Douglas Menezes - Interactive Art Director » design

Adobe TV “Chips & Tips” Show

admin — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 22:56:18 +0000

Back in September I received an email asking to analyze the colors of mood of my site in an episode of the Chip & Tips show of French Adobe TV. No need to say that I was very proud to accept. Check the result below:

Unfortunately it is only French.

Thank you Stephan!

From Popcorn to Popova

admin — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 20:59:23 +0000

Francisco Inchauste from smashing magazine wrote a very interesting post called “If Famous Graphic Artists Were Web Designers…”. The subject is polemic as you can see by the comments. Some people love it, others hate it. I, myself, liked it very much. For me it’s not a big deal if the article it’s not very precise historically. I found very interesting to see the similarities between a hundred years old paints and brand new designs. Check the comparison made by Francisco:

Lyubov Popova

Lyubov Popova, Painterly Architectonic, 1917

A website Popova might have designed: Douglas Menezes

The great deal for me is that most of the designs (i think) were not directly inspired by the paints. In my specific case, I always loved Russian Art and Design but had never heard of Lyubov Popova (shame on me :[ ). I may have seen her work long time ago, in my school / college times, but I wasn’t even thinking about russian art when I designed this. And after my very small research now I think her other paints are much more expressive than this particularly one. The fact is references flow between the works of different people, in different fields and different times. What my tired mind allows me to remember is that first reference for this design was the Norwegian duo Röyksopp’s Junior album cover.

I mean, imagine if some popcorn package designer feels inspired by my site and I was inspired by this album’s artwork, and the this cover’s designer (couldn’t find it, if you know let me know) was inspired by something else. Will this timeline get back to Popova? Popcorn to Popova (very bad joke but a good title)? I can’t tell. But it seems a very good way to study and learn the design history and how it interacts with the professionals and society. If you are a good student feel free to do this homework.

I’d like to thank Francisco Inchauste and smashing magazine for the reference, I’m very glad. Cheers!

Yields of this site

admin — Sat, 30 May 2009 08:30:38 +0000

I’m very happy and very surprised about the audience of this website. It’s really amazing! Two weeks ago I sent the link to a few CSS galleries to get feedback and before I could track it, my site was published in a lot of css and reference sites. The visits rate increased 5000% in 2 days!

I would like to thank to all websites that linked here. I’m very glad. I was posted in Smashing Magazine, Creattica, Make better websites, Abduzeedo and was selected as Garden of the day. And If you could drop me a line if you link me it would be great. I’m trying to make a list of the referrals that I will publish soon.

One Man Band

admin — Sat, 09 May 2009 10:14:39 +0000

Over the last months I developed a fascination for the street musicians called “One man band”. They’re a very curious social phenomenon that can be found in almost every country. When I started to pay attention to them a lot of questions came to my mind. The first one was “Why do they do it?”. Seriously, what’s the point of playing ten instruments at the same time? It seems a very hard to do task and it surely requires a lot of practice. They don’t sound very good (with very few exceptions) and of course, nobody likes them, most people on the street are always trying to avoid them. You may try to pretend that they are not there, but it’s impossible not to notice them.

So, why do they do it? You can say that they do it for money. But I really think there are numerous of easier ways to get money. The only reasonable answer I could find was that they really like doing it, that they do it for love or madness. And there is no doubt that hey have a very mystical and romantic atmosphere around them. After some research I started to like them. The funniest thing about it all, is that I like more the ones that sound the worse, don’t ask me why. I found all kinds of one man bands from the fastest, to the fatter, the shorter, etc.

Ok that’s a very strange fascination to have. But I couldn’t help myself not to find out some similarities between them and XXI century designers. Sometimes I feel like a one man band. And I’m not saying that I can or like to do other professionals job (e.g.: developers, information architects, etc). I’m talking about all the information you need in mind when you are designing anything. In Internet production case: Usability guidelines, Brand guidelines, Grids, Wireframes, CSS, Jquery, Sfir, Animation, Videos, Dynamic / static Content, SEO, Social media, Ads, Tabs, Forms, enough! Sometimes I have to stop and ask myself “what was the concept, once again?”.

Now I believe you are thinking ”so, why do designers do it?”. This I can answer for sure: we do it for the feeling of accomplishment, for the satisfaction of seeing your idea alive and working. Even though sometimes nobody likes it. Somehow I think that those one man bands have the same feeling. So, while there can be found one man bands playing in the streets, I think we can keep on doing it!

So, it’s all about being able to see the forest and not just the tree, I believe that this concept could be applied to several fields of professional work. Now, why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourself as well as what you think about all this in the comments bellow?

Brand new Website

admin — Fri, 08 May 2009 09:11:07 +0000

Hello world. This is the first post of my brand new website. I’m very happy with it and hope you like it too. This was build with paper, pencil, illustrator, photoshop, wordpress, love and dedication. I want to thank the developers of brain fart for this wonderful code. For now that’s it, soon I will post here a lot of my work and life experience hence I live in a very curious city.

Thank you very much for your visit and If you are interested feel free to contact me at hello@dougmenezes.com. You can also follow me in twitter and add me in facebook. Sign my RSS Feed to get my blogs updates. And, of course, don’t forget to comment here!