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Twelve Months in Review: 2013/2014 – Mathew Zurlinden, A Retrospective Time Use Analysis

Mathew Zurlinden — Sat, 14 Feb 2015 22:26:10 +0000

Images of the final printed book copies of my time use analysis project.

February 14, 2015

Book Cover

Mathew Zurlinden — Fri, 24 Oct 2014 15:51:12 +0000

I have an ambitious goal to complete my personal time project year end report by December 1. I had a vision of a cover design for the report so I spent a little time sketching it out and refining it in Illustrator. Below is the first digital pass. I must say, I got pretty excited and happy with the design when I saw the vectors rendered on my monitor.

Personal time analysis project

Mathew Zurlinden — Thu, 10 Jul 2014 14:57:01 +0000

365log.blogspot.com

For the past 10 months I have been keeping (relatively) detailed records of time spent on my daily activities. The initial goal was to try and figure out how to be more efficient with my time. I anticipated tracking my time for a week; maybe two. Well – ten months later and I am still going at it. After about one month I decided I should just go for a full year and make a project out of the process. I have recently created a blog – 365log.blogspot.com – to document the project and share the data with whomever might be interested. Although the project is not a design project I intend to include design elements when I wrap up the first year. Below is an example of a potential graphic I designed for the project:

New Website, New Logo, New Business Cards

Mathew Zurlinden — Wed, 02 Apr 2014 15:16:42 +0000

With a new website and a new logo, it was only appropriate to design new business cards. My personal design aesthetic preference is clean and simple but I wanted to explore a variety of options before committing on a design. I ended up creating 12 unique designs; below is the final four designs I debated between:

After making my final decision I did the only logical thing; I made a 3D CAD model to see what the final printed cards would look like… This also afforded me an opportunity to easily test the remaining designs and confirm my decision. Below is my final decision in the 3D environment

April 2, 2014

Logo

Mathew Zurlinden — Thu, 20 Mar 2014 01:13:17 +0000

While I was creating this website and struggling with CSS and HTML and web hosting and … I still have no idea how this website functions… I was quite proud after I had something functional so I showed the website off to a colleague who has also created a website for himself. He was nice enough to inform me I “needed” a favicon. ”A favicon?!” I asked, “What the hell is a favicon?” For those of you who might be living on earth like me and not in cyberspace, a favicon is the tiny icon in the web address bar or on a tab in a web browser that identifies the brand. Well, unfortunately, he was correct. What kind of a legitimate website would not have a favicon? So I scoured google for hours to learn out how to implement such a thing.

After determining adding a favicon was actually a feasible task, I realized I did not actually have an icon/logo to use as a favicon… Before losing my motivation I quickly opened Adobe Illustrator and whipped up this little guy:

The initial concept worked well for a placeholder until I had time to consider alternatives. After many sketches and Illustrator revisions I have narrowed my favorites down to the nine below. I determined I was actually quite fond of the red dot theme so I pursued that pretty heavily. After all the variations I considered, my original “quick and dirty” logo made it to the final nine. Sometimes the first idea is the best idea… Some of the design directions below are abstract (which I rather like…) and some are more literal. Anyway, if you look at your address bar or browser tab you will see the logo I chose to use. Also, when you click on the button in your browser that says “add to favorites” the little favicon will hopefully appear in that list as well. Assuming I did things correctly…

March 19, 2014