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damien's zone

Posts with #design

The intersection of liberal arts and technology

Inspired by "Lack of Vision" by Louie Mantia.

It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.

I have been thinking about this quote recently.

I've never really considered myself an artist. Sure, I've spent hours upon hours messing around in Photoshop as a teenager on the family computer, learning graphic design by following tutorials written by other amateurs. Does that make me an artist? I don't know.

I've always been more into what we'd call web design and UI design. I've learned the ropes of all of this by just fiddling with existing things. It might feel "pointless" to an outsider, but I remember taking great joy in essentially doing "vector tracing" with Photoshop's Pen tool over various pictures of my favorite fictional characters, pieces of tech and such.

All in service of figuring how to reproduce that one gradient, that one visual effect, etc. I distinctly remember doing that over a (I didn't know it was at the time) render of Apple's iconic Cinema Display.

For fun, I was messing around.

Around 2009 or so, I got my first iMac (the first aluminum one). I had been lusting for this computer for a long time before my parents got it as a birthday present. I browsed Apple's website, enamored by the design of the hardware and the software.

I was so enamored by the visual, dare I say artistic, quality of the software (I couldn't judge anything else by that point) that I had gotten into the hobby of disguising my Windows XP installation into Mac OS X "Tiger" and later on, Mac OS X "Leopard".

Even after getting my Mac, I didn't stop obsessing over that aspect of my computing life. I took any excuse I could to change my system or Dock icons by downloading a pack from The Iconfactory, MacThemes.net…Read more

design technology