Here’s a simple UI set I worked on earlier this week. It was a fun experience creating matching interface elements. I’m thinking the whole thing is possibly lacking contrast—it makes your eyes work a bit—so I’ll probably play with that when I have a chance. Any suggestions for UI elements I could add to this set? Tumblr doesn’t make commenting easy but you can send me feedback on Dribbble.  You can also download the psd file from my Google docs if you like it. It’s free of rights. My modest contribution to this world.
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Here’s a simple UI set I worked on earlier this week. It was a fun experience creating matching interface elements. I’m thinking the whole thing is possibly lacking contrast—it makes your eyes work a bit—so I’ll probably play with that when I have a chance.

Any suggestions for UI elements I could add to this set? Tumblr doesn’t make commenting easy but you can send me feedback on Dribbble. 

You can also download the psd file from my Google docs if you like it. It’s free of rights. My modest contribution to this world.

Would you keep the $5 bill?

I just received a survey questionnaire in the mail, from a Florida-based agency called Simmons. It is a 4-page survey about media usage and leisure activities. Nothing surprising here, except that there is a $5 bill stapled to the questionnaire sheets.

The survey came with a letter explaining that my household had been selected to represent “hundreds of households in [my] community,” and that the agency was “very grateful for [my] help.”
The letter also said: “Please accept the enclosed $5 dollars as a token of our appreciation.”

This is the first time in my life I receive cash in the mail from strangers. And I feel confused.

Is this $5 bill thing a super smart and audacious strategy to get my immensely-valued feedback? Or is it plain stupid and disrespectful?

It’s stupid because I could have just trashed the envelope without opening it. I almost did trash it, in fact, as they didn’t get my name right, but I got lured into opening it by the colorful stamps. These look like stamps my mom would use—how smart!

Ok, so maybe it’s not that stupid, but it is disrespectful and aggressive to put me in a position where I feel like I have no choice but to fill out the survey. 

I do have a choice, but it is in the shape of a moral dilemma:

  • I could keep the $5 bill, complete the survey, and feel like a tool.
  • I could keep the $5 bill, ignore the survey, and feel dishonest.
  • I could send them back the $5 bill in the prepaid return envelope they attached (oh yeah, there’s the prepaid envelope…)
  • I could keep the $5 bill and make an origami elephant with it, so I never have to think of it as money again and I can escape the moral guilt of not sending anything back.

Now if I keep the five without filling the survey, do I put it in my wallet or do I send it to my favorite charity? And if I do send it to my charity, is it tax-deductible? Ha.

Oh God.
Seriously, thank you Simmons, for giving me a headache.
I think I’ll just earn that money and buy myself a glass of wine.
There has been a lot of celestial activity these days, which inspired me to create this illustration of a meteorite falling over an Icelandic landscape. This is a composite photo: the sky is a night sky I found on google images—I removed the moon—while the landscape comes from a day picture of a cotton field in Iceland, taken by a National Geographic reporter. The meteorite is basic vector art. By the way, here’s the difference between a comet and a meteor: Meteoroids are small chunks of debris in space. When they enter our atmosphere they start to burn and and streak across the sky, blazing bright for a few seconds. They are then called meteors (or shooting stars). When meteors are large enough to survive their trip through the atmosphere and hit the ground, they are called meteorites. Comets are also chunks of space debris such as rocks, but they have ice mixed in as well. Contrary to meteoroids, they have very long orbits, and when they come close to the Sun, the heat boils off their frozen ice and pushes it into a long, bright tail. Comets are much bigger than meteors and they do not have to enter our atmosphere to be seen. 
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There has been a lot of celestial activity these days, which inspired me to create this illustration of a meteorite falling over an Icelandic landscape.

This is a composite photo: the sky is a night sky I found on google images—I removed the moon—while the landscape comes from a day picture of a cotton field in Iceland, taken by a National Geographic reporter. The meteorite is basic vector art.

By the way, here’s the difference between a comet and a meteor:

Meteoroids are small chunks of debris in space. When they enter our atmosphere they start to burn and and streak across the sky, blazing bright for a few seconds. They are then called meteors (or shooting stars). When meteors are large enough to survive their trip through the atmosphere and hit the ground, they are called meteorites.

Comets are also chunks of space debris such as rocks, but they have ice mixed in as well. Contrary to meteoroids, they have very long orbits, and when they come close to the Sun, the heat boils off their frozen ice and pushes it into a long, bright tail. Comets are much bigger than meteors and they do not have to enter our atmosphere to be seen.