Alex Cornell is a San Francisco-based Designer and Musician. He is a cofounder of Firespotter Labs, a Google Ventures funded startup. He has also worked for IDEO, Plancast, and many other Bay Area companies as a UI/UX and brand designer. Recently he passed over 2 million views on YouTube where he maintains a periodic online musical presence.
Contact Alex:
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Links for Alex Cornell:Alex's main site / portfolioAlex on TwitterAlex's Music
Julien Vallée is easily one of my favorite artists working today. His work is so unique, refreshing, and wonderfully playful. I’ve written about Julien before, and I was very excited to learn that his awe-inspriing body of work is now available in print. Rock, Paper, Scissors is his first monograph which includes lots of Julien’s personal work and commissioned projects. For such a young designer, it’s pretty amazing how much he has created to date!
Another aspect of Julien’s work that I enjoy, is his penchant for documenting his process so carefully. I am a big fan of detailed process descriptions (as you could probably guess), and Julien’s process videos are exceptionally well done. One of my favorites is the making of DanseDance. The book will come with unique login codes to access more of these types of videos.
UPDATE: It was fake, but now it’s real. And it’s going to win everything. Download it now.
Ever since I started working in startup land, I’ve felt the need to ingratiate myself in the ever-buzzing world of *tech*. This means staying up on other companies, the blogs, and the general Silicon Valley scene. This can be very repetitive. People get funded, apps get released, and companies buy things. Sometimes a conference happens. Having spent the better part of the last few years neck-deep in this hullabaloo, I figured it was time to parody it.
As I’ve written before, I currently am working on Nosh. Download it now please, it will give you some context. One of my periodic jobs is to drum up support for our beloved application. Of course we do this the normal way (press releases etc), but when I have a free weekend, I like to try and make something crazy and unusual to help things along. I call it the Skunkworks project (achieve victory by any means possible). We had great success with the 404 page, and the Jotly project was my next move. Continue reading for the full process behind the project.
Ivan Maximov created these opening titles for 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea for a school project. Relatively simple, compared to some of the intricate excellence you see on Art of the Title these days, but I think they are extremely well executed. I really like the combination of live action underwater footage with some slick After Effects motion overtop. Would love to see a longer version.
I’ve written about a few of my recent projects (404 Film, Nosh Promo, Firespotter Logo). These were all completed for Firespotter Labs, which is the startup I cofounded earlier this year. We started out with four of us and we are now thirteen, primarily engineers. Up until now, I’ve been the only designer. We are growing fast and the design needs of our company are such that one visually-minded pixel crusher is no longer enough. We are looking for another full-time interface designer.
Firespotter Labs is a startup. We are looking for someone that enjoys this kind of atmosphere. I’ve written a little bit about what it’s like and I couldn’t endorse it any more positively. Our first app launched about one month ago, so we are primarily working on it, but we have a couple other products in development that will need a lot of love.
If you’re interested, please email me at jobs[at]firespotter.com and use the subject line “Design Position”. We are looking for someone with a strong skillset in user interface design. Usability is key. If you can make things that look awesome as well, rock and roll. Please include a link to your portfolio and/or Dribbble. If you’ve worked on sites or apps in the past, it would be very helpful if you could link these as well.
We are hoping to fill this position as soon as possible.
There’s always been an arms race of sorts, between startups, surrounding their 404 pages. Often times sites do something unusual on this (hopefully) seldom viewed page. When we first started working on Nosh, we had a lot of fun brainstorming ideas for our 404 page. We wanted it to be crazy and I think it ended up being just that.
Above you will find the video that became our 404 page. It’s loud, crazy and weird. Definitely the most fun I’ve had on a Sunday in a long time. I’ve written up some production notes here — if I miss anything feel free to ask in the comments and I’ll be sure to answer. Follow me on Twitter here.
These shapes by Axel Brechensbauer remind me of some strange and wonderful life-size chess set. They certainly don’t look like objects I normally come upon in real life. If one day I do, I will purchase and display them atop of my home for all to see.
Last week I wrote a quick post about the Nosh Promo video I made. Today I wanted to go into the production and describe all that went into its creation. Basically it was insane 25 hours from when we started, until the next morning when I exported the final video and the power went out in my apartment building (literally AS I hit export). Above you’ll see the composite I put together to show how each step of the post-process contributed to the final video. View the final video here or at the bottom of this post. I’ll describe each step in detail after the jump.
