The Chrono-Photostream →

I now have a Flickr account where I’ll be posting some of my favorite screenshots from my travels, along with a sampling of some EVE related design work I’ve done. Check it out!

New Look at CrazyKinux →

If you haven’t seen it yet, head over to CK’s site to check out the new banner I designed for him. It was a pleasure to give a little back to a site that not only got me on my feet in the blogging community, but got me into EVE as a whole. Cheers CK!

Designs Roundup Two

It has been a while now since my initial offer for free design work was opened to the EVE community, and since then, I have had no shortage of side projects to fill my weekends. It’s been a blast—the best merge my all time love (design) and my new sexy mistress (internet spaceships).

Round one was fast and focused, working out a few larger identities for some podcasts with a few banners sprinkled in.

Round two has been a little more piece meal, with smaller one-offs ranging from blog banners to forum signatures and logos.

But the list goes on. If you don’t see your logo/banner in this set of designs, do not fret, I haven’t forgotten you. It just happened that your request came behind a few others on the list, and there’s only so much I can crank out in my spare time.

With that said, for now, I’m going to have to put all future design requests on hold from this point forward.

This is partly due to the fact that I have more on this list to wrap up, and that won’t happen as long as requests keep coming in. But it more has to do with a new, much larger project that has landed on my plate, which rightly deserves my full attention.

In the next month I hope to be able to share with you all what it is (no, I’m not working for CCP…yet), but until then I’m going to keep it zipped.

So there you have it. Enough blabbing. Here’s a snapshot round two:

• Banner for Nashh Kadavr’s EVE Blog and Celebrity Death Match
• New logo for Lonetrek.ws
• Official Tweet Fleet banner
• Morphisat’s EVE Blog banner
• Fun little forum sig for Squizz

Looking forward to posting info on the new project when the time is right.

Tweet Fleet & Goodies

A good many EVE players have made profiles for their avatars at Twitter, and over the past six months it has turned into quite a bustling community for EVE discussion. It could best be described as a meta-game 24/7 chat channel. Always something to read, always something to talk about.

Well as I’ve mentioned in previous posts, 00sage00 has done a great job of formalizing the “Tweet Fleet”—as it has been aptly dubbed—in some efforts on his blog. His latest bit of brilliance has been to take advantage of the new Twitter Lists feature, which compiles a set list of Tweeters into an easily followable list. So even if you aren’t on Twitter yet, joining and following the Tweet Fleet is a great way to dive right in.

To give an idea of how much it’s grown, I’d like to welcome the latest member of the Tweet Fleet: @ccpgames. CCP has actually had an account for a while and posted the occasional dev blog link from time to time, but in the past few days they’ve really upped their game and began responding to us capsuleers. It’s good to see them taking the time.

Badges

Now, If you’re viewing my site outside of your RSS reader, you’ll notice a little badge in the top-left of the site, and another in the footer.

As a small donation to the Tweet Fleet / EVE Blog communities, I’ve put together a few badges to be used on folks’ blogs that are either members of the Tweet Fleet, or simply want to help promote the community. All you need to do is input a few chunks of CSS and HTML in your blog layout.

Insert this anywhere in your CSS Style Sheet:

/*BLOG PACK BADGES*/ .badgecorner { position: absolute; left: -1px; top: 0; margin: 0; padding: 0; border: none; float: none; } .badgenormal { margin: 10px 0; padding: 0; border: none; } .badgecorner a img, .badgecorner a:hover, .badgenormal a img, .badgenormal a:hover { background-color: transparent !important; border: none; text-decoration: none; } /*END BLOG PACK BADGES*/

For the top-left corner badge, insert this directly under your HTML Body tag:

<!--CORNER BADGE--> <div class="badgecorner"><a href="http://twitter.com/00sage00/tweetfleet" target="_blank"><img src="http://h.imagehost.org/0800/tweetfleet1.png" alt="Member of the EVE Tweet Fleet" /></a></div>

For the inline rectangular badge, insert this in desired location within site (suggested side bar or footer):

<!--INLINE BADGE--> <div class="badgenormal"><a href="http://twitter.com/00sage00/tweetfleet" target="_blank"><img src="http://h.imagehost.org/0568/tweetfleet2.png" alt="Member of the EVE Tweet Fleet" /></a></div>

Enjoy!

A few notes: I don’t guarantee this code will work with every site layout. If it doesn’t work easily, my best suggestion is to keep calm and move along. I also don’t have time to troubleshoot the HTML if it doesn’t work on your site, so please avoid sending me your support requests. (Though I’m a softie, so if you really need help…ah, what the heck…)

Designs Roundup One

Well, round one down. This past weekend I offered up my design abilities—being that it’s my real-life profession—to the EVE community for some fun, and fun was certainly had. The response was awesome, and I have enough jobs lined up for the next few weekends (so if I haven’t gotten to you yet, it’s coming). Requests run the gamut of logo designs, banners for blogs, podcast identities, and even some program design.

I can’t thank those of you that have contacted me enough, and I’m very glad the consensus seems to be that capsuleers are happy with the work I’ve done so far. I figured I’d post a progress report and do a little show and tell. Here we go:

Missions Collide

It’s a podcast we all know and love (and if you don’t, subscribe it fool!), and I’m grateful that Song Li asked me to help him out with the logo and podcast cover art. The logo is all custom-drawn typography, and the logo mark was an obvious choice for mission runners. I wanted this to feel a bit old-school—like an Atari game cover—because while mission running isn’t for everyone, it’s certainly a classic gameplay style.

