Updates - Future Horizon Design (2025)

Announcing my new website and visual identity.

The new website is a vast improvement (in my opinion), both in terms of design and accessibility. Here are some new features compared to the old site:

Light and Dark Mode

The old website had alternating blocks with inverting colours with no light or dark mode. The new site has media query controlled light and dark modes with alternating background colours that do not invert (exception being the code tag).

If your browser theme is set to dark, you'll see the dark theme. If it's set to light, you'll see the light mode. A description for these is on the About page.

Visible Skip Link

I personally like having visible skip links because:

• it makes skip links equally visible for all users, not just those using screenreaders or navigating by keyboard
• no wondering if the site has it or not and only find out after pressing the tab button
• easier to access on mobile devices if not using a screen reader

For more about this, you can see Bypass Blocks (Level A)

Return to Top Link

The old website did not have Return to Top anchor links. This site does, and it is built into every page using templates. It has a role="navigation" and since it is a repeating block, it is outside the main element. Visually, it is symmetrical with the Skip link in its positioning.

High Contrast Text

This website carries on the tradition of high contrast text. All primary text has a contrast ratio greater than 7:1 which exceeds the WCAG AAA requirement, and all headers exceed 4.5:1 contrast Contrast (Enhanced) (Level AAA).

Large Buttons

The old site had a somewhat clumsy burger menu on mobile. The new site has a simpler linear navigation and all buttons exceed 44px in height (and width). Target Size (Enhanced).

Monochrome Icons

The monochrome isometric icons far exceed the minimum contrast requirements for non-text content (>3:1). The icons are easy to see and also reminescent of old user interfaces that used to be in black and white. Non-text Contrast (Level AA).

Breadcrumbs

Not that this website has a very deep link hierarchy, but to help people find their way around particularly on the Portfolio I've added a breadcrumb list to every page which re-uses the icons from the navigation bar.

Alt Text

The previous website had exceedingly long alt text for graphics or illustrations in the portfolio, in the alt attribute of the img element. The new website has moved long text alternatives to paragraph text instead and delineated from the rest of the content by a fill area, header, and smaller text.

Long text alternatives should be easier to navigate by screenreader and also has additional markup like lists. Decorative images like the background graphics (header and footer waves) are described on the About page.

Accessibility Page

To make even more obvious my commitment to accessibility, I have made a dedicated Accessibility page with a description of my goals and known issues (PDFs are not my friend right now) and work arounds.

Indieweb Markup

I've used Indieweb microformats like h-card and h-entry. The Indieweb is an online community dedicated to owning your own content and publishing it on your website first as a people-focused alternative to the corporate web. This is also one of the reasons why I picked my Mastodon instance as indieweb.social.

I always like having a place online I can call home and mine and microformats help do that by ensuring parts of a page can be better integrated with the rest of the web.

Also, using rel="me" on the social media links on the homepage, this helps assure others of my identity across the web.

The increased amount of bots, deepfakes, and impersonation online is worrying and this is one way of trying to assure people can trust that I am a real person and not some false persona.

No Javascript

Now, Javascript isn't evil, but the last website used a Discord hook for the blog and contact forms and I decided it was better to retire that method. I'm taking a leaf out of Low Tech Magazine's book by letting users submit comments by email instead.

New Web Host

I've moved web hosts from Swish Connect to Serversaurus. Both are Australian web hosts with green credentials, but Serversaurus is also a B-Corp and I want to support businesses that make a positive difference and prove it through independent measurement, evaluation, and action.

XHTML

The new website is written in XHTML5 rather than HTML5. The difference won't be visible unless a page breaks but it did help me learn new coding practices and get me in good habits like checking for valid XHTML markup using Nu Checker.

I'm excited to finally release this website. Hopefully it's a better experience all around. Any questions, do send me an email!

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Sharing my latest project, the Cyanotype Bear Blog Theme.

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Sharing my latest project, the RBlind Lemmy Themes.

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I've been developing a new website behind the scenes, which will involve an altered logo and name and new domain name. I am planning to set up a redirect but I'm giving you all some prior notice. I'm excited about the change, this website, name, and the logo have needed a refresh for awhile. The new site will have a dedicated Accessibility page too.

As a part of the changes, I've renamed my socials to my real life name so there is hopefully less confusion leading up to and after the change. Since a new project I've been working on involves Github and Codeberg, it seems standard practice there to use your full name to publish repositories which is part of the reason for the switch.

As a side note, I updated my Mastodon instance recently from a11y.social to indieweb.social. Although I care about accessibility, the a11y.social instance is small enough that a lot of posts from other instances don't propagate there and the inverse is true - posts coming from a11y.social don't necessarily show up on other instances either. So far there seem to be a lot more active accounts on indieweb.social so I'm glad I made the switch. The hyperlink on the contact page will redirect properly now.

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Multimodal Integration

Updates:

1. New design: Multimodal integration
2. Indieweb
3. Social media
4. Future plans
5. What's happening

For starters, you can take a look at the new design.

New design: Multimodal integration

The new design is an early 2000s style wallpaper with elements of frutiger aero, and since I can't resist textural layering it has that too. I listened to the band Enigma while working on this, they are a mixture of electronic, experimental, and worldbeat. They have an otherworldly sometimes futuristic feeling to their music which I like to think is present in the artwork.

Some visual elements were borrowed from PLOS open source scientific papers (with the exception of one Nature paper which nonetheless shares the same license). Each use the Creative Commons 4.0 license which require attribution and indicating if changes were made. All content was altered for aesthetic and artistic purposes.

It has the following elements:

• pyramidal neuron (vector trace and edited): Modernization of Golgi staining techniques for high-resolution, 3-dimensional imaging of individual neurons
• cortical slice images (traced cortical slice shapes for use in the background): BigBrain 3D atlas of cortical layers: Cortical and laminar thickness gradients diverge in sensory and motor cortices
• artificial neural network image (bottom right, vector traced and edited, described the network in the text): Real-Time Decision Fusion for Multimodal Neural Prosthetic Devices

I re-created the tansigmoid function shape in Python using numpy and matplotlib and exported it as a vector. I don't think the slope factor is identical but it's close enough.

References

IndieWeb

In terms of the IndieWeb changes, I removed the latest blog post preview from the homepage to give the Updates feed more space. I added the microformats for marking up update feeds and entries which means the homepage and these very entries can be loaded in an RSS reader, so I added context below the RSS icon to explain the difference.

Social media

I have removed the links to my Twitter and Instagram from the Contact page and I will no longer be using those accounts. X being the worst of the two as it is a very hostile to the LGBTQI+ community and I don't want my attention converting ads into fuel toward hate campaigns or lobbying. Instagram operates under Meta's genAI training rules which is mandatory and in Australia we have no digital or privacy rights to allow us to opt out. So I stopped posting images on X and Instagram months ago but it's time to pull the plug completely, I think.

Future plans

I'm planning on rebranding my website sometime early next year, which will involve restructuring the website a little since it's not working as effectively as it should, and changing the logo.

What's happening

I installed a dual-boot of Linux on my Windows PC and I am finding the environment very refreshing and fast. No more Windows advertisements or web search in the start bar, and no more genAI being forced on me. Although I can't completely switch due to my favorite design programs Affinity and Clip Studio Paint not having a Linux version (yes, Linux has Lutris however I haven't gotten it to work on my PC yet). In the meantime, I have moved my web development and almost everything else over to Linux.

If you're curious about which Linux distro I'm using, I'm trying Accessible-Coconut. I'm now using my design Multimodal Integration as the GRUB boot loader wallpaper.

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Updated the Contact page with my Bluesky account details. Give me a follow!

Additionally, added a green web hosting badge from The Green Web Foundation to the Sustainability section on the homepage.

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Added a logo and pattern design to Green Cloud Computing Branding.

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Updated the portfolio with my newest projects ESR Book Cover and ESR Book Illustrations.

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New design Floppy Disk Branding

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New design 1bit Postmodern Collage.

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Design Focus is a series of posts about designs that maybe do not belong in the Portfolio but I still want to share and focus on for the sake of a retrospective and learning purposes.

This time I am looking at a design I made in early 2023 in February. I wanted to explore an early 2000s aesthetic as well as a Vectorheart [CARI] design. The square layout and chaotic composition was inspired by some designs by Bee Lever (Mukkys World) [Instagram].

Here is the design:

Design Background

At the time Brisbane was going through a heatwave and I was sweltering in my sharehouse room that had no air con or fan. I was generally feeling a bit pessemistic about climate change action worldwide (and in my home country) and the generally substandard of private rentals I have experienced and how many of them are not very liveable.

So part of my inspiration in creating this graphic was to draw attention to better ways of designing houses that might be more climate resistant (and cooler) while also drawing attention to renewable energy. Researchers have found that green roofs can improve biodiversity in cities, reduce temperatures of the roof, and make solar panels more efficient (see Study finds green roofs make solar panels more efficient [ABC News] and Green Infrastructure Research Group [University of Melbourne] for more).

If you are interested in a more detailed document, one key piece of research I found when creating this design was the Residential apartments sustainability plan [City of Sydney] published in 2015 by the NSW government.

Visual Design Elements

The design is thematically solarpunk which means it takes an optimistic viewpoint and aims to create enthusiasm for a sustainable future.

The visual root of the vectorheart aesthetic is the futurist movement so there is an emphasis on velocity or movement. This is communicated by the use of line, like the thicker ground line that intersects the top third of the design as well as the circuit lines. Literally there is a speed meter with years on the tick marks to represent that we are moving through time overlaid over a backdrop of trees. You can interpret this as it takes time to grow trees or the climate takes time to change.

Some of the design elements are obvious, like the shapes for the trees, buildings, lightning, and clouds. There is repetition of the trees in three of the quadrants; trees on the ground, trees on the tops of buildings, and trees floating in the air as abstract icons.

There is some text overlapping with the other elements which you can interpret as flavor text.

The colour theme is blue to represent temperature cooling as well as create a tranquil atmosphere.

Overall I like the cartoony nature of the graphic (like the cloud shapes). The visual style is intentionally flat as I did not want distracting elements, but if I were to return to this idea I would experiment with texture or image overlays to create additional depth.

Conclusions

This design is quite literal in its intentions and focus. I hope that it got some people thinking about how they can be more climate positive or do something to be more sustainable.

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Multiple updates:

• New RSS Feed button on the homepage
• Adding pricing plans to two new pages Graphic Design Services and Web Accessibility Testing.
• Addded 88x31px site banners to the Copyright page.

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Design Focus is a series of posts about designs that maybe do not belong in the Portfolio but I still want to share and focus on for the sake of a retrospective and learning purposes.

To start, I am looking at this student assignment completed in November 2022 to create a typographic poster based on an inspirational quote.

There was a bit of flexibility since inspirational quotes are anything that can be meaningful to you and be personal, so I chose a quote from the book The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia A. McKillip [Wikipedia].

The giant Grof was hit in one eye by a stone, and that eye turned inward so that it looked into his mind, and he died of what he saw there. -Cyrin

This is the poster design which I will be discussing in this post. The quote is in rune-like letters surrounded by the eponymous Beasts of Eld.

About The Source Material

The fantasy novel The Forgotten Beasts of Eld was published in 1974 and the quote is from the boar Cyrin who speaks in riddles. The quote is about self-insight with a literal pun looking inside, indicating that someone (in this case, the giant Grof) could have such poor self insight that they die (allegorical spiritual death).

I came aware of this book through a non-fiction book Wizardry and Romance: A Study of Epic Fantasy by Michael Moorcock [Wikipedia] where this cryptic quote was used to intrigue readers. Well, it worked on me.

The Forgotten Beasts of Eld is difficult to describe without ruining the story. It won the 1975 World Fantasy Award [Wikipedia] and is one of my favorite fantasy novels. Do not let the blurb fool you, the story is much more than it seems.

The book centers on a druid named Sybel who at the start of the story is a hermit with only mythical creatures that used to belong to her father to give her company. One night, Coren of Sirle appears and hands Sybel a baby to take care. The baby is from the deceased Queen of Eld. Sybel agrees to care for the child, and eventually, twelve years later is drawn into the world of humans for better and worse.

