimes people seem to forget that a company needs more than a logotype, it needs a brand. You can find the book here.
OiNK has “died” recently, and much has been told since. I was a user too, and I definitely feel the need for another OiNK, but I won’t go into all the discussion about piracy, buying CDs, whatever.
Read this post by Rob in DemonBaby.com. I definitely loved it and it cleared my mind a little about the music industry and how it should be changing. In my guts I knew that something isn’t right, but I’m not into changing worlwide systems, but this makes sense.
For more (and different) opinions, read the comments. There’s some bashing but there’s also some other perspectives. You decide what you think is right.
http://www.demonbaby.com/blog/2007/10/when-pigs-fly-death-of-oink-birth-of.html
I could sure use a Waffle, what about you?
I’m buying a new device soon, and I have one requirement that needs to be met, it has to have wifi/wlan, and it can’t be very expensive 
. Most of the time I’m at internet hotspots where I could be connected and check my e-mail real quick for example, but for that I have to take my laptop off, turn it on, wait 55hours until Windows loads, connect, open browser, login, check e-mail and shutdown and close. And a laptop isn’t the most portable device just to check e-mail, so I have some ideas:
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