I don’t think I’ve slept in days. Today our company launched our first app: Nosh. Above is the promo video I made a few days ago which will give you a quick little intro. I plan to write a few process posts on this whole thing: one on the video (which was an EPIC 24 hour production), at least one on the app development, the branding…there was an insane amount of work that went into all this that I’m really excited to share. For now though I am beyond exhausted and am going to go sleep in my chair.
Check it out and let me know what you think! You can read the Techcrunch article here. I’ll write more details later
From what I can gather, Nizo is an app that brings the lovely Super 8 stylings to the iPhone. The app isn’t out yet, but right now I’m just mesmerized by the promo page. Its elegant implementation really stopped me in my tracks this morning. The app is put out by Image Mechanics, who have a pretty darn sexy site themselves.
This is my favorite thing on the internet right now. These terrific animated GIFs were created by Jamie Beck, a NYC based photographer. The allure is simple: rather than overtly drawing your attention to obvious movement, these animations are very subtle and controlled.
*Tasteful* I think is right word to describe them. It’s what sets them apart from all the other nonsense GIF animations. The subtlety creates a kind of serenity almost — sort of a halfway point between film and real life. Definitely makes you do a double take the first time you see it.
Prediction: I know animated GIFs are as old as time, but I think soon this subtle spin on the technique will be absolutely everywhere. Enjoy it now.
This is an awesome video infographic about the computer virus Stuxnet. It was created by Patrick Clair, a motion designer from Australia. I’m not sure which was more captivating for me, the visuals or the information. From a design perspective, this is gorgeous, but it’s also a fascinating description of Stuxnet, the first “open source weapon.”
I’m giving a talk this Saturday at the WMC Fest in Cleveland, Ohio. The Weapons of Mass Creation Festival is a 2 day event packed with design talks, concerts and all sorts of other creativity-related goodness. It’s now in its 2nd year and is put on by local agency Go Media. A whole host of exciting people are speaking, check the lineup here.
My talk is Saturday evening at 5:30PM EST. I’ll be talking about all sorts of things — mainly some strange and wonderful lessons I’ve learned along the way from trying to become a famous musican to eventually dropping out of graduate school to terrify my parents and live a life of crime. Or something like that. Anyway if Cleveland is nearby for you I hope to see you there! Definitely find me and say hello. Maybe we can even talk about design (or anything else random of our choosing at that moment).
It’s hard to pin down what Apolis Global actually is. One part clothing shop, one part advocacy group, they guys at Apolis are certainly a versatile bunch. I’m writing about them mainly because of how impressed I was with their overall branding. They’ve got their visual message down. I placed an order through their shop and received the awesome artifacts above. It took me a moment to open the box because I didn’t want to destroy it.
I actually found Apolis by way of their logo, which I absolutely love. You can find out a little more about it here.
While it’s fresh I thought I’d write up the process behind the Firespotter Labs logo I designed. This was an incredibly fun logo to design and probably one of the quickest, at least when contrast to some of the luxurious multiple month (!) design explorations I’ve done in the past for school or other companies. That said, it was exceptionally challenging; it’s hard to take a step back and think objectively about the company you’re a part of.
Before this, I had already designed a couple logos for some of the products we’re working on now. I had to break out of the “consumer application” design mindset I had been entrenched in for a few months. For the mothership, we needed something that conveyed that we were a lab full of crazy people brewing up cool things, while simultaneously appearing to be trustworthy gentlefolk worthy of venture support.
You may have noticed I’ve been a little less prolific around here lately; finally I can tell you why. I’m very excited to say that as of last November, I dropped out of my MFA program and am a cofounder of Firespotter Labs, a startup funded by Google Ventures. As cool as the concept of “stealth mode” sounds to me, I am decidedly *not* used to *not* writing about what I’m doing. Finally my sneakiness is over! In this post I want to talk a little bit about what it’s been like working full time at a startup, as well what went into the decision to drop out of my design program five months away from graduation. I really couldn’t be happier.
Of course all this would be more interesting if you knew exactly what we were doing. I wrote our About Us the other day and it’s spectacularly vague, so if you want to find out a little more, there were nice articles in The New York Times and Techcrunch last week. Continue reading →
