Jonathan Moore
I am a designer who lives in code, entrepreneur, and an idea incubator driven to make our world a better place.
I am a designer who lives in code, entrepreneur, and an idea incubator driven to make our world a better place.
This week I started the process out by coming up with a fresh new concept for a personal logo mark, visual styles and design elements.
I have only begun to make changes to my site by applying our latest theme Jetty and updating the visuals, but over the next few weeks I will relaunch my portfolio of the last decade’s work and announce new projects that the Style Hatch team is working on.
Also, starting next week I am launching a weekly email newsletter where I send out original articles, stories and insights designed to help you take action on your ideas, spark creativity, and brave the unknown. Subscribe to the newsletter now to make sure you get the first one that goes out Monday morning.
The photographs that appear in the animated GIF are from Folkert Gorter available under a CC Attribution 3.0 license.
Last week, we retired the blue alien head. New Tumblr users will now get these friendly geometric faces as their default avatar. Adorably, they take their colors from the post type icons.
I love all the playful details that Tumblr builds in and packs away for it’s users.
(via petervidani)
Stellar branding, interior and graphic design work by Singapore based Bravo Company for the new Mexout eatery.
Mexout is a fresh-mex eatery in Singapore. We imagine Mexout to be a young eccentric Mexican food expert, or “Mex’pert” as we’ve coined it, who is living in his parents’ basement. … We’ve came up with about 20 hand-drawn logos for them to use in rotation. For the rest of their collaterals, everything is handwritten or hand-drawn. No computer was used for the creation of the graphics.
Don’t you just hate it when you urgently shoot an email to tech support - who guarantee they will get back to you asap - only to find that the guarantee of them getting back to “asap” you is via an automated confirmation email of having received your call for help. In such instances, we tend to forget that tech support are people too and that they need to go back home :D or just wish that they simply had someone “human” on call 24/7.
Well I wasn’t in such a dire situation with my call for help to Style Hatch. But my support request was emailed over the weekend and I obviously did not expect to get any help until the next day. But as expected, I received the above automated confirmation email. And reading the content of it just made me smile. A simple “automated” email had so much of “human touch” to it. It’s a rather small thing but I loved it that Style Hatch put so much care to add a word of reassurance that they will indeed get back to help me! Having read that email, I would have forgiven Style Hatch even if they weren’t able to get back to me because they had to continue ”fighting the sharks with their bare hands”.
Good design goes well beyond the pixels and typefaces all the way down to the small interactions that a customer has with your company. Now I better get back to wrestling sharks…
Last Friday we pushed our latest grid-based theme live on Tumblr. Patchwork lets you add #featured and #minimal tags to your posts (or add your own custom tags in the Customize menu). The #featured tag will display your post in the grid across two columns, and the #minimal tag will only show your Photo, Video or Audio content with the full captions on the permalink pages.
We also spent quite a lot of time refining the theme’s responsive layout features for a flawless experience on mobile devices. Resize your browser window down on the demo site to get an idea of how it looks.
Check out our alternate demo site at patchwork-minimal.stylehatch.co to get an idea of how you can customize virtually ever visual element in the theme.
If you have a quick question about the theme tweet us @stylehatch or send an email to patchwork@stylehatch.co.
“Products are made in the factory, but brands are created in the mind.”
— Walter Landor
As an experiment Ben Pieratt, founder of Svpply went through the exercise of creating Hessian as visual brand without a product. For $18,000 the name, identity, Tumblr blog, and assets can be yours for your new restaurant, mobile app, teeshirt line, organic blueberry syrups or game development studio.
The idea, product and real branding work is all up to you, after all a brand is an experience living at the intersection of an expectation and a promise.
“You have to design apps for the way people are, not the way they wish they were.”
(via davemorin)
An upgrade, years in the making…
When we imagined Tumblr more than seven years ago, we dreamed of offering creators a new canvas. Every post would be a raw look through the author’s eyes and mind. We imagined the interface disappearing as these subjects came to life.
For years, this vision was challenged by limits in browser technology and an increasingly daunting set of Tumblr features to support. But today, we take a huge step.
After months of careful crafting, we’ve reduced creation on Tumblr to its essence, while carrying over every single feature and making room for some BIG new ones (like completely customizable drag-and-drop photoset creation, faster uploads, and inline reblogging!). We can’t wait for you to try it.
The upgrades have started rolling out and will be available for everyone by the end of the weekend. Most of the bugs and omissions you’ve reported have already been fixed, but please let us know if you run in to any other issues!
Tumblr’s design, product and engineering team did a fantastic job with this major update to the dashboard. Finally being able to drag files into Photo posts and rearrange photoset grids is a beautiful thing.
Acknowledging that fixing is the unsung hero of creativity, Sugru created The Fixer’s Manifesto to encourage a culture of fixing. In the spirit of the manifesto, they are hosting the markdown and generated PDF files on Github where people are encouraged to fork, edit and submit pull requests.
Sugru is selling the letterpress version of The Fixer’s Manifesto that includes an eight pack of their moldable fixing compound.
“The Pressure is Good For You”, neon sign by Adam Garcia.
Last summer I was honored to speak at Valio Conference along with Cameron Koczon, Jeff Sheldon, Kyle Neath, Krysten Heide and others. During my talk I share about my journey from running an agency taking on client work and shifting to products with Style Hatch and Tumblr themes, the design elements outside of colors and fonts that really matter, and customer service. You can find the slides up on Speaker Deck.
Also, find the audio from my talk on Traction on the Circles Conference website.
I have always felt like there are a lot of Tumblr themes that work very well for highly visual blogs full of images and then other themes that work well for long-form articles. Personally I want to start writing more on my blog, in between the usual posts about creativity, design, photography, and startups. With that in mind I designed and built our latest premium Tumblr theme Cadence specifically for myself.
Cadence is now for sale on Tumblr for $49. If you want more details on the responsive layout, two column grid, customization or theme options check out our introductory post or email us at cadence@stylehatch.co.
Also, you’re more than welcome to use the photograph that I personally shot in your header!
Regardless of how great you are at communicating with clients, I think we’ve all been in this place at one point or another. The video was created to promote Docracy’s new Super Signing service.
Docracy’s collection of Open Legal documents is also a great starting point if you’re looking for agreements to use with clients.
If I’m really honest I have to admit to being a habitual new book starter. My iPad is full of books that I start—and plan on finishing someday—only to find another one to read three chapters in. On a recent flight back from Dallas, I downloaded It Will Be Exhilarating by Studio Neat and read the whole thing from forward to acknowledgements during the short flight.
Although it is a fairly short book, it might be one of my recent favorites covering design, indie entrepreneurship, passion, and process.
“Make something because you feel invigorated when you work on it, and anxious when you don’t.”
“The biggest myth ever perpetuated in the design field is that good design sells itself.”
