Apr 18, 2012
Hello Fellow Vintage Design Buffs,
This is Vincent from Vectorian Vintage Vectors. I'm pleased and excited to announce the release of a totally revamped version of the Vectorian Vintage Pack: The V2 Vintage Pack.
A special “Thank You” goes out to all the designers who bought the original Vintage Vector Pack and my other product, The Minimal Icons Library. It was your excellent feedback which lead me to release a new and improved version.
The revamp started when a customer noticed some of the frame borders for Illustrator had little gaps between the borders and corners (see examples below). Being a perfectionist myself I knew I could clean these imperfections up. That lead me to Brian Fuelleman, an Illustrator expert and a Vintage Vectors addict just like me.
Brian volunteered to improve the frame borders. He did an amazing job! He checked each one, fixed problems, added corners, improving a lot of aspects. In addition he gave me a lot of good advice which lead to improvements and a higher level of excellence in other areas of my pack.
When Brian finished his work I thought it would take just a few more days to complete the updates, polish up some other details and ship the new version.
Boy was I wrong!
My work was just beginning. It took me weeks to achieve this new version.
Why? As I made improvements in every aspect of this pack I saw the opportunity to add more and more stuff and add more value to the pack.
-All previous borders have been improved and are now easier to use (Thanks Brian!)
-All borders now have corners and can be used on a square or rectangular shape.
-235 NEW Vector Frame Borders have been added.
-”Smart Borders” have been added. They are a new kind of border for more complex border designs. They are based on the Illustrator's appearance panel possibilities.
-70 NEW high quality Vintage Vector illustrations have been added.
-All the files have been reorganized to make recall and access easier.
-All ornaments and borders have been numbered to make it easier for designers to share with customers and designers.
-Catalogs in PDF for each main part: ornaments, borders, illustrations. They are in A$ dimension, so you can print it and have a better way to browse it, get inspired and share.
-Improved the samples provided. Samples are important to show the way to use the ornaments and to inspire you. Almost all are historically accurate and picked from genuine Type Foundry catalogs.
-More samples! I wanted to show the endless possibilities of the Pack for packaging, stationary and wedding invitations. By the way, I'm sure you can do better than me, so if you created great designs with the Vectorian Pack, please mail it to me at vincent@webalys.com
-an improved manual, to be sure that you use the pack at 100% of it's possibilities.
Check all Vintage ornaments and Borders on Vectorian website
-Color swatches library from Victorian era, to design with historically accurate colors.
-More ornaments
-Catalogs available as a printed book on high quality paper, probably using a service like Lulu.coom or amazon books.
-and...what else? Do you have any suggestions? You can write me at vincent@webalys.com
Please let me know : I'm looking for feedback and examples of designs made with it.
Or use the comments below to give me feedback.
Hope you enjoy this new version!
Vincent
PS: I am on Twitter and Dribbble
Oct 8, 2011
A minimalist but friendly apporach for the french company Firebots.
Sep 9, 2011
I was bored of this Vintage woody design. I wanted to show that these decorative ornaments can be useful not only to create Vintage design, but also for any modern creation.
So I radically changed the design for a modern, clear and slick style.
Also i saved some real estate on the page with the excellent and simple Slideshow plugin for JQuery : Slides
Sep 5, 2011
"Anyone who’s serious about designing interfaces should have this book on their shelf for reference. It’s the most comprehensive cross-platform examination of common interface patterns anywhere."
Dan Saffer
I agree. Absolutely recommended to learn, or review, the most efficient design patterns.
A must have for web designers, and available in Kindle edition (I would prefer a PDF version though...)
Sep 1, 2011
A fresh and new design for my fiancee business website : smooth pastel colors, mascotte illustration, clear layout, improved copywriting content and SEO.
One week after the redesign launch we feel the effects : more conversions, more students, unfortunately more work for my seet heart ;-)
So, if you want to learn to speak Thai from home, don't hesitate : Mia is the best online Thai teacher via Skype.
Jul 9, 2011
This book changed my vision of design, as 37Signals changed my vision of business some years ago with Getting Real.
“Reality Is Broken is the most eye-opening book I read this year. With awe-inspiring expertise, clarity of thought, and engrossing writing style, Jane McGonigal cleanly exploded every misconception I’ve ever had about games and gaming. If you thought that games are for kids, that games are squandered time, or that games are dangerously isolating, addictive, unproductive, and escapist, you are in for a giant surprise!”
Sonja Lyubomirsky
After reading it, I'm convinced that gamification mechanisms will be an important part of application/website design in the next years.
Learn more on the official Book website
By the way, my other Company project is named "Positive Flow" and was inspired by this book. This name is a reference to the Flow behavior, the mental state in which a person in an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity.
Leo Tolstoy
Jul 4, 2011
I've just launched a new personnal business : Vectorian
I spent weeks creating this new downloadable product providing hundreds of high quality ornaments.
I wanted a Vintage appearance, so I designed a layout inspired by old nineteenth century advertising : centered title, wood background, old paper poster...
Jan 17, 2011
I worked with Hitomi Studio, an e-commerce and Magento development expert, to polishing the design of the Pullin Shop.
We paid attention to every details to improve the conversion rate, and worked on some often overlooked page, like the 404 page or the search results.
Jan 13, 2011
I designed a new version of the corporate website for my canadian friends of One2Crowd, expert in Magento and application development.
A clear, fresh and technologic appearance and a focus on their skills.
I also designed a new logo and some basic graphic guidelines.
Jan 12, 2011
Created with Illustrator for a customer application.
Jan 9, 2011
Unfortunately this design was rejected by the customer.
Had some fun to create the map/background anyway.
Jan 4, 2011
Advertory will be a revolutionary solution for small and medium business to communicate and promote online.
