Before unveiling the new identity for Komodo Media incarnation five, let’s take a trip down memory lane by looking at the previous evolutions of the almighty Komodo Media logo:

Version 1: The Reptilian Head

Komodo Media version 1 reptilian head logo

There’s a reason this isn’t my logo anymore. Most people thought that this was some form of funky microphone, even though I insisted that it was a digital reptile head. Yeah…no. This didn’t really work out, however if I were to remove the digital tongue, I think that it would have been a whole lot stronger.

The text however, was really where it was at. I built the text my self and at the time, I really loved it. I loved all the circular shapes, however I was no font designer. That was for sure.

Version 2,3: The Stegosaurus Spine

Komodo Media versions 2 & 3 stegosaurus spine logo

Continuing in a reptilian direction, versions 2 & 3 was a much better attempt. With a few “stegosaurus” platelets and something that looked somewhat like an eye, I was fairly happy with this version. At least happy enough to keep it around for two versions of my site. I think I’ll still look back with fondness at this logo because it was during versions 2 and 3 of Komodo Media, that people started taking notice of my designs.

Version 4: The Cute, Consolidated One

Komodo Media version 4 “Cute” logo sans mark

As much as I loved having a logo mark, I always hated having to try to pair the logo text with the mark. It became a pain most of the time and I found myself really wanting an all text logo with the mark built into it. Also, the previous version looked so much like a stegosaurus’ back instead of a Komodo dragon, so it just became confusing.

This version saw a reworking of most of the characters in the text logo as well, fixing the ‘K’, which I always felt was ugly.

Version 5: Drafts

Komodo Media version 5 drafts

At this point, I really want to get away from the rounded text. It felt too cute, too ‘web 2.0′ if that even makes sense. I wanted to move away from the bubbly feeling and get to something more natural and more mature. With these drafts, I felt like many designers feel when working on a personal site design — I didn’t really know which direction I wanted to head — just somewhere new.

With the above drafts for the version 5 logo, I was trying to keep an all text logo, while incorporating some sort of reptilian feel. My goal was to remove the “cute” style and design it to be a grown up, more mature logo. Eventually, I decided against these. They ain’t bad though.

Version 5: Enso Brush Stroked

Komodo Media version 5 brush stroked logo

This is the logo that I have fell in love with. I’ve seen it in my head for months now, and it’s finally come to fruition. I think what I finally realized is that I’ve always wanted an all text logo that is totally original. I didn’t want to use any known fonts and I didn’t want it to seem like any font out there. This is why the logo was brush stroked by hand. I’ve also realized that I really wanted a logo that felt human…imperfect. Something that denied that we design using pixel perfect design tools with perfect vectors and grids. I wanted something that felt perhaps a bit unbalanced…a bit raw…a bit savage…like a Komodo Dragon.

Feedback?

I’d love some feedback on this logo. What do you think? Do you agree with me and do you love it? Not sold? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Thanks for reading.

Time for another inspiration post. This post is long, long due. I remember when I first saw Anand Sharma’s work at Dragon Interactive. I was stunned by his clever gradients, pixel precision, cross-fading animation and level of detail put into everything. I remember wrongly thinking that his site used Flash because of the smoothness of his animations, and clever way of producing text shadows. No, he does it all in HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Dragon Labs

While I certainly tip my hat to his work on Dragon Interactive, I think everybody, their Aunt Bea, and their pet snake have too :) I’d like to talk about some of the work I’ve seen him doing on an upcoming site called Dragon Labs. Anand has showed me his work as he has progressed with this design.

Bubbles boil up hover effect on a beaker at Dragon Labs.

First let me say, that he has given me a whole new definition of “meticulous.” Everytime I thought the design was complete and looked great, he’s spend another 3 days on it and make it better. His level of detail, perfectionism and devotion to a design is flawless. Every time a revision is made to one of his designs, its for the better and often introduces on more sparkle to dazzle the design. He thinks and researches each one of this designs in a way I’ve never done before. Typically, I start with a canvas and start designing. Anand researches his subject like a Jedi knight preparing for battle, knowing his enemies’ weakness, studying his target, preparing, waiting, until the right moment. This most of all impresses me about Anand. He designs because he loves it. He designs it right. He is meticulous.

I could rant more on process, but I think it important to see what I’m talking about. Anand has made his “sketches” public on his flickr account. There you can comment on his work, view samples from his portfolio and work that he has done on Noisefreak, Girl Gamer, Dragon Interactive and more.

Another thing I have noticed about Anand’s work is how he uses PNG images and scales them for the browser size. With a large resolution monitor, the beakers at Dragon Labs are large and gorgeous. When a user resizes their browser, they are in for a treat. Anand has used percentage based CSS dimensions on the beakers to scale them according to the browser dimensions. What does this mean? Well, other than being ridiculously and insanely rad looking, there is no cutoff. The beakers stay in view and seem placed right on the “shelf” for large and small screens. Awesome. Also, you’ll notice a bubbling effect shown above on the Octopus beaker. No, this isn’t an animated GIF image. This is a frame-by-frame animation of a PNG image of bubbles. You can see three frames of this PNG “filmstrip” here. Too flippin’ cool.

What is Dragon Labs?

YShout Shoutbox Administration Panel at Dragon Labs

Dragon Labs is more than a pretty face. Its a community offering. It’s some of Anand’s best work put out for you to learn from and use in your own projects. Want to know how he did that great crossfading effect on Dragon Interactive? That’ll be there. Want to see an insanely cool implementation of a “pulsing” shoutbox admin panel? Yup, that’s there, and more coming. Anand will be putting quite a bit of his genius work up there, a sort of tutorial-like, one-way blog of sorts.

Follow him

So what do you do with people that have more talent in their left pinky finger than you do in your whole body? Follow the leader. Read their blogs, study them, learn from them, follow them on twitter. You know what to do.

• Follow Anand Sharma (aprilzero) on Twitter
• Dragon Interactive

Not only are the site designers dishonored by a complete rip-off, but the designer attempting to design by “inspiration” gets their name smeared. The design community can be brutal ;) Honestly, some of these inspired designers have the best intentions. They are starting out and mean the best. I earnestly never want to see a good designer get their name smeared in the name of inspiration.

I thought I’d share with you how I have been inspired by sites, movies and products for my last redesign of Komodo Media, version 4. I hope that through this designers can learn to be inspired by all great art forms around them, but maintain a style of their own.

Base inspiration

Click on a thumbnail for a larger version.

It’s very obvious what Komodo Media version 4 is on the whole. Thematically, its very jungle and islandish in nature. From wood to leaves to toucans to outriggers, it feels like you are lost in a jungle. Thats the intent. My inspiration came from a mixture of a love of Swiss Family Robinson and Pirate/Jungle movies as a child as well as a few visits to the Enchanted Tiki Room in Disneyland.

Once I knew the theme, I went around the internet gathering all imagery that I felt represented this theme well. I didn’t want to clone them. No, I just wanted to surround myself by the kind of things that spoke “jungle” so that I could design in that style. It has become a pretty regular process now for me to gather a ton of screenshots or images of inspiration and surround my design with them as I design.

Inspiration in the details

Infinise Design

In earlier mockups of Komodo Media v4, I used tabs that were inspired by Infinise Design’s tabs. I loved the smooth rounded edges that were slightly non-typical in websites I’d seen around the block. I ended up moving to the recessed wood pill-shaped navigation that you see now.

Bear Skin Rug

In earlier versions of the my mockups, I used an accordion style post browser in the right sidebar featuring popular, random and recent posts as well as categories. Something always felt wrong with it and it seemed a bit too narrow as well. My tabbed based solution was inspired by Bear Skin Rug’s beautiful sidebar tall tab implementation. I just loved it.

