I am the ghost of groovymother.com. Woooooo!

This is an old page from Rod Begbie's blog.

It only exists in an attempt to prevent linkrot. No new content will be added to this site, and links and images are liable to be broken. Check out begbie.com to find where I'm posting stuff these days.

Filed under 'design'

April 10, 2012

Getting Clients

Sample chapter from Mike Monteiro’s new book, Design is a Job.

I’m not a designer, but I love working with them, and have a client services past as an engineer. Tons of great insights in the three chapters I’ve read so far.

“Get to know the people on the client team and treat them well. Make them a valuable part of the project and make sure their voices get heard. People change jobs. If the current project goes well, the person who hired you will have her stock rise within the company, and the rest of the staff will eventually spread out far and wide to other companies who will need design services at some point. Your DNA travels with them. (Not literally. I’m hoping I don’t need to add a chapter explaining that.)”

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March 19, 2012

Frustro: The Impossible Typeface

Font inspired by the penrose triangle. More typefaces should make your brain hurt.

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September 19, 2011

December 1, 2010

Minimalist Muppets

MY NEW FAVOURITE THING IN THE WORLD EVER EVER EVER!

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November 15, 2010

September 21, 2010

Etch A Sketch iPad Case

Nice! I like the idea of rebooting your iPad by holding it upside down and shaking.

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September 15, 2010

calvetica - The fast calendar for iPhone

I am digging the heck out of this. A lovingly-designed calendar app replacement for the iPhone which interacts with your existing calendars, so all the lovely syncing goodness of iOS keeps on working.

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August 12, 2010

Tips On Buying Design

Fab essay by Mike Monteiro.

“It’s like buying a melon. Any sample the grocer is handing out won’t come from the melon you’re about to buy. And don’t buy on looks. To really know a melon you’ve got to squeeze it hard at the ends. Also, a melon analogy? Not my best moment. Let’s move on”

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July 17, 2010

iFontMaker – The First & Fastest Font Editor for iPad

Super-simple typeface designer for iPad. Touch interface to sketch your font, then it uploads it to a website for sharing.

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July 5, 2010

iBooks highlighting

iBooks highlighting

Jeez, even the text highlighting is gorgeous and magical! (Quote from Richard Herring's How Not to Grow Up)

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June 22, 2010

ALT/1977: WE ARE NOT TIME TRAVELERS

“I’ve re-imagined four common products from 2010 as if they were designed in 1977: an mp3 player, a laptop, a mobile phone and a handheld video game system. I then created a series of fictitious but stylistically accurate print ads to market them, as well as a handful of abstract posters (you know, just for funsies).” Wonderful!

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June 9, 2010

Today's Guardian (Phil Gyford's website)

Phil explains some of the design decisions behind his reader webapp.

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April 16, 2010

Phaidon Design Classics for iPad

The content of the $175 hardcover books that I’ve been coveting for years are available as a $20 iPad app? Sold!

April 2, 2010

February 23, 2010

Hot Pockets Ingredients

Appetizing typography.

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January 21, 2010

thesixtyone

Gorgeous redesign of the indiemusic exploration and listening site.

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January 7, 2010

Letterheady

I don’t know why letterhead design interests me as much as it does, but I’m always fascinated by it. Random fact: As a kid, I collected “With Compliments” slips.

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December 10, 2009

AOL Reveal Films

I quite like this set of animations for AOL’s new corporate identity. Viewed together like this, it feels like when the BBC reveals a new collection of idents!

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October 23, 2009

Classic Album Covers stamps

Man, nothing would make me send more letters than being able to put a Screamadelica stamp on the envelope.

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October 6, 2009

April 26, 2009

The extreme Google brain

A beautifully incendiary post about “Google’s Aspergerian nerds” and their complete misunderstanding of visual design.

March 24, 2009

Balsamiq Mockups

UI sketching tool. Deliberately made to look “back-of-the-napkin”-esque, to ensure no-one spends too long worrying about pixels over functionality.

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February 10, 2009

Pepsi Gravitational Field

Epically mental “leaked” Pepsi rebranding document. Hard to tell if this is genuine Pseud’s Corner style bullshit, a genius bit of viral marketing by Pepsi, or a splendidly bizarre hoax.

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December 28, 2008

Brand New: Best & Worst 2008

The best and worst logo redesigns of 2008. I quite like their April 1st Ford redesign — wish it had been for reals!

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November 26, 2008

Helvetireader

Rather gorgeous minimalistic skin for Google Reader, by Jon Hicks. Had to tweak it to get my all-important “Mark All as Read” button, but apart from that, perfet.

November 16, 2008

Poolga. iPhone and iPod Touch wallpapers for the rest of us.

Some gorgeous photos and illustrations, at just the right size to be your iPhone wallpaper.

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October 10, 2008

30 Reasons

“30 graphic designers create 30 posters and give you their 30 reasons to vote for Barack Obama on November 4th.”

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August 20, 2008

Stevey's Blog Rants: Business Requirements are Bullshit

“ONLY BUILD STUFF FOR YOURSELF. That’s the Golden Rule of Building Stuff. If you’re planning to build something for someone else, let someone else build it.”

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July 28, 2008

It's 1975 And This Man Is About To Show You The Future

Slides from a vintage IBM sales presentation. I might do a presentation some time that *only* uses these for illustration.

