Caraminhadas is an online magazine about Education, produced and published by Linha Mestra. The word “Caraminhadas” is a combination of the words “caminhada” (walking) and “caraminhola” (ideas in your head).

The project started as a simple idea to create a website where the talented people from Linha Mestra could publish content that would be relevant to school teachers. Over a few months it evolved into an exciting and promising online magazine, with great ideas and immense potential.

Everyone involved participated in all phases of the project, from conceptualization to design and implementation. The feedback from the team was exceptional, and it lead to a beautiful visual design, and a user-friendly interface.

Caraminhadas is a living, ongoing project, and I am proud to continue to be part of the team.

It was an honor and a great pleasure to design a portfolio website for my friend and brilliant jeweler, Thelma Aviani.

I have been following Thelma’s work since I met her in Australia in 2001, and her pieces have never failed to surprise and amaze me. I am especially interested in the contrast between the simple and elegant pieces, and the complex and artistic ones. At first, I tried to express this duality through the website design itself, but as the project unfolded we decided to keep it simple and clean, and just let the beautifully photographed pieces speak for themselves. The result is a website that translates her style and herself.

Update 2: My entry won! Check it out at http://www.carsonified.com/fowd/and-the-winner-is.

Update: my first entry (the “What are you doing?” slide) has made it to the top 10! Voting is now open at Carsonified.

These are my entries for the FOWD 2009 Holding Slide competition. The idea was to design a static graphic that will be displayed on the big screen between sessions of the conference.

For my first entry, I played with all the different things people usually do during conference breaks. I used a series of icons to represent some common and amusing activities. Also, for whoever is bored during the break, this slide might give them a few ideas.

The other three entries make up a three-slide series that uses front-end development languages to convey the idea of break time. With XHTML it was pretty straight forward since all I had to do was to use the “break” tag itself. With Javascript and CSS I had to be a bit more creative and less obvious, but I believe they can make up for a pretty interesting interpretation exercise.

In all of the designs, I choose to use FOWD’s existing visual elements in order to preserve the visual identity of the event.

The most common design used in posters for the play All in the Timing is a clock. That’s why we decided to go in a different direction for this show. Working with the Director, Lee Papa, we came up with the concept of using falling objects to illustrate the concept of timing. I developed these two incarnations, and was prepared to take the concept further (using any number of different silhouettes, objects, and environments) if needed. However, for the budget of the play, two posters was sufficient, and no more elaboration on the concept was needed.

After reading the excellent The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web by Dave Shea and Molly E. Holzschlag, I couldn’t help but start thinking about making my own theme.

CSS Zen Garden is the website that first showed to the world the infinite possibilities of designing with Cascading Styles Sheets. Using one single HTML file, hundreds of designers around the world have come up with beautiful, innovative css themes that can be seen at csszengarden.com.

So while looking through the wide range of themes, my mind kept returning to the idea that a theme for a website about CSS should be about CSS itself. And since CSS is nothing but an endless list of typographical elements and conventions, I designed a theme using nothing but typography and a little bit of color (of course).