I received a pleasant email from the Senior Editor of How Magazine. It informed me that Tempesthole.com has been chosen as one of their Top 10 Sites for Designers for this month, March 2009.

A utterly and completely unexpected honor but no less appreciated. It’s nice to see the effort I’ve put into the site doesn’t go unnoticed. Thank you very much, How.

Anyway, have a look around the new site. I like think It’s matured like any fine lady should, becoming slightly more charming and considerably heavier than before. If you find anything that isn’t broken (images, links, etc.) please let me know and I’ll do my best to break them too. Please update your bookmarks as well.

Here’s an illustration to fit the theme:

What actually is under the hood is WordPress with a custom theme specifically developed this purpose.

And here are the new, green ones:

And, again, you can download both sets as a single zip-file. And again, of instant messengers they should work with at least MSN and Pidgin.

Download Skull Emoticons V1.1

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

The problem with MSN was that it uses 19 px emoticons instead of the 16 px I’d done. That fit me fine, since I’d already thought of doing bigger versions of them, to get clearer expressions. And true enough, the extra 3 pixels make a big difference and the new ones were much easier to do too.

I don’t think I’ll go into any detail about the design process – so here’s the full set of the twenty emoticons:

Or you can download the whole set as a single zip-file too. Have fun and use however you see fit.

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

I was using 16 x 16 pixels format for these – and that feels really small. The main goal I had was to keep the expressions as clear as possible – which meant keeping them really simple – while getting some unique character for them on the side. Turned out keeping them just legible is quite a task in itself. No wonder the round, basic smileys are so popular: they work really well!

First round: Pretty basic:

Second round: Skulls. Thought these were a bit unclear in parts and the white color isn’t the best one to use with these. Some other color for the skin pops out the eye and teeth whites better – thus making the expressions clearer:

Third round: Simpler skulls with blue face. They’re perharps a bit too dark for this background:

It’s hard stuff – more respect for the designers and pixel artists that are actually good at this stuff.

This one’s a project I did for The University of Lapland’s International Office. It included a magazine ad, some editorial material, a website and a small printed brochure to lure exchange students to the three higher education institutes located in Finnish Lapland: Kemi-Tornio University of Applied Sciences, Rovaniemi University of Applied Sciences and the University of Lapland. For more info on the schools or the project, you can visit www.StudyInFinnishLapland.fi.

The first that that had do be done was the magazine ad and the editorial material for the article. I only had a couple a days to both come up with an idea, that would be both fairly fast to execute with the materials at hand (I only had the couple of days for it) and could be expanded to cover the whole campaign.

I came up with an idea of combining monotone illustrations of student characters with actual photos of the school premises. That way the illustrations would work as a unifying graphic element – as well as making the promotional material pop from the other schools’ mostly stuffy, official and highly similar ads. All this had to be accomplished without compromising the credibility of the schools.

Here are the ad and one of the images from the magazine article (the other was just a basic photo collage without illustration).

The next step was to design and produce the mentioned website for the campaign, which included doing a few more illustrations for the site’s headers. To avoid using images just for their visuals I included maps of the schools’ locations in the headers.

And as the last phase, I designed the eight page brochure of the campaign. Again a few new illustrations and I modified a couple I’d already used. Here’s a couple of spreads from the brochure and an photo with an illustration:

And finally, the characters compiled into a single image as well as one of the illustrations from the brochure.

NOTE: None of the photos are mine and their rights belong to their respective owners. They are either from the archives of the schools, the media archive of the city of Rovaniemi or www.Finnfoto.com.

This is Shane:

It’s a nice change of pace doing something for charity. Probably one the reasons I got my lazy ass to actually doing this is that just a week ago I was exposed to this, and I still feel a little affected. Fucking awful, I’m feeling bad just typing a blog entry about that stuff.

Here’s the card I came up with:

Now, Shane’s birthday is in just a few days – on 30th of May – but I’m sure he won’t mind cards arriving late. So, especially if you’re within reasonable mailing distance, drop the boy a card.

Edit: I can’t help but feel a bit like an asshole for submitting this to IF with the nature of the site being self promotion as it is. Nevertheless, it is a new piece and fits the theme ("Cars") a little too well for me to pass.

I suppose it might be a bit more exposure for Shane’s effort too.

So, this is me embracing the world.

That’s it, I plead temporary insanity. Back to brooding.

In Alberto’s words: Born in 1926 in Finland, the godfather of constructivist graphic design.

Click the image above to view the whole blog entry with several impressive book covers and illustrations. Check out the whole blog while you’re at it, Mr Ruiz’s stylish sketches of women are well worth the look. A word of warning though, he has the RadioBlogClub player blaring away on the blog and it can be really loud if you get caught by surprise.