My interview just came out in Designer in the Spotlight weekly feature of Jacob Cass’ JustCreativeDesign.com

It’s rather long, but for those of you who are ardent fans of my persona, or want to find out the dark secrets of my existence – here’s the link to the interview: Designer in the spotlight – Lady Omega

Moving

We’re in the process of moving to Europe, and for the past couple of months we’ve been working hard packing a 3000 lbs container to ship it over to our destination. I’ve never done so much packing in my life, and now i can say that i am a professional packer able to produce my own custom made boxes, and my hands are still recovering from the staples, tape and paper cuts. Here’s a photo of one of the last days of packing:

Taking pictures

In between the moving business, i managed to take some photos of the fall in Virginia. This was the first fall i saw since 1999, so it was really exciting for me to remember once again that the trees can be different colors. Here are some photos and you’re welcome to check out my Fall set on flickr.

…and then we escaped the winter and went to Israel, where it’s still pretty warm, and got to go to the Dead sea where i took a couple of photos as well.

Making music

The long-awaited Encoder album, “Slivers of Time” came out, with my guest vocals on the first track, “When it rains” and 2 more remixes of it by Ethereal Sedition and Liquid Newt. I like Ethereal Sedition remix really a lot and i think they did a great job. I’ve posted the original song here before, so here’s the Ethereal Sedition remix:

• [See post to listen to audio]

Lord Kaiaphas / Zhyin also made a guest appearance on the upcoming album of an American black metal band, Arcane Asylum. The song is called “Atrocity is Silent”:

• [See post to listen to audio]

He also has just played a Minimal Criminal live set at Moksha’s Hanuka party last weekend, and got a great reaction from the crowd:

Working

Yeah and on top of all that i’ve been doing lots of work, which you can check out in the updated portfolio of Elune Art.

So, i surely have lots of excuses of not writing much in my blog. I’ll be more organized in 2009

Happy New Year to everyone!!!

Each one of the 8 floors is like an art gallery, but the fun thing is that you find different styles of art with almost every step – one space would have modern-style, surrealistic paintings, the other one would have photography, the next one would have junk art, and the next one would have something totally weird you won’t even know what to call it. The other 2 floors have live performances and the bar.

I did 5 floors of art only, and that was more than enough impressions and inspiration. It was great to find out that there are so many young artists in the area, with very interesting ideas and ways of expressing themselves. I took loads of photos and artist’s flyers to check their sites. Here are some of the photos of the art i found the most interesting for me:

The Peep Show

The Peeps are marshmallow-inspired creatures made by different people for the Washington Post Peeps Diorama Contest. The dioramas display all kinds of iconic images from the present and the past, political situations, well-known movies, and just funny stuff. These are definitely worth noticing.

If you want to check out more photos i took, visit my Flickr and the Artomatic pool.

Shin Tanaka

Shin Tanaka is a graffiti artist, paper toy creator and designer from Fukuoka, Japan. His site features supercute papercraft toys – Spiky Baby series, T-Boy, Boxy and others. Some are available for download.

Josh McKible

Josh McKible’s Paper Birds are adorable. He is a very successful graphic and visual design artist from New York, living in Tokyo.
The birdies are available for download!

Brian Castleforte

Brian Castleforte is a designer from LA. His site – Nice Bunny has a vairety of his papercrafts as well as of the other guest artists. The toys are available for download.

Atom-Glue² chronicle

Here are the brilliant works of Atom, a japanese artist: the papercraft reproduction of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights‘ creatures – the Helmet bird, and the Letter bird from The Temptation of Saint Anthony.

Paper Critters

Paper Critters is an online paper toy creator site, where one can make his own paper creature, get a chance to be showcased in the top 10 critters, and see some of them out in the wild!

Readymech

Readymech’s papercrafts are free, flatpack toys for you to print and build. The site features a great variety of cute creatures.

Speakerdog

Speakerdog – yet another site with cute downloadable papercrafts. Make your own speakerdog!