The Brief

The point of creating the poster was to emphasise typography while keeping imagery subtle. However, I ended up making mine much more illustrative focused. It needed to be in the CMYK colour space (for print), have bleed, and be able to be printed on a large dimension.

Poster dots per inch (DPI) is usually 75 for a viewing distance greater than 1 meter.

The Beasts of Eld

In the book, the Beasts of Eld are:

• the Black Swan, described as having a golden eye
• Blammor (black mist with five eyes), represented by an eye
• Cyrin, the boar with red eyes and white tusks
• Gules Lyon, the lion, used to live in the Southern Deserts
• Gyld, a dragon with green wings, and a love for treasure
• Moriah, a huge black cat, green eyed
• Ter, a falcon

The world of The Forgotten Beasts of Eld is inspired by celtic or irish mythology which influenced the visual design of the poster.

The Visual Design

Due to the celtic influence, the design focused on runes used in the ancient Germanic tribes of Europe. Runes were a cryptic writing system used to tell fortunes, cast spells, and provide protection. I altered Futhorc (Anglo-Saxon) runes [Wikipedia] to become more like english letters so they could potentially be read.

A major inspiration in terms of shapes and colour scheme was this runestone from the church of Resmo on Öland at the Swedish Museum of National Antiquitiesin Stockholm.

The final design used an eye in place of the word eye in the quote, and additional eyes were added around the name Cyrin to represent the Blammor, a mysterious creature Sybel encounters.

In celtic design (see The Designer’s Craft Library: Celtic by Chris Down [Internet Archive] for more celtic designs and ornaments), ropes and knots have spiritual significance to represent the bonds that bind people and spirits together.

More generally, ropes also represent bondage or imprisonment (of animals or humans).

Both symbolic representations of rope have significance in the story so are used in the visual design.

The elements are positioned on a gravestone both due to the original use of runestones as headstones but to link back to the quote about the giant Grof dying. Some texture overlays of stone were used to reinforce the idea.

An early concept that I didn’t execute due to the complexity and time constraints of the project was having the animals tied up in ropes.

Retrospective

In retrospect the design does not work very well because it lacks cohesion between the different elements.

While I am very proud of the animal graphics I made (the 3d relief effect is thanks to an Adobe Illustrator effect) they do not interact harmoniously with the runes or the rope.

The gravestone (for the giant who died from lack of insight) also is very flat, lacks contrast, and it takes a few seconds to realise it is a gravestone.

I think the eye shape takes up too much prominence in the center of the composition, although it does help provide a central focus.

Although I spent a lot of time creating custom vector graphics for the runes they ended up being difficult to read and the shape of the letters in an arc is a little unusual and not realistic to actual runestones. If I were to recreate this design, I would save time using rune graphics somebody else had made (or a different celtic inspired font) to place the text more realistically. In addition, with this saved time I could focus on entwining the animals in rope to make the overall design more cohesive.

The book cover title and author name are a bit squashed and could use additional white space, however the overall placement is like a book cover and is a call back to the source material in book format.

In addition to all these visual factors, I was told by many people the quote did not make sense (until explained, and even then was still very cryptic). As one of my instructors said Look, I do not get it, but it is your design. Nonetheless, I stuck with my idea because I wanted to pay homage to this great story as I had learned the author, Patricia A. McKillip had sadly died the same year I made this.

Conclusions

While this was not the most successful design, I did learn a lot from this project and it was fun to do. That is what student projects are for, after all. For experimenting, trying new techniques, and ultimately, learning.

I would also recommend everyone read The Forgotten Beasts of Eld. If you are local there is a free copy to read in the Brisbane City Council Library Catalogue.

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Major updates.

• New contact form on the Contact page.
• Added labels and styling to the Guestbook form.
• Expanded the Resources page to include further Web Accessibility Resources.
• Hidden CSS updates to improve styling and fix broken link styling.

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New design added, a Neurofunk Album Cover with a Industrial Gothic visual style.

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The Cre8 Your Career exhibition is a student showcase for Queensland TAFE design students to share their work.