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July 27, 2008

I believe that is meant to say “fuel”

I believe that is meant to say “fuel”

but that's not what I saw when it caught my eye in the supermarket. This is what happens when your designer doesn't give a, ahem, "fuel".

June 6, 2008

That design is money!

About the UI design of Wells Fargo ATMs. My decision to open a Wells Fargo account after moving to SF was largely influenced by the experience I had at one of their ATMs, so it’s definitely a good design.

May 27, 2008

COLOURlovers :: Patterns

ColourLovers has a new (to me) section collecting tileable patterns. Some gorgeous designs here — just the thing for your wallpaper.

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April 27, 2008

Creative Review: Spiritualized and Farrow: made for each other

Interview with Jason Spaceman and Mark Farrow about the fantastic packaging they’ve put together for Spiritualized’s albums. They’re one of the few bands where I make sure to buy the “deluxe” CD.

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April 2, 2008

The Royal Mint: The New Designs Revealed

The new UK coinage is wicked cool — the individual coins are part of a larger picture.

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March 3, 2008

Coding Horror: Actual Performance, Perceived Performance

The way you code a progress bar will do more to “performance” than tweaking the process it’s measuring. “Humans do not perceive the passage of time in a linear way.”

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February 12, 2008

18 Smokin' Hot Business Card Designs

Varied mix of designs for business cards, plus links to suggestions for what to put on them. Spurred me on to creating something nicer than Moo Cards for when I’m attempting to be “professional”.

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January 31, 2008

Windows Vista Help: Opening the Windows Vista box

Official Microsoft documentation on how to open the Vista packaging. Because it *needs* documentation.

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January 29, 2008

What font says 'Change'? - The Boston Globe

Type designers decode the presidential candidates.

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January 16, 2008

Design Police | Bring bad design to justice.

“Please do not use Word Art™” Should make a set of these for code reviews. “Use spaces, not tabs”

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January 14, 2008

Jellyvision: The Jack Principles

“The Jack Principles is the first set of comprehensive guidelines for designing, writing and performing for an interactive conversation.” Great reading if you’re developing software for humans.

November 19, 2007

Reading Tea Leaves and Campaign Logos - The New York Times > Opinion

Analyzing the design details of the 2008 political campaign logos.

October 23, 2007

Dopplr Blog > In rainbows

Lovely little design detail on Dopplr — Their “logo” changes colour based upon your usage of the site.

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October 10, 2007

Cover art for In Rainbows // journal // hicksdesign

Since the MP3s don’t have any cover-art, Jon Hicks is hosting a “Design your own Radiohead Cover Art” contest. #21 is my favourite so far.

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October 8, 2007

rentzsch.com: apple's antiCAPSLOCK

The new Apple keyboards have a delay (at the hardware level) to prevent aCCIDENTAL cAPSlOCK.

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August 30, 2007

April 16, 2007

Design of the New U.S. e-Passport

Holy crap, the new US passport design looks like a Colbert Report “let’s overdo it with the eagles and flags” pisstake!

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April 6, 2007

Magnetbox

Awesome retro blog design.

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March 20, 2007

Google Homepage introduces dynamic themes - Download Squad

The new Google personalised homepage themes are gorgeous. Updating them based upon time and local weather is just ridiculously lovely!

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February 20, 2007

Tantek's Thoughts: Three Hypotheses of Human Interface Design

Nothing earth-shattering or new, but food for thought.

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February 9, 2007

The User Interface of Microformat Detection

Some very clever ideas about visually alerting users to the existence of microformats on a web page, plus some interesting debate in the comments about how much Firefox should visually change the look of a page in the name of “usability”.

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January 5, 2007

New at Pentagram: New Work: Saks Fifth Avenue

Saks Fifth Avenue’s new branding is defined by taking their logo, splitting it up into 64 squares, then tiling those squares in an almost random manner.

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December 26, 2006

COLOURlovers

Social site for sharing colour palettes. Could be useful as I rebuild groovymother.com

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December 12, 2006

ridiculous_fish » Blog Archive » Logos

Logo Quiz — Can you tell the Digital Audio logos from the ones for Haircare?

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December 7, 2006

BS 1363 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The awesomeness that *is* the British 3-Pin Plug. The article covers most of the beautiful design decisions, such as the longer earth pin (so earth is the first connection made when you plug it in) and the cable being attached to the bottom, so you’re less tempted to pull the plug by yanking the cord. Well done British Standards chaps!

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November 21, 2006

Joel on Software: Choices = Headaches

Good article by Joel — Why *does* the Vista shutdown menu require *seven* options?

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July 4, 2006

PhillRyu.com - The Top Ten Most Beautiful OS X Apps

A smattering of free/shareware OSX apps with to-die-for UIs.

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June 17, 2006

Decalgirl

Skins and wraps for game consoles and iPods. I’ve just decorated my DS Lite in the Baseball design, and it’s very fetching if I do say so myself.

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September 9, 2005

The Grauniad's new look

So farewell then, Garamond Italic and Helvetica Black.

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About This Site

This is an archive of groovmother.com, the old blog run by Rod Begbie — A Scottish geek who lives in San Francisco, CA.

I'm the co-founder of Sōsh, your handy-dandy guide for things to do in San Francisco this weekend.