christian ross

Iggy Peck, Architect

I mused my love for An Illustrated Guide a few months ago but sadly it’s been a bit neglected since then. Figured I’d steal their thunder and post one I found this week at the library for Cohen who initially didn’t want to check it out but has since requested it back-to-back-to-back on a number of occasions.

Iggy Peck, Architect

Both the illustrations and the story are good in this one. Four thumbs up (Dad and Cohen). Recommended ages 4-8.

Buy on Amazon (affiliate link): http://amzn.to/obJzF4

Dallas Mavericks 2011 Season in Infographic Form

My favorite basketball team just won the NBA Championship. Chartball Posters created an infographic for it. Why wouldn’t I post a link to it?

Crazy amounts of data here. Probably too much to digest easily but pretty cool nonetheless. Get your own for a mere $43. Ok, I’m not spending $43 bucks on it either but maybe in a moment of impulse you’ll decide jump on it.

Note to family: It’s cool, but not ‘hey, he likes it, mark-it-down-for-a-gift-idea-later,’ cool.

via @jeremyjohnson / Fast Company

Lotta Nieminen – Illustrator

Cleaning out my ShoveBox last week I stumbled across a link¹ I had thrown in there a while back for Lotta Nieminen. Originally from Helsinki, Finland and now residing in the greatest city on earth, Lotta’s skills are impressive across the board but her illustration style is what caught my eye. Some of my favorites below:

Winter:
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House Cleaning

With my family out of town most of the weekend, I sat myself in front of this screen for a better part of 28 hours playing catch up and doing some much needed maintenance on this site. I know that some of you are tinkerers and somehow set time aside regularly to tweak and adjust but with client work, family time and the hundreds of other things I fill my days with, I rarely take the time to do proper adjustments.

Three columns
The design itself hasn’t changed too much other than moving back to a three-column layout that I originally launched with. In doing so, quite a bit of time was spent having to go back and tweak older post images/videos to fit into the now skinnier main-column width. For the pixel nerds, I went from 700px down to 500px with a left column of 220px and a right of 180px. Mix in a little margin and you’ve got yourself a website. While it’s not built on the 960.gs, it is 960px wide. I also tweaked the font-size down slightly just to account for the new page length. Hope readability doesn’t become an issue.

About page
I have intentions of building one of those Weightshift-based home pages like several of you have done but being as un-photogenic as I am, I don’t have a decent enough image to work with yet. Add to the fact that I’m slightly concerned with messing up my Google mojo by forcing my TLD to it, I might still end up doing it but it will probably be more like some of you who go with iam.christianross.net or me.christianross.net. (more…)

Custom lettering

I’ve never been good with a pencil/sketchpad but about 4-5 months ago something spurred me on to sketch out a couple of letters that were in my mind on a Post-it. I spent a few days staring at them stuck to my desk when I finally decided to create the entire alphabet in my notebook. There they sat for a long while. Tired of letting projects like this fall by the waste side, this past Sunday afternoon I scanned them in.

Illustrator users would punch me in the face for not using the live-trace tool but I actually traced each one by hand into vector shapes. One, because I’ve only used the live-trace a time or two before and I couldn’t quickly remember how, and the other, because I wanted to see exactly what it took to dive into a task like this all by (digital) hand. (more…)