Andy Mangold

As a young designer, my web presence is an important aspect of my personal branding, my best method of marketing myself, and a strong reflection of the designer I am, or want to be. Since I started putting my work online three years ago, this domain has had six different designs, only three of which I am not completely ashamed of (a good sign I am growing as a designer). Keeping to my unintentionally established six-month website life cycle, I will be redesigning my portfolio and blog for launch sometime in early 2010.

I have been spending the last couple months accumulating bookmarks of portfolio and blog designs that I find to be highly effective, compelling, or interesting for any reason, and I thought I would share my thoughts. These are some of the best websites out there in the portfolio/blogosphere, in my humble opinion.

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My very good friend and colleague Anthony Mattox has FINALLY gotten around to putting his interactive work online in a form that you can actually interact with it (in addition to redesigning his blog!). The beautiful generative graphics and visualizations that have mesmerized those who have seen Anthony’s work first hand are now available to mesmerize everyone on the series of tubes. If you have any spare time on your hands, do yourself a favor and jaunt on over to www.anthonymattox.com/interactive and explore some of his beautiful generative works. If you find yourself on a white page where you are not sure what to do, just start clicking in the void and watch the magic happen.

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I have not posted in considerable time, but that is because I have been busy with lots of things, not the least of which was redesigning this site. I have lots of things in my backlog to post about, so expect thing to pick back up. Shoot me some feedback on the new design and please let me know if you spot any bugs, I will be polishing everything off (adding a picture to the about page, etc.) in the next couple days.

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My blog is more or less an unprofessional mess, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. But, that’s mostly because I do not possess the dexterity, concentration, or dedication that is required to author an informative, focused blog. Bryan Connor, however, possesses all of these things, and his blog Young & Freelancing has been a long time coming. Bryan has been a very good friend of mine and a partner in the chaotic, often stressful, world of young freelancing for almost 2 years now. Few people I know show the brand of maturity and composure Bryan carries himself with when dealing with floods of emails, frustrating clients, and all the other fun stuff that comes with being an creative individual in today’s freelance market.

If you are young, or freelancing, or have an interest is the behind the scenes of design, be sure to check out Bryan’s Blog. Despite its infancy, Bryan has already stocked the blog with some pretty incredible and helpful articles. I am sure my habits have made/inspired some of his “what not to do” lists, so if you want to hear from the best, click on through.

Vices & Freelancer Bad Habits to Avoid

Getting Things Done – To-do Lists & Priorities

A Freelancer’s Starter Ethics – 20 Guidelines

Be sure to subscribe and read, I know I will.

Photo from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_colors

The super talented and attractive Anthony Mattox discovered this wonderful table of CSS color names you can use in your stylesheet! Some of these are freakin’ ridiculous. I knew you could use “Black” and “Red” and what not in CSS, but I never would have guessed that “MediumSpringGreen” or, Anthony’s favorite, “PapayaWhip” would work. I think “Peru” is the best; what’s your favorite?

Hey everyone!

I am pleased to be able to announce that the new design of my website and blog is now live (th0ugh still without an about page). The new layout focuses a lot more on highlighting my work and uses a clean, typographic style for all of the blog posts, which I promise will increase in frequency and awesomeness. You will also notice I added support for gravatars in the comments template and condensed everything down, so the text takes up less space and the images are larger! Hooray! (sorry you small screen folk)

For all of those that DO follow my blog, the address of the feed will be changing, so PLEASE add the new address to your RSS reader to continue getting my content! The new address is below:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/andymangold

I will be posting more of my work from the semester soon… if you don’t subscribe to the new feed you won’t get it!

I must apologize for the extremely inconsistent blogging; I cannot promise I will ever level out. I have been working on a website re-design for Ken Carroll, craftsman of beautiful wooden handlebars for bicycles and here is a bit of a teaser for the redesign, which should go live sometime soon. I will write more about the site and project once it goes online.

For now, let me know what you think about the typography overlaid on top of the photograph. I did it by hand, inspired by some fantastic analog typographers and calligraphers I found online over the weekend.

A re-design of my website I am working on

As any designer out there knows, it is impossible to stop re-designing one’s own site. Completely impossible. So, even though the current design of my site/blog is the only one to get me any publicity, and overall I think quite successful, I am in the process of creating a new design. (more…)

On screen display tends to focus on sans-serif typefaces, so unfortunately all of the serif fonts truly available to a webdesigner can be covered in one post. There are only two truly web safe serif fonts: Times New Roman (Times), and Georgia. The latter is found on both Mac and Windows operating systems, with Times and Times New Roman, essentially identical fonts (at least in terms of the web), appearing on Mac and Windows operating systems respectively. (more…)