Command-Tab

As I was working on my mockups for Komodo Media v4, a good friend and fellow designer, Collin Allen was working on the new version of his site, Command-Tab. I was fortunate enough to see mockups of his navigation and fell in love with his hammer icon for his primary navigation. The other icons were nice, but the hammer icon…oooh, I loved it. That one icon inspired a total reworking of my main navigation and helped to inspire my icon, inset in the wood, pill styled primary navigation.

The Guinness Toucan

I like to make my designs mean something, especially my own site. I love Guinness. I was trying to think of a classy way to work Guinness into the site that didn’t scream beer drinker or drunkard. That’s not my bag and its not me. I remembered an old ad campaign that Guinness used to run using a toucan and that was it – I was sold. I quickly reworked my version of the toucan using Fireworks. You can see the Guinness toucan flying in the header, squawking next to my twitter stream, perched atop the outrigger in the footer, and adorned the mail stamp when you use the contact form.

Apple Mail

It’s been said a time or two before. Working in a creative and well-designed environment inspires design. For the longest time, I couldn’t put my finger on it. Finally, I realized why I loved working on my Mac. Every part of the interface feels aesthetically right and those aesthetics inspire me. In this case, I loved Apple’s mail.app icon so much, I designed my contact page stamp to match.

Super Mario Galaxy

At the time of my redesign, I was playing Super Mario Galaxy quite a lot. I love the Mario series and this game was no exception. Once again, I love tying elements of me into my design. I decided to keep this one subtle as well and designed the 5th star rating on my blog posts to be the luma from Super Mario Galaxy.

Veerle’s Blog

I guess one could say that a lot of things about Veerle’s blog inspired this fourth design of Komodo Media. I’m not going to say yes or no to that, but I do know that one element of Veerle’s design inspired me: the calendar icon. So I took her great design concept and made it my own…island style.

Apple iTunes

I guess I’m an Apple tool, but once again I got inspired by another OSX program, iTunes. You’ll find the result of my inspiration in two places. First, the pill shaped search box, albeit a grainy inset wood is inspired by the search field in iTunes. Second, my trademarked uber-awesome foliage-O-meter dons a knob that many have recognized to look very similar to the volume knob in iTunes, with a very different purpose. Apparently I feel that knobs to control the density of the jungle is on par with volume level. *snicker*

Hicksdesign

I’m sure a ton of things about Jon Hicks’ site inspired me during the redesign, however one very obvious inspiration is typography. Gill Sans for headers? Check. Lucida Grande for content? Check.

Inspiration comes from many places and over time. I encourage you to dig deep and look all around you for inspiration for your design. Don’t limit yourself by merely copying a site. Be inspired by others’ work and adapt and rework it to make it your own, bringing recognition to your own skills and honor to whom you are inspired by.

Nerd Glasses

I <3 Nerds. I can sense a nerd like Gandalf sensing the ring...and "Nerdification" - I'm adding that to my list of words to use once every 2 minutes.

Cappuccino

Hmmm, nerds, coffee…is there more to life? I love the scripted “Cappucino”.

MailChimp

Jon Hicks: He rocketh vectors hard. Mental Note: If Jon Hicks designs one more monkey, I’m recommending him for leading actor in the new “Gorillas in the mist”

Espresso

More coffee? Maybe I need to get on a program. I almost want to drink the foam. Wait – there it is. yes. I DO want to drink the foam.

Here’s another sweet little giveaway…I named him sprout! So, I know what you’re thinking right. Ohh my gourd, I just spent like 6 hours googling for a vector image of 3 seeds and a sprouted leaf. This is is sooooo perfect. Or maybe your site is low on it’s vegetation and it so desperately needs leaves jutting out to and fro from its crevices. Anyhoo, whatever your bag is, take these sukkas off my hands. Enjoy ;)

You’ve can download either the Fireworks PNG for vector editing and gettin’ all wild and crazy or just download the regular PNG for use in any graphic editor for general merrymaking.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

I have some Fireworks vector mushrooms to give away for free today. Come one, come all and let the download fest begin! These mushrooms were intended for the version 4 release of this site, but I decided to bag them making an appearance at the last minute. They are inspired by the Mario Brothers series as you can well see and are completely healthy for consumption.

