Time for a Change - Abduzeedo 12 Years

Abduzeedo started at the end of 2006. Exactly on December 16th. The reason I started was due to necessity. My design studio had just been robbed. I had lost my computers and had to start over. In the context of losing everything, the blog was forged and as Bob Dylan once said: if you ain't got nothing you ain't got nothing to lose. With that mindset, I launched the blog without any business aspirations, but with a way to learn about new technologies, test the web 2.0, ways to monetize and share everything I could.

Bob Dylan once said - if you ain't got nothing you ain't got nothing to lose

Looking back it seems like things were easy, losing all my gear wasnt stressful at all. Time is always our best friend, but this friend is a slow and steady medicine. Its effects are not instantaneous. In addition to that, and with a mix of hard work and a lot of luck the blog became successful, which allowed us to grow and stand the test of time (our good friend once again) crossing a decade serving people with things that inspire us.if you ain't got nothing you ain't got nothing to lose

Over the years weve seen big shifts in most areas. Thankfully the internet expanded everyones horizon. It gave us access to content that before was available to very few and gave the opportunity to many to have the same access to success. It was my case, I was in Brazil, not in the big cities like Rio or Sao Paulo. Still, I got to create a blog that reached everywhere that had internet access.

Throughout our 12 years, weve done our best to feature and promote artists, designers, illustrators, and photographers. We have received thousands of emails thanking us for the features. Weve interviewed people we admire including masters like Drew Struzam, the creator of classic posters for movies like Goonies, Indiana Jones and Star Wars. Weve also received a few emails complaining that we used images in an inappropriate fashion. In which case, they have been promptly removed. We never use images for any other reason than to educate and inspire burgeoning creatives. It was never my intention to cause any harm, and as a designer and photography enthusiast I understand and respect the idea of copyrighted material.

Through no fault of my own, I wound up painting in the movie business. The posters I painted went around the globe, seen in most every place by millions, if not billions of people. It is said that the Star Wars Episode I poster, because it went around the world in every venue unchanged, that it became the most viewed piece of art of all time. This is no fault of mine. -Drew Struzam

Because of that, we are changing some things on the blog. We will go back to our roots and be more focused on digital art, branding, and interface design. We will also try to bring more tutorials, reviews or just opinions.

To celebrate these changes, you probably have already noticed, we have a new logo and a brand new website. Bear with me, I know there are some bugs still lurking around. But I am working as hard as I can in my spare time to fix them.

New Design

The new design is the simplest yet. I decided to clean up as much as I could and take a full reference on design books and simple editorial design. The color palette is just black and white. We use 50% grey for some pull-quotes but thats it, everything else is as simple as black and white.

There are a few tricks we kept from the old design. You can press G to see the grid and you can press N to go to night mode (that one goes automatically when its night time). We also took full advantage of CSS Grids and CSS Variables. And that allows us to create some fun things, like the Pantone Color of the Year post. In addition to those, stay tuned, we have a few more surprises coming soon.

The whole design process was done using Figma and then translated to the Drupal theme that I created. I had completely forgotten how to do that but received amazing guidance from Rafael Silva and we now have a super streamlined process for future updates.The font used on this website isDIN 2014fromAdobe Fonts.

Branding

The new logo is a complete change from the previous. If you follow me on Twitter or Instagram you might have seen some explorations I shared months ago. Basically, the idea was to bring back a more fun, playful and yet nostalgic look. Everything seems to be going in the same direction, Helvetica or Futura variations of typography for logotypes. I am not saying that I dont like it, but because I still follow that same you aint got nothing to lose philosophy I decided it was a good time to swim against the current.

Stay tuned for a post on the new branding process in the next couple of weeks.

New Features

With this new release, we have a new feature that it is our curated Store. We will be adding products we love, either we have or not, to share with you. Feel free to suggest products for that section too, especially if you are the person selling them. It could be posters or plugins and presets. Anything design related, we would love to feature it in our store.

In addition to that, you can now access the website via our new domain https://abdz.do - it's much simpler and easier to pronounce.

Abduzeedo team

Our team is very lean, its basically Francois Hoang, our chief editor and pretty much the guy running the show; myself, Gisele, and Ibby. Once again I cannot forget to mention Rafael Silva, he really made the whole process of updating the blog super easy.

We are working on opening up the blog to more people to write posts. If you are interested send me an email at [email protected] with the subject write for the blog.

I hope you enjoy this new version of the blog and thank you very much for supporting and checking our site. We are immensely appreciative.

Happy Holidays and a great 2019 to all!