A new design

Austin Govella — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 18:02:51 GMT

Just launched a new design. I'm proud. Not because it's the greatest design ever, but because it really matches who I am with what I need. I'm a contrarian at heart. My design is driven by what others aren't doing rather than by what it needs to do, but as someone who believes so much in the user experience, what's a contrarian to do when the prevalent style becomes clean, usable, readable websites? That's my style! So, the post page becomes this crazy mash of colliding elements before slipping into quiet order below the fold. Then the elements start colliding again in the footer. I love it. The main page and everywhere else are oddly utilitarian. But, at least they're overseen by the mummyhead. It's either a sad or disturbing icon about the self. Stolen from the Situationists and adorned with grungey, paint splatter angel wings, it floats over a logotype set in a classical style. I'm not sure what that says, but it's me.

An Armani Casa ad from this Sunday's New York Times Style Magazine.

In this Sunday's New York Times Style Magazine, a slew of furniture ads seemed to reflect an underlying fear of globalization present in much of the Western world. Each ad represented an onslaught of the different, the foreign, and the strange, and each onslaught was kept back by a reliance on the super-clean lines of modernism; those same lines that reflect education and class as the West's cultural redoubt against all things foreign.

All that wasn't in my head at the time, but this is my response. It's odd. Despite feeling so disconnected from the Design world, you can describe my work the same way. I’m a contrarian, but even I fall victim to the same fears. In the West, everything is changing, and no one knows what the fuck is going on. Seems like everywhere I look nowadays, you can sense that society is reacting to that.

Fancast officially launches

Austin Govella — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 16:11:00 GMT

Tuesday at CES, Comcast officially launched Fancast, a next-generation, personalized, cross-channel entertainment website.

So far, work on the project has run everywhere from ecstatic to calamitous, but it's definitely been one of the most interesting sites I've worked on.

But Wired rewards all the sweat and tears in one sentence: "Fancast turns out to be surprisingly well-designed -- and useful enough that the biggest complaint is likely to be, what took so long?"

Projects from Thinking and Making

A new design

Fancast officially launches