In this blog post I will share my exhibition table and some designs from the night (1st December). Apologies for the blurry photos, I was just using my phone camera.

My Table

The graphic design students each had a display area to set up and we each designed posters and a skateboard deck for the night which was required to incorporate our logo and branding.

For my table I had a blue tablecloth, a guestbook with blue pens and ruler, portfolio, business cards, a packaging assignment, and some QR codes with links for a digital guestbook and social media handles.

I liked the idea of having a guestbook because I remembered somebody from the exhibition last year did the same which I wrote in. I also thought it helped encourage interaction and help link to the concept of digital guestbooks and emphasising interactions through websites rather than social media. That said, the messages I got on exhibition night were in the physical guestbook and I am guessing it is because of the accessibility of it.

My brand colours are different shades of blue to represent different depths of the ocean along with the brighest blue being a bioluminescent blue and reminescent of the IBM computer terminal.

My poster and skateboard designs showed deep sea creatures and the telescopefish which is my logo mascot.

Each design student shared a space with somebody else. For example, my friend Sunny Disposition had her display on the other side of mine. This photo was taken by her as well!

I will share the guestbook entries at the end of this blog post, I want to share some designs from the night first.

Typographic Murals

There was competition among the students to develop typographic murals for the walls. The winners shown below all produced eye catching designs.

Another Dollhouse Design hand-rendered their typographic mural including illustrating bat wings for gothic vibes. This mural was positioned outside the elevator as you arrived at the third floor.

Una Design employs a New Wave approach to typography and pop art colours and half tones. This mural was positioned in one of the corridors on the third floor.

Tayticus Designs grunge typographic mural was inspired by David Carson. This mural was positioned inside the exhibition room against the wall.

Hantreloardesign made a pixel art mural with graphics inspired by Super Mario Brothers. This was another mural which was inside the exhibition space.

There was one more typographic mural design but I forgot to take a photo of it. 😞 It featured illuminated letters which can be seen on IF Instagram.

Skateboard Decks

All the Diploma graphic design students had skateboards on the wall and I thought a good way to capture the variety was to take a photo of them all together. So, moving from left to right...

Other Design Work

The visual arts students had credits for their work though I have had some trouble finding their social medias. Here are some of the works I thought were really cool.

Unfortunately I could not find the design student names for these as they were dissociated from the display area though they were for the Certificate III in Design.

Grace Kelly made these cute jellyfish, all her designs have a pastel appearance you can find her as princessartworks on Instagram.

The baphomet illustration is by Nandus Swart and the gravestone painting is by Miranda Westway.

The pin head sculpture is by Chiara Kostoglou, I wanted to ask if they have ever seen Twin Peaks Season 3 mainly due to this character called The Arm who has a similar appearance.

The fantasy sculpture of the deer is by Bellamy Smyth and the abstract rock sculpture is by Andrea Lugo-Calamlam.

Invasion from Outer Space!

Just wanted to give a shout out to these space ladies walking around the exhibition area and who let me take their photo!

Guestbook Entries

I got a mixture of very kind and very amusing messages in the physical guestbook. I have left the names out but I appreciate you all. Thank you for the messages!

Wrapping Up

This evening capped off a busy yet fun year. I made some great new friends, got to be inspired by the people around me and in cyberspace, and got to think about design all day. If you were part of the exhibition, I hope you enjoyed this year too.

If anyone finds their design on here and wants credits, feel free to send me a message and I will add it!

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Plunged Into Clouds is a experimental electronic ambient album cover. You can see the final outcome and read about the project background in my Portfolio.

This blog series, Design Filter, is to focus on my design process for a few projects. This includes showing process work like mind maps and thumbnails.

To start this project, I drew upon my experiences of listening to electronic music and the experimental ambient genre to generate a mind map using word association.

Referring to benchmark images of album covers by The Future Sound of London, Tangerine Dream, and Amorphous Androgynous helped me develop thumbnails.

Early on these had a more fantastic quality to them as I was also inspired by some Dream Theater concept albums with science fiction and fantasy imagery. However as the benchmarks were more abstract the thumbnails eventually took on this quality as well.

Once I decided to focus on a scene of coral and more abstract walls of coral or underwater rock, I took photographs of sand, the ocean, and sky at Masthead Bay (Cleveland) with a Canon EOS 1500D. I scanned pigeon feathers at 600 pixels per inch so I could use them as image textures, and used stock photography for underwater imagery like coral and to make natural looking colour gradients. Some example imagery I used are shown below.

Processing the elements in Adobe Photoshop involved layer masks, the healing brush, advanced blending modes, the colour range select tool, layer masks, the mesh warp tool, and gradient maps. Some of the gradients applied were taken from swan feathers, pink sunsets, purple coral, and blue skies.

If you would like to see the final design please see the Portfolio. If you would like to work with me, feel free to send me a message!

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I was randomly assigned the film Raging Bull (1980) to design a poster. You can read about the project and see the final outcome in the Archive.

This blog series, Design Filter, is to focus on my design process for a few projects. This includes showing process work like mind maps and thumbnails.

This post will contain some spoilers for film The Raging Bull (1980).

To make this movie poster, I first watched the film in order to form my own opinion about it. I considered a few different approaches to metaphorically communicate a relationship breakdown and did an exercise of word association mixed with a mind map to get me started with the design.

One unused concept was to explore the idea of misguided chivalry (a white knight) using medieval imagery to focus on Robert De Niro’s character who is destructive, violent, and lacks self-insight. The inspiration for the medieval imagery were designs by Aubrey Beardsley who produced illustrations for Le Morte de Arthur [sample images in a blog post by Enchanted Booklet].

After focusing on one of the thumbnails of the characters sitting apart on a giant sunflower to emphasise their failing relationship in a more literal way, I did studies of some movie stills and used reference books to develop the imagery.

Imagery of a knight with arrows in his eye or being defeated by a dragon eventually bled into the final concept with the characters sitting apart and being surrounded by screeching flying dinosaurs. Here is the final black and white lineart to show what I mean.

If you would like to see the final design please see the Portfolio. If you would like to work with me, feel free to send me a message!

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You can read about the project and see the final outcome in my Portfolio.

This blog series, Design Filter, is to focus on my design process for a few projects. This includes showing process work like mind maps and thumbnails.

To develop this illustration, I first made observations in a mind map on the elements of design used in postmodern designs I wished to emulate, then notes on the imagery in the BSAF YouTube trailer, logo, and website. Once it was all on the page, I could consider combining elements together.

The left and right sides considered the two different parts to the project. In developing the thumbnails which started as a sketch beneath the mind map, I combined elements from the left and right side.

The isometric composition which began on the mindmap page ended up being the strongest idea with the other thumbnails almost being diluted or more simplified versions of the same.

The draft was made in Clip Studio Paint which used an isometric grid and a vector pen, then was later imported to Adobe Illustrator for clean up and colouring. The vector drawing is in red, as I usually use black ink for the final layer and keep draft layers in colour.

I was really pleased with the final outcome, so I hope you take a look at it in the Portfolio. If you would like to work with me, feel free to send me a message!

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Crystal Shore is a vegan sparkling water beverage brand. You can read about the project and see the final design in my Portfolio.

This blog series, Design Filter, is to focus on my design process for a few projects. This includes showing process work like mind maps and thumbnails.

Once I decided on an overall direction for the logo, sketching the logo in a circle helped constrain the proportions and helped me focus on simple, abstract shapes.

The strongest examples clearly showed the dolphin silhouette, a wave or ocean element, and a crystal or sparkle shape.

The best logo concepts had good flow and a sense of motion with leading lines. These logo designs also worked well in black and white. Here is a close up of variations on the final concept, which I next took into Illustrator to convert into vector and test in colour.

As you can see, a lot of the actual designing of a logo happens before the logo has entered the computer. That is because it is easier and faster to iterate designs on paper before the finalisation happens on the computer.

If you would like to see the final design please see the Portfolio. If you would like to work with me, feel free to send me a message!

Comments

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Comments

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Comments

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Comments

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Comments

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Comments

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Comments

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