Sunday Morning Ice Cream

The website that I designed for Genevieve Mateyko's super dreamy ice cream business, Sunday Morning Ice Cream is up! The ever so lovely and amazing Ginger Ngo did the harder and more important part of the site: coding and building what was in my head. Big ups to her.

There was a lot of thought and unseen things that went into this website that I kinda want to talk about.

First off, Genevieve's ice cream is incredible. Her flavors are so imaginative and exciting, the descriptions for them taste exactly as she says and more. There's so many times where there is the promise of something in a dish or piece of food and it just never lives up or delivers. Her ice cream is what is exactly in my head, translated. Ice cream wizardry!

I offered to help Genevieve with her website because I actually haha, had a really strong desire to try out marbling and I was like, what project could I apply it to and I guess I was eating Genevieve's ice cream at the time and was like, ICE CREAM!  I just began to sort of imagine what her site could look like and just getting really excited. I thought that the marbling would be a graphic device that would be showing the ice cream in a really interesting and abstract way. I also wanted to use pale colors to reference the pale colors in her ice cream and the colors seen at dawn. It sounded all so good in my head. I was set. I couldn't wait to get all the ideas out of my head and make it real - such a rare feeling for me.

I started experimenting with marbling. You name the technique, I did it. I tried marbling with oil paints and turpentine. That didn't turn out very well - I ended up with really greasy paper and a headache. I tried marbling with paint and shaving cream, which also didn't turn out very well - my apartment smelled like strawberry shaving cream and I'd be like, why does it smell like this in here, and then be like, oh yeah, I tried to marble. With shaving cream (sigh, how lazy and ghetto). I was getting pretty deflated by that point, buying all this stuff just to make this one element and coming out with nothing. I was also at all costs trying to avoid buying a kit (for some reason I thought it was going overboard to buy a kit, yeesh), but in hindsight, it would have been better to just buy the kit from the get go and save myself all the hassle, because this is what you end up with if you go with the kit:

After all my whatever failings with the other marbling techniques I tried, I was so excited to come out with these. It was also so addictive to make them, I could have gone on forever. I can see why you'd see billions of marbled cards or books. Marbling is amazing.

So anyways, I started design the site according to my original idea and what was in my head and this is what I came out with:

Ugh. Man. So awful.

Or I mean, it's okay, maybe for like a Grecian goddess hair salon or fashion brand (aka, no, this design is not good for anything). But it was so hard for me to let go. I was so excited for this idea and it looked so right in my head and I just could not accept that it wasn't working. I wouldn't allow myself to think of other ways to visualize the site. But at the same time I knew something was horribly wrong with it as well. It was too over the top for the branding Genevieve already had. It was way too much on one page. It was way too feminine.

That was another struggle, Genevieve talked about how with her branding and with what she's selling, she didn't want to come off as overly feminine. And for some reason that really stuck with me the entire time I was making the website. Everything screamed femininity to me and it just got to a point where I just couldn't even tell anymore.

But anyways, as you can see with the current site, I basically did the opposite of my idea, focusing on the photographs (which are amazing and explain her product better than marbling can haha) and making the marbling an accent rather then the focus. I also simplified it as much as I could, which was also insanely hard to do, because after having done so much on the original design, going simple, it felt like, wait, did I even do anything? Is there anything even there? I fell into that thing of where you think that in order for something to be worth anything, you have to be really involved and make tons of apparent choices.

This website made me go through so many conflicts within myself. What is too much? What is enough? What is too little? How much of the designer should be present within the design? Is this website too similar to what I did last time? I would go back and forth between these questions over and over with every thing that I nudged from here to there on the site.

I wanted to show the process that went into this site as a reminder to myself in the future that it is a process to get to something simple, and sometimes it is really involved and that it has hard moments, and that bad feelings are there for a reason, to make you confront yourself and ask questions and hopefully get to the more appropriate answer and solution.

Man, who knew that designing an ice cream website could end up being so deep?!

In all seriousness, I am happy with what Ginger and I came out with and I hope you guys like it too and poke around and get excited about what Genevieve is doing and buy lots of her ice cream. You won't regret it. Promise.

For the love of Chinatown

This GIF for the Chinatown Night Market has been kicking around:

I helped out by making the visuals for it. Below are them sitting pretty and still. Parts of the visual identity of the market uses these really beautiful and vibrant wrapping papers that are sold by a store in Chinatown. I wanted to make a whole new pattern inspired by the imagery seen in these wrapping papers and also use them as a texture. I find these patterns funny. I like how over the top they are. How bright they are. How garish they almost are (or are...if you think they are, it's okay, I think that's cool). The dumpling and Streetfighter ones are my favorite. Anyways, I hope these get you stoked on going to the Chinatown Night Market this summer, I mean if making this was fun, who knows how fun the market is going to be (we haven't even gotten to the real thing yet)! DUMPLINGS! SINGING! MAH JONG! PING PONG! VIDEO GAMES! I hope to see all you singing, dumpling-eating, video game playing nerds (and not nerds) there.

A Most Curious Event

Poster I made for Curious Oyster's upcoming event at The Found & The Freed. There'll be oysters and delicious snacks and then an auction for vintage goods! And if that isn't enough to get you in the door, welllll, Richard recreated the paddle that I made on the poster that you get to take home! So cool! I am going for that reason alone haha.

Also, Ginger and I have also just completed the website for Curious Oyster and you should take a look around if you've got some time. I just saw this now, but Ginger did a really good write up about it. I'm blushing and getting a rush of heartwarming feelings! She articulated the process so well and it just reminded me again of how great it was to work with her and how proud I am of what we done. If you didn't already know, Ginger rules.

 So I went to New Zealand a couple weeks back to speak at a conference with the creative director of Adbusters, Pedro and the senior editor, Darren. New Zealand is amazing.

Black sand beaches. You can't tell at all from this picture, but the sand has this blue glittery sheen, because there is iron or steel in the sand (and rumor has it that they are starting to mine it for this metal)

You'll be in these amazing places and be pretty much the only people there.

 Pedro and I went to the zoo.

 All the animals in there, I could have watched them all day. These turtles kept climbing over each other  and they could never make it work but they still kept doing it over and over.

I went to a place 3 hours away from Auckland called Rotorua. There is a lot of geothermal and volcanic activity, geysers, sulphur pools, all that kind of stuff there.

I went to go see this geyser and in the brochure it said, the geyser erupts daily at 10:15am. I was amazed and really curious as to how they could time the eruption of the geyser (especially to the minute). Turns out, they actually stick this biodegradable chemical thing down the rocks to make the geyser go (although the geyser does go off naturally on its own, just not when anyone is conveniently around).

I went to this other place called Waitomo, where there are a bunch of glowworm caves and caves with stalactites and stalagmites. And a population of 42 people. Most of which who work as tour guides for the caves. I really liked it there, you would see more wild turkeys running around in a place then people.

David Attenborough was in this very cave. Or so I am told. It was funny. The cave was like being in space mountain. Even funnier, because the cave is so small, you're on this raft, and they take you back and forth 5 times so that you have enough time to experience seeing the worms. It was weird. But nice.

Back in Auckland, there were these art installations going on. This thing was cool cause I felt like I was in Tron.

The funniest thing I saw in Auckland.

 The scariest/weirdest thing I saw in Auckland.

The most elongated siamese cat I've seen.

 Happy faces everywhere.

 

I liked this light shadow because it looked like the carpet was worn at this one spot. 

Indeed.

I don't really know how to explain how I felt about New Zealand. Being there, it was nice because you felt really separated from the world, but still part of it at the same time because of the time difference. The world's day begins and ends there. Things are a bit slower there, but at the same time there's all these things there that you have at home and that get you wanting to live and act like you do at home, but the experiences don't quite match up and there's weird disconnects - like that they have a Denny's there. There is something kind and well meaning about the place, something small and manageable, everyone is so nice, and at the same time there are these great expanses, ones to get lost in, to get sentimental in - and oh man I hope I get to go back there again.