Feel free to use them as you wish, guilt free, just don’t pawn them off as your own work or charge for them. If you want a version for adobe illustrator, you’ll have to find a clean way to convert them and if you do, please tell me!

Enjoy.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

I’ll post more on what I learned in the designing process as well as releasing some freebies, so stay tuned. As for now, I’m a tired boy and I’m gonna take a rest. Please leave a comment and let me know what you think!

So, Komodo Media will be coming out with a design that I love and I hope you will too. I have spent many hours tweaking and perfecting this design in Fireworks till Lord only knows when and how long. Anyhoo, enough about my design, for that is not my purpose today. My purpose is to give you people out there a little help in your design world by giving you a little gift. A gift which I have poured my heart in to designing, and a bonus from my friend and fellow elite designer, Thurston Elfstrom. Props to him for designing the luscious red restrada. For some reason, I have felt like giving away vector art of leaves and plants. So, it is without further ado, that I present you with the Komodo Media Leaf vector art package:

A full time business needs a good resource kit. I love link aggregators and top 10 lists to death. Top 10 design lists help me to find inspiration out there on the big interweb. Also, Help lists like CSS Help Pile really help new designers to bring helpful links all to a central location.

I’d love to compile a list of helpful resources such as icons, bullets, backgrounds and more to help out the web design community by housing free resources for you. So, if you have any design prowess at all, I suggest that you help by submitting your icons, backgrounds, bullets, buttons and more to me at rogie@komodomedia.com. I will do my best to upload all of your items if I feel that they are quality enough to compile central pile of graphical resources for us: a sort of Web Design Tackle Box.

Ladies and Gentlemen, start your submissions!

Watch artistic movies (Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Etc.)

Sometimes you need creative fuel from an external source. Turn on a movie that is heavily influenced by some sort of admirable style. Look at the way the the Shuttle Tyderiums lines flow so gracefully, look at the color schemes on the characters, ships, whatever. I think going to a different media other than what you are working on is a better idea that going to the same. A lot of times I will pull up 5 websites I want mine to be like and be influenced by design elements from them all. I really feel that to be truly unique on a project, you need to pull yourself away from all of the design cliche’s and stereotypes and put yourself into something new.

Get plenty of sleep.

A frazzled designer is a bad designer. Make sure you get plenty of sleep. None of this running on 1 hour of sleep the night before. I have found at those points I think I’m really “in the zone”, but in fact I’m not quite working up to par. I will think I have some sweet design at 4am, then I wake up at 9am and look at it and it looks ghetto. Get plenty of sleep, your body needs it, but don’t oversleep! The idea is to get yourself into your optimum condition, conducive to design.

Coffee

I’m not talking about guzzling 3 pots before 8am. I heard somewhere something like “Coffee fuels the creative soul” and I believe it. At my times where I really don’t have an inkling of an idea of what to design, I put myself in a non-distractive environment and curl up with a steaming cup of Joe and most times, you’re right, it does the trick.

Eliminate Distractions

Seriously. All this TV going on in the background and things going on everywhere never helped. Get in your comfort zone. Spend time to create a peaceful working environment. Possibly one distraction: music, is best. Turn on your favorite tunes, the ones that really get you into the zone. But keep it at that!

Take a Break

You may have deadlines and stress, but you need a break. Creativity isn’t something that can be forced. You have to force yourselft to take a break. Get out in the fresh air, get outside. Even a 15 minute break will do great things for you. When you do, it will free your mind and get creative ideas flowing again. I swear that people get into design “infinite loops”. You get stuck on an idea and even if that idea is crap, you keep messing with that idea over and over, even if it is heading nowhere.

Any advice from you?