I've been spending a lot more time making things lately and it feels good — I now have an online shop and have begun making and sharing animations.

I've been trying to take heed of my own words from my previous post — to spend less time looking over my shoulder, idling away time on the likes of Twitter and more time actually doing and making stuff.

A couple of side projects have come out of this. The first and most notable is Moving. Moving is an animation project featuring geometric animated gifs I've made using Processing. I'm really enjoying playing with animation again; timing and easing are really hard to get just right, especially when the animations are entirely driven by code. It's a good challenge.

There's a couple of reasons I started this project. The first was to tune my eye back into animation and timing, a useful skill that I'm sure I'll be able to bring to bear on my real job as a UI/web designer. The second was to forge a creative outlet that's separate from (but related to) my normal day job — similar to the motivation behind my Geometrica side project, which I'll be updating soon.

I find it invaluable to have self-initiated creative projects around the work I normally do as a designer.

If you're interested, some of my code for Moving can be found here with more going up soon.

Another thing I've set up recently is an online shop. I've wanted to do this for ages, but it seems thinking about setting up a shop and actually doing it are not the same thing.

Anyway, the shop is up, so if you're looking for something to adorn your walls, go take a look.

Self-initiated work aside, I've been collaborating with Malika Favre again on what's coming together to be a great project. More on that in the next couple of months. Asides from that, my work on GOV.UK also continues apace with the brilliant team there too.

I'm looking forward to what's ahead in 2015 and as ever, if you have an interesting project or collaboration you want to discuss, drop me a line.

Published 9 years ago