Saturday Morning Starcakes

Another Song Li request for an up-and-coming podcast with a more informal tone. I’ll wait and let Mr. Li himself reveal the premise, but needless to say, it’ll be quite a treat.

Pods + Pills

This design was for my pal Crimsoneer who keeps a great blog over at Pods and Pills. The request was a logo design and a simple forum signature. Again, this is all custom typography and logo mark.

Stationside

Casiella, another fellow blogger, is on a mission to start his own podcast about EVE fiction, to put it briefly. I hope he doesn’t mind me spilling the beans here, but I’m really excited about such a podcast as I’m always fascinated with New Eden lore, and would love to hear some discussion on it.

The design consists of a custom-drawn logo (spot the mark?), a banner for a soon-to-come blog, and the itunes cover art. I had extra fun with the blog banner art, which is the image of a station fractured as if to symbolize the hundreds of stories contained within each facet of EVE. 10 points if you can spot all the characters’ faces.

While I wanted to give each one a genuinely unique character, I also wanted to make them feel like they were all part of the same universe. EVE has some pretty distinct design sensibilities (white type on atmospheric image), and working within those bounds go a long way for making these feel familiar, yet with the flexibility to become their own.

So, another update next week on round 2. Stay tuned.

EVEmac: Design for API App

I play EVE on a Mac. While I am extremely appreciative of CCP taking efforts to make the game playable on OS X, there’s still a long list of reasons why Mac capsuleers are at a disadvantage to their Windows counterparts, aside from the awkwardness inherent in a ported game. A majority of the disadvantage I see actually exists outside of the game itself, and has to do with those staple third-party programs most pod pilots take for granted: the EVEmons and EVEHQs of the ‘verse that just don’t have Mac development.

Now, I realize that it is only a very small portion of the EVE community that plays on a Mac, and I’m not putting fault on any party here. The fact is, because there isn’t a wide base of Mac players, there isn’t a wide community of programmers available to tackle native API driven software. That’s just how it goes.

But a man can dream. And ever since I started playing EVE I have dreamed of a truly native Mac API program that doesn’t rely on Wine or any other strange hackery. I’ve wished for an app that takes the beauty of the OS X aesthetic and runs with it. The iTunes of EVE apps, if you will (say it, “yes, yes I will”).

Then I stumbled upon this post in the EVE mac forums. A kind fellow named Flammard has taken it upon himself to build such a program, and as far as I can tell he’s gotten farther than any attempt I can find before it. So, being the “sure I’ll do it for free” designer I’ve been lately, I contacted him a few months ago and offered to help him from the design side.

He admitted that design may not be a priority for a while, since he’s still working to build the functionality, and rightly so. But I couldn’t help myself, so I spent a few days mocking up my dream OS X EVE API app (mmm…acronym soup), if nothing else than to give him a little aesthetic and user-experience guidance, which he was really appreciative of.

So it has been under wraps for a while, but I figured I may as well share the mockups with the community and get some reactions. I’m holding myself to standards set by Capsuleer, of course, in which Roc has done an immaculate job merging the right dose of EVE with the simplicity of Mac design.

Without further adieu, I present vaporware in its fullest, EVEmac:

I’ve only rolled out a small sampling of a few screens, but hinting at what other future functionality could possibly be. I have also shared these designs with the Capsuleer crew, and it kicked off a good discussion on how this might influence future Capsuleer releases! We’ll have to see what the future holds, but I’ve made it clear to PyjamaSam and Roc that these designs are practically theirs already, since I was so directly influenced by their program.

While Flammard has expressed that he wants to take his API program to this direction eventually, I’m not holden to any one developer. If anyone is secretly a kick-ass Mac programmer and is so inspired to run with my design, please do contact me.

Otherwise, I hope this is a little eye-candy for Mac users out there. We can dream, together.

Design

I have an offering I want to open up to the EVE community here—one that my future self may want to shoot me for, but he’ll deal with it.

I try to make it known that I’m a graphic designer by profession, and I’ve received a few compliments on the layout of the Chronofile and gotten some expressed interest in helping others with EVE related design work. I’ve recently helped Chainer out with a few banners to promote his site. I mocked up Roc in true Basterd fashion. I’ve done a little work with PyjamaSam on future Capsuleer updates (and I’d love to do more!). I’ve even mocked up what my dream Mac native API app might look like, in the vein of EVEmon and others, and sent it to a few developers hoping to get some programming legs on it (bigger post on this later…with pics).

I just want to let the community know that as long as it’s EVE related, I’m all for it. I have a blast working on this stuff, and would love to have a body of related work. This is where you come in.

If you’d like some ads for your site or app, need a logo for your podcast, banner for your corp forums, an alliance logo, EON ad, UI design for a web app, etc., do not hesitate to let me know. This doesn’t mean I’ll necessarily have the time or capacity to do anything under the stars, but it won’t hurt to ask.

Because I see this as you all really helping me get a body of work for an unsaid purpose (I’m sure you can use your imaginations), I’m doing this for free (no $, no ISK) for as long as I can handle. If demand ever gets so high that I need a breather, I may begin to throw in some ISK costs, but I’m not betting on that for a while.

So, hit me up with your requests if you’ve got them, and I’ll see if I can help. Thanks folks.