Trent Walton

Metroid Type Explorations

Fri, 17 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

To celebrate the release of the new Beasts of England typeface, Acorn, I made some quick typographic exploration designs based on the key areas from Super Metroid! I’m pretty hyped on how the set turned out.

Echo Wolf

Fri, 03 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

New music will be released via Echo Wolf! I’m aiming to release a steady stream of tracks every month or two.

Expanding Upon Design Systems

Wed, 13 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

What if we expanded design thinking to encompass the entire product development process?

Design systems have done wonders for helping organizations build digital products. With a design system in place, visual consistency is easier to maintain, components become reusable, and redundant work is reduced.

With the right buy-in, design systems can do magical things for team collaboration. When contributors with different specializations (design, engineer, etc.) start looking at the same thing, perceptions align and friction melts away. As teams have become more distributed/remote, it’s more important now than ever to capture this collaborative magic.

In my experience, however, most design system management tools focus only on the intersection of design and code. This is likely a result of the amazing work done within the design and engineering community to evangelize and share knowledge about best practices. Why stop here?

A few years ago, while working on various projects at Paravel, we realized that this unified lens and collaboration model should extend to as many aspects of an organization as possible. Looking back at project friction points over the years, we observed that they extended far beyond the design & code space:

Struggle to gain buy-in across the organization and approval from leadership
Difficulty accessing data from testing, research, performance, and analytics that would inform design decisions
Significant gaps in knowledge sharing (and preventing knowledge loss) as team members shift roles and turnover happens
Misalignment of product development and marketing efforts

So we decided to extend design system thinking to all areas of an organization in order to create something new: Luro, a product development system.

Separate from the firehose of chats, tickets, and emails, organizations need a central hub to house and display the most important info about product and process. This info must be easily referenced, self-service, and it must combine information across all specializations and silos.

Example 1
I’m a designer, and Figma is my daily tool. I’m new to the team working on the signup flow. If, on Day One, I could see every component being used in the current flow, page speed insights, KPIs for the redesign, and the testing/prototyping history of the flow over time, I would not only be well equipped to do my work, I’d save hours of everyone’s time.

Example 2
I’m VP of product and spend a lot of time meeting bi-weekly to review status update slide decks from my four direct reports. These meetings help, but I’d also love to make this information self-service. It’d fit my schedule, and I’d feel much more up-to-speed with the status of roadmap objectives and reassured the teams are aligned on goals.

The tools we use (and the info we’ve got readily available) are the lens through which we view our products. We are building Luro to expand that lens so that teams can build together more effectively and with a unified sense of purpose.

I’ll be writing more about Luro in the coming weeks/months. In the meantime, the Luro waitlist is live! Sign up to follow along as we begin to roll things out.

luroapp.com

Hyperlight

Fri, 31 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I’m excited to be releasing a few new tracks over the coming weeks/months.

Hyperlight is going to be the peppy/optimistic album starter. Channeling 8-bit NES Rad Racer vibes, I wanted to go for a carefree-cruise-around-town feel. Enjoy, and thanks for the support!

Hyperlight single artwork

Hyperlight design outtake (but I still really like this one)

I’m having a blast hacking together 3D models and experimenting with texture, lighting, and of course, type I’ve been digging. More to come.

3D spaceport rendering

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Spotify Canvas videos for Hyperlight

Voyager

Thu, 29 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Back in August I decided I wanted to make an instrumental synthwave album. As trying as the Summer was for many of us, I did my best to take advantage of all time w/ my 8 & 10-year-old boys. We hiked, swam, watched borderline-appropriate movies, and generally had a blast.

At the house we were leasing, my office was right by the long circle driveway. I could hear them outside all day being awesome: racing bikes, climbing trees, busting rocks, sword fighting, etc.

Their radness set the vibe for the album. We even wrote a brief nine-part sci-fi story that went on to inspire each of the nine tracks. I made each song in order according to the plot and would include the boys in layering in some sound effects and voiceover bits.

So yay! Here’s Voyager! Happy listening!

I continued doing all the things I love for the album artwork: picking fonts (indulging myself here w/ some ITC Serif Gothic for the title) and making (hacking together) 3D graphics.

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No idea what I’m doing here, aside from having fun

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And adding all sorts of textural and color layers to wrap it up

I also put together some Spotify Canvas videos—one for each song. Here’s a quick edit showing them all together.

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Spotify Canvas videos for Voyager

I plan to keep making music. I’ve got a long way to go to gain those 10,000 hours, but I’m having a blast. One day I’d love to find myself making soundtrack music for a show/movie. Heck, maybe my kids will hire me when they get that script we wrote into cinematic production. Anyways, Netflix, give us a shout!