Dragon illusion

This dragon is lots of fun. I already have one at home, it’s pretty cool. The little dragon is made out of paper – you cut it out, stick it together, and stand it on a table or window ledge. But when you move around, the dragon’s head seems to follow you around the room. There is a video on the Grand Illusions site, which shows how it works, and it’s available for download.

Papercraft Robots Gallery

Robot Tairiku site has a big gallery of papercraft robots, available for download:

Skull-A-Day papercraft:

And here’s a papercraft skull from Skull-A-Day:

And another supercute thing i found on Notcot – made by Sleep Sheep and Friends or Cloud B ~ this turtle is cuddly under its shell, lights up in various colors, and projects the night sky on to the ceiling (or your tent, fort, etc). It’s supposed to be for toddlers but i want this thing!

At the stage of making the text-logo for the site, I found out that there are NO decent web 2.0 fonts for Cyrillic languages. While my fonts folder is stuffed with all kinds of web 2.0 fonts , there are none that work with Cyrillic. I surely have some “fancy” Cyrillic fonts, but they are very specific to a certain style, and do not go with the modern designs almost at all.

Therefore, I did some research on the Russian web 2.0 business and was pretty disappointed with the results. I found out that web 2.0 does exist in Russia, and, undoubtedly, there are many talented designers and various web 2.0 applications, but I haven’t found any decent information, samples or sources for the web 2.0 or any modern-looking Cyrillic fonts. This was the only link i found and it speaks for itself.

Russian designers’ personal sites are mostly in English, which is a necessity, of course. The sites in Russian that I saw, stick to Arial/Verdana or other default windows fonts for Cyrillic. That is very sad, I mean, while designing a website in Russian, does one have no other choices except for sticking to Arial or spending time on creating custom made letters?? Branding, logo, tag line for the site are always important, and, with having no resources to provide a decent looking text-logo or static image with text, this becomes a real pain.

So c’mon Russian fontographers, what’s going on here? Maybe I was looking in the wrong places for the fonts? If so, I would really appreciate some info on Cyrillic web 2.0 fonts.

If someone goes to CSS Mania to check out my listing there, i would appreciate your votes very much!

Also, while i was redesigning my blog, i got the best friend award from Lilyruth. Thank you, Lilyruth!

1. Wanting Great Designs for Cheap Prices

Because everyone seems to have Photoshop and know a designer nowadays, many clients tend to have a bad idea of what design is worth. While it can be ok to have low prices when you are starting out, when you are confident enough and your work is good enough you should come up with prices that make it worth your time.

Many clients also try to outsource their projects to India and other places where designers work for rock bottom prices, but you need to stick behind your work and hold out for those clients who know what you are worth. Let them know why you are the best choice!

2. Asking you to Design on Spec

This is when clients want to see a finished design before they pay. You should avoid doing this as much as possible, but in times of desperation it could be he only option. Be confident though and let clients choose you based on your portfolio and not on spec. Be especially careful of designing on spec for people on classifieds and forums because it’s a common scam in places like those where they really are not clients, but designers themselves looking to steal your work and use it for their own projects.

3. Slow Payments

Some clients are notorious for paying slowly or not at all. The way I combat this is to ALWAYS require a down payment before I begin work. For smaller project I usually ask for all the money upfront and I never send the final files until I receive the last payments.

4. Not Planning out the Project Upfront

I find it extremely important to plan out a project as much as possible before starting work. Even if they have a tight deadline make it clear the project must be fully planned out before you begin. After all meetings and discussions are done write up an estimate listing all of the details of the project and your prices and terms.

5. Not Giving you all the Copy and Images Needed up Front

This is probably one of the most common bad habits of clients. I try to stress several times that I require all copy and images before I begin and this usually gets them to give it to me on time. Although don’t be surprised if you end up having to design using dummy text and make annoying adjustments later to fit the actual copy.

6. Not Having High Resolution Images for Print Projects

This is usually due to the fact that clients do no understand the fine points of resolution or that they just do not have any high resolution images available. Try recommend using high resolution stock photography or illustrations instead, but if they really must use those images try to keep them as small as possible. If this happens make sure you write in your contract that the images provided were of low resolution and may not reproduce well when printed.

7. Forcing you to use Poorly Designed Logos and Other Elements

Many times clients will ask you to include pre-existing logos or other design elements within the project you are working on. You will have to judge when and when not to argue this if you feel it hurts the overall design. Learning how to negotiate and inform clients on what you believe is best can be considered an art form and takes practice!

8. Can you Make that Type Bigger?

This has always been on ongoing battle between designers and clients and has become a sort of inside joke for designers. Even Paula Scher commented on the issue by naming on of her books Make It Bigger.

9. Asking for Way too Many Revisions

This one can be pretty easily avoided by establishing a set amount of revision rounds and initial concepts before starting a project. Make sure you get this in writing or at least save your emails where they agree to your specifications. This is most commonly done in the logo and identity design area of graphic design.

10. Asking for Additional Work on top of the Original Agreement

This one can be good or bad. It’s bad when they spring additional work on you and don’t want to pay more, but it’s good if your agreement outlines the pricing for additional work.

11. Never Available to Questions or to Look at Samples

Often clients can be extremely busy and working on multiple projects at once. As designers it’s important for us to be able to contact our clients to show them samples, revisions and ask important questions. This one is really up to you guys. You can either try and deal with it and get the project done or you can let the client know about the issue and try and resolve it or drop them.

12. Pinning Printing Costs on You

Many designers handle printing for clients, but I try to stay away from this. I’ve seen way too many clients try and stick designers with outrageous printing bills because of an error in the final design. I basically say I can recommend printers to you and do an initial check of the files to make sure they are print ready, but it’s up to you and your printer to do a final prepress check and make sure the files are correct, because I will not be held responsible for any printing costs whatsoever.

13. Not willing to pay for Additional Costs

This usually turns out bad if you try to spring additional costs on clients at the end of the project. Once again this problem can easily be avoided if you specify upfront what the additional costs are or might be. This can include stock photography, stock illustrations, printing costs and rush fees.

14. Canceling Projects

Whether you or a client decided to end a project you should be covered in some way. Using a contract again is a simple way to protect yourself. Simply state that if a project is canceled, you will invoice for work completed up until that point. Some designers give no refunds at all and some are happy to refund clients if they are the ones who drop the client because of issues.

15. Returning Many Months Later for Login Information

I recently had a client from over two years ago contact me in desperation because he lost certain login information. Lucky for him I keep good records and I was easily able to look up his info. I’m not sure what would have happened if I didn’t have it, but having it in my records made it an easy problem to solve.

16. Asking for Files Years Later

Similar to log in information clients often misplace files you send them. I always keep files on my computer, even from projects years ago and I make sure to back up my files on multiple external hard drives.

17. Legal Action

No one likes this one, but it does happen so be prepared. Always save emails and paperwork in case you need to present them as evidence. Also make sure you find a lawyer that can help you if something comes up. Ask family and friends if they know any good lawyers who would be willing to represent you if a problem occurs.

18. Over Controlling

Some clients are very over controlling and don’t allow for much creative freedom. When dealing with an over controlling client it’s important to let them know you are the designer without sounding to harsh or rude. Just give them your honest opinion on issues and suggest things when you can without being to pushy.

19. Lack of Research & Planning

Sometimes clients want a website or some other project done, but they have absolutely no idea what’s going on. By this I mean they have done no research or planning before hand, but still want a complicated website that’s easy to update.

This makes things extremely difficult for designers because we have to explain every last detail several times for clients. While helping clients is our job there are some clients who really need to go back to the start and do more research on what they are getting themselves into.

20. I Know Everything

Similar to over controlling clients, some clients think they know everything there is to know about design and what your job entails. They tend to tell you exactly what to do with your designs and can be very pushy. Sometimes you have to just deal with this, but as mentioned before don’t be afraid to give your input. I mean they did hire you because you are a professional designer right?

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I would want one i guess :)

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Also, Thokkian Vortex site is now online!

Thanks to Most Inspired, The Daily Slurp, Light on Dark, CSS Bloom and Morpheed CSS for featuring my design!