I’m proud to have been chosen to work on it with Sebastien Sacard to design the application interface. Sebastien is a skilled agile web development manager and a very nice customer. It was a pleasure to work on this project and I can’t wait to see the application becoming real. I know a lot of people who will need it 
So far, the application is not launched, so I can only show the design I made for the “Coming soon” page.
Be aware of the Advertory launch by subscribing to the newsletter : http://www.advertory.com
Dec 27, 2010
Nov 2, 2010
An interesting interface design for a professional extranet based on PHP.
Radio Campus France, a network of independant french radios, needed to redesign their extranet to better internally communicate and share files.
I redesigned a new interface with a strong focus on ergonomy and make the information and action easier to understand.
The graphic design ambiance remind the radio environment. The gray texture and buttons remind stereo devices, and I was especially inspired by the mythic vynil deck “Technics MKII”.
Aug 9, 2010
I plan to release a premium version of my Interface Design Framework in the next weeks.
It should cost between 70$ and 100$.
With this premium version, no more need to credit me or linkback to my website when you use it.
UPDATE : it finally just cost 37$ and you can download the Vector icons pack for Web Design here
And it will come packed with a impressive amout of new icons, new GUI elements, some e-commerce, blog or social networks common layouts, and even patterns for backgrounds to give spice to your designs.
I started with the Icon library : it’s now 760 icons, the most complete minimal icon library ever.
More comprehensive, consistent, and still pixel perfect and carefully crafted.
I also improved some icons and organized and sort the library.
So it’s 500 icons more and I tried to propose a complete collection : 530 symbolic icons and 230 arrows icons.
But if you see some missing icons you would like to see, just tell me
Here is the preview of the icons which will be provided in vector format for Illustrator : as a source file and as symbols elements for directly drop it in your designs.
Jul 25, 2010
I rebound on a comment about my User Interface Design framework posted on Hacker news
This post says : “Mmmm… that’s an interesting approach. I think it’s perfectly fine for creating quick jpg mockups but I wouldn’t use it for the real app for two reasons: 1. Attribution. 2. Differentiation is design.”
I personally don’t agree with this definition “differentiation is design”.
Everybody has his own definition of design. As a webdesigner mine should be : “Solve problems, make users life easier, bring profits to my customers”.
No need to differentiate for the pleasure to be original. The interface should be invisible and even monotonous.
Monotonous ?
Yes, it could be a quality interface design : using some convention than the user already knows, repeating the same look or patterns with consistency. Thus, the user don’t need extra brain efforts and the really important elements in a interface screen immediately pop to the users eyes, because they are different from the monotonous interface.
Ok, this is my own approach to designing, but if you agree with it, you will feel the need of this kind of framework.
The idea of this framework is inspired by the Agile software philosophy . Even if I’m not developer I’m a big fan of this efficient iterative development. EspeciallyRuby on Rails and the 37 Signals method.
As in Ruby on Rails, the main principle behind this GUI design framework is “dont repeat yourself” to gain productivity.
The agile developers use the “convention over configuration” approach. Convention doesn’t means the best solution, or a principle to blindly follow, it’s just a default setting which is often the most appropriate. And you can customize it according to your needs.
My GUI framework follow the same philosophy of using “Conventions” for interface. It provides some patterns and default GUI elements that most of the time you will use as it. You save some time, some energy, you can concentrate on more important tasks : understanding the users needs, solving problems, finding the right patterns and carefully building the interface.
In my experience, the design problem is not about designing the GUI elements themselves ; it’s more finding the right visual hierarchy between these elements, balancing their visual weight to make the interface the most clear and the less crowded as possible.
Here I can spend hours tweaking, changing size, create more white space or changing the colours to give more focus to one element, fading another one… But usually I use the same interface elements with roughly the same look: radio buttons, tabs, breadcrumb, accordion menus.
Thus the idea of grouping all these elements in a library for saving time. As it we obtain a side benefit : the interface is more consistent and clear. Creating a GUI library force me to compare all the elements in the same place and check their coherence.
If you don’t like the convention, you can make your own configuration
As all the elements provided in the GUI Design framework are vectors, you can easily adapt them to your needs. But you already have some foundations that you’re free to customize and you save time.
You can also use the library as a GUI reference : I tried to make a comprehensive library with a lot of patterns, and to inject some usability good practices. Even if you don’t use the elements, it could be a inspiring reference.
I plan to add more elements to this framework for saving time : grids, columns system, repetitive background patterns… If you have any idea of others elements feel free to share your ideas.
If you don’t know it, download the User interface Design framework here
Jul 18, 2010
Here is a preview of the free graphic styles I’ve almost finished for Illustrator : you will use it directly from the Illustrator’s graphic styles panel.
It will be consistent and usefull if you want to quickly find the good color combination for your web design and creating buttons, navigations elements, panels…
You can use the reference colors file for each styles to look the backgrounds, typography and side elements : the colors should match together. Actualy, I will also release a swatch library for illustrator with all the colors.
So far I was using some other free styles library for Illustrator, but they lack of consitency and seems created and organized randomly. I tried to make my graphic style library more complete, consistent and to give the colors some inspiring names.
Each color variation comme with 2 differents gradients and with a square and rounded version.
Any feedback is welcome :-)
UPDATE : You can now Download for free the User Interface Design framework
Jul 2, 2010
Here is some screenshots of the coming GUI elements for wireframing and designing application interfaces with illustrator.
All the elements will be in Illustrator format and vectorials, they could be used as symbols and dropped from symbols panels. It will be free to use both for personnal and commercial usage. (just need to link to the framework page if it’s used on website).
It will be released in two or three weeks.
Feel free to give your feedback, it’s still perfectible
UPDATE : You can now Download for free the User Interface Design framework