Monarch

Mon, 25 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I randomly started making music back in December. At the time, the only place I posted anything was Instagram stories. As short beeps evolved to songs, I built audio.trentwalton.com.

Fast forward to April. When I had 12 songs I was pleased with, I decided to package them up for distribution/streaming. Let this post serve as a mini-release party for Monarch!

No, there’s no vinyl edition, but designers gotta comp their dreams :)

Where’d the song/album names come from? The theme for this project was to try and not overthink anything. I’m an amateur here, and while I spend lots of time fussing over details with websites, I didn’t want to do the same with the music.

I rarely edited or revisited songs once they came together, and in Keyser Söze fashion, names came from whatever I saw lying around the office. “Rucco” came from a BOTW Shrine, “Ideals” came from the Ball jar on my desk, and so forth.

The process for the album artwork began with developing a color palette. I assembled some warm tones and played with layer-blending a solid pink/beige block to unify things.

Establishing a color palette

From there, I built some textures by dramatically scaling up image resolution, transferring images to halftone, and then scaling them back down. Gigabytes later, all I had left to do was play with shapes.

Bunches of options—butterflies are fun, but a little too on-the-nose

I hope you enjoy the beeps. I’ll continue to post MP3s here as they come.

New Fonts on the Ol’ Blog

Tue, 18 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’m proud of myself because this is merely a post about new fonts rather than a post about a blog redesign. The perfectly-dialed-in textures and vibe from Phil Coffman’s recent redesign nearly pushed me over the edge, though. Anyways, I did what any sensible designer would do after letting the blog sit for too long: buy fonts!

I’ve had Grilli Type’s GT America on my font shopping list for a while. You’re reading GT America Standard Light + Light Italic now, and GT America Mono Regular is sprinkled across tags, meta info, etc.

Grilli Type’s GT America

Titles are set in a variable version of Denso by DSType Foundry who, I’d like to add, were so kind in helping me fine-tune some of the spacing.

With the variable version, you can adjust levels for weight, serifs, and optical size/contrast. I’m still drinking the variable fonts Kool-aid—It’s fun to see the added utility (and kb savings) variable fonts can gain you.

Mr. Robot Title Cards

Sun, 16 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve blogged about this before but wanted to post again now that the 4-season series has wrapped. A consistent detail throughout Mr. Robot was that the title cards seemed to capture the essence of the episode instantly. The (freeze) framing of a powerful image + music + the splash of red type across the screen always got me excited for what was in store.

Potential spoilers below, but here’s a video with all four seasons worth of title card intro screens:

The Strokes – At the Door

Fri, 14 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I adore the high-contrast type, aged color pallette, and sci-fi concept painting here in the artwork for The Strokes’ new song, “At the Door.”

Art direction and design by Tina Ibañez & painting by John Harris

I couldn’t help but track down the title font. I believe it’s Blackbarry NF by Nick Curtis. Then I saw the throwback-Hanna-Barbera-vibed video, which hits even harder. The titles here are set in Angelus Medieval (see also DXAngelus Mediaval).

Sherlock Holmes: A Scandal in Bohemia

Wed, 05 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

~4 years ago, we had a sliver of free time at Paravel, and wanted to experiment with creating an immersive-website-book-thingy for Sherlock Holmes: A Scandal in Bohemia complete with a vibey page design, illustrations, animations, and even audio.

sherlock.paravelinc.com

I’m not sure we ever called the experiment done, and we certainly could have spent many more months fretting over all sorts of details. It probably got to a point where the work it’d take to reach the standard we set in our minds far outweighed the joy experienced in the act of creating it. And then we just forgot about it until recently and decided to ship it as-is. Yay!

I’ve heard you trash talk scroll jacking! Hypocrite!

Yes, there are animations and sounds triggered by scroll (whether or not something is in view). We wanted to play a rain soundtrack when the story mentioned rain. The same goes for fireplace crackling sounds and paper notes sliding into view. Users can still scroll smoothly, and we tried to be extremely subtle about it (which I generally think is the only way to do it).

About the audio

I knew Dave and Reagan were skeptical about including music and sounds. Still, after some experimentation, I think we found the right balance—ambient tones instead of sharp notes, pulling in looping sounds (like rain) to offset the potential abruptness of a door swinging open, etc.

I also regularly fantasize about being a foley artist and/or making music for TV, movies, or games, so this helped to scratch that itch.

Practicing what I Preach

I’ve been lecturing my kids about the importance of output as it relates to creativity. I’ll say stuff like, “I like hearing about all your ideas, but I love it when you turn those ideas into reality even more.” It’s inspiring to see them create tree house models out of boxes and tissue paper, write spell books, and invent comic heroes.

So I’ll be sharing more of my creative endeavors, whether they’re perfect, imperfect, practical, or frivolