my name is mwd

As a side to my interests in user interfaces and photography, I’ve been getting quite interested in design in general. Whilst I don’t particular expect to be any good at it myself, I have to do occasional bits here and there, and I’m always looking for inspiration from others – as they say, if you want to be good at writing, read a lot of books, etc.

A very good way I’ve discovered of seeing interesting design is the Layer Tennis competition, now in its second year. The idea is that two competing designers pass a single design back and forth, each trying to add, extend, and out do the other. There’s ten volleys in total, and each volley can only take 15 minutes – thus you get to see a lot of great design work, and better yet you get to see it evolve over the course of each match.

Some matches are better than others, but overall the current season has been quite good. I definitely prefer it when the designers do continue with the artwork between volleys – on occasion only the theme is continued between volleys rather than any artwork, which I think defeats the purpose of layer tennis somewhat.

I particularly enjoyed Week 1 (which inspired me when doing this background design for Digital Flapjack), Week 11, where the designers opted to work together rather than against each other, and Week 12, but if you’re interested in design I encourage you to look through all the matches, as there’s usually something interesting in each one.