Today I’ve decided to take the wraps off my latest project ‘Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.’. This one really is for the hardcore Star Trek fans. It’s loaded will all kinds of trivia and minutae that I hope real Trekkies will appreciate. It’s set in the Prime Reality (for the uninitiated that is the Star Trek Universe that existed before the franchise was rebooted in a parallel universe in the 2009 movie by J.J Abrams’). It’s also set quite a few years ahead of the last time we officially saw The Next Generation crew in Star Trek Nemesis. I wanted there to be a sizeable chunk of time missing from the timeline to make the stories a bit more interesting to the reader and bring back that sense of wonder and mystery that I felt when I was watching the show growing up. It will be made up of fragments of little stories, personal logs and new Trek designs which hopefully will be as fun and enjoyable for visitors to read as it is for me to write. I remember one birthday I got the Encyclopedia of Star Trek and couldn’t put it down. Then the following Christmas I got the Art of Star Trek, and another rare book called Star Trek ; Strange New Worlds and loved it aswell. In a way the idea for ‘Tea, Earl Grey, Hot’ came as a mixture of those books and in some way a homage to them.

To check it out, go to Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.

The truth is more is more, and less is less. Less is not really more. Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe’s famous phrase should be interpreted on a relative basis. Something can only be ‘less‘ in comparison to something ‘more‘. But something cannot exist just being ‘less’ all by itself, just the same way something can’t just be ‘more’! Something has to be ‘more than’ or ‘less than’ another thing. It’s not only relative, it’s also subjective. Some will say a house is not the same thing as a home and that a home is more that a house. You can have the most aesthetically beautiful, minimalist moderniost house imaginable which is architecturally ‘less’ than a traditional house with an arched roof and front lawn etc, with messy interiors and toys and books and stuff all over the place. But someone could argue that as beautiful as that other house is, it’s not a home and in that sense is less than the example I just gave. In a situation like that, is less really more. Let’s take it up a notch and consider the idea of communicating more with less. This is what all good designers and graphic designers should aim for, the ability to make me think a similar thing to what you wanted me to think, using as few elements as necessary. For example, if I design a logo and it doesn’t communicate anything to me, then that logo has failed me. If I strip it down and it doesn’t communicate what I want it to, but then I add more to it and then it begins to convey my idea, that in this instance more is more suitable than less. But if when it’s minimal and it communicates nothing and when it’s maximal it communicates nothing, then more is equal to less. So in summary, less is not more, less is less and more is more. If ‘less’ isn’t a more effective communicator of a concept than ‘more’, then less is equal to more, and the two cancel each other out. But if ‘less’ isn’t working and adding more works, then comparitively and in that situation, more is equal than that specific ‘less’. Get it?

Today I’m making an active effort to unsubscribe from all those e-mail newsletters I don’t read any more and even worse the ones I don’t remember suibscribing to. When you’re using Google Mail it’s kind of manageable because I just set a filter and all my newsletters would go nicely and neatly into a newsletter folder ready for that rare occasion that I might actually read them. Problem is I can’t figure out how to get those filters to have the same effect when my e-mails are pushed to my Blackberry. So my phone goes off every twenty seconds with some newsletter or some offer and it really makes you think, why did you subscribe to all these things anyway? It’s like a hangover, it creeps up on you incrementally. When you’re at the bar downing shot after shot, it’s not a big deal until the next day. We can apply that same thinking to subscribing to newsletters. In a way sometimes, maybe we subscribe because we’re greedy. We don’t want to miss out on that juicy bit of information or that deal we can’t resist in a sale coming down the line, so we hardly ever think twice when giving our email address out to subscribe to this or subscribe to that. But when you open your inbox and have 50 new messages and only 2 are of any significance, Houston… We have a problem. I want to think from now on, when my Blackberry starts ringing, its because I’m receiving a message I actually want to read, from someone I actually know. Which is why I unsubscrribing from everything that isn’t essential and from all the feeds I never read etc. So when I wake up tomorrow and check my messages it’ll be nice and minimal. Here’s hoping anyway…!

One of my favourite things to do is sketch. When an idea hits me, I always have my Moleskine near me. I like the way it feels, the shiny black lustre and the roughness of the cover, the colour, thickness and smoothness of the paper, it just feels so… luxurious. I’m not the kind of person that keeps things in any kind of logical order, from my sketchbook to Photoshop layers, nothing is in sequence, and there can be fragments of several different ideas spread across all the pages. When it comes to putting ideas down, I like it when my Moleskine is packed solid. There isn’t a page which isn’t sketched on, no corner of a page left untouched. To me it feels like the more I fill the pages up, the more valuable my sketchbook and ideas become to me. It feels like it’s worth it’s weight in gold the more I thoughts I put in it. When I set out to redesign my site, I didn’t just want somewhere to show my work, I wanted a testpad, a place to experiment and try new things but still display them in a rough manner. Which is why some posts will be articles, some posts will be unfinished thoughts, some will be rough, others will be smooth. There will be doodles and sketches and scans and little tests of things and ideas all over the place. I wanted to find a way to share that same excitement of thoughts and creativity and ideas in with the same density and richness that I have in my Moleskine. I’d like to translate that into an electronic medium if I can, a place to experiment and tinker, a laboratory of sorts… I call it ‘tinkeration’, and that will be the topic of my next post!

Testing… Testing…

If you’re reading this, the site’s not ready yet. Gosh, it feels like you’re that person that shows up waay to early to the party whilst the host is still setting up, I feel all awkward and exposed…Try to maybe come back tomorrow. Or maybe the day after, I don’t know maybe I’d have finished it by  then. Or maybe after I’ve finished Mass Effect 2. Or maybe a bit after that if that happens to be weekend. Actually, that reminds me, I’ll probably be spending most of the weekend catching up on LOST and 24, so maybe it won’t see the light of day until a little bit after that still… hope I’m not giving the impression that I don’t do much… haha. See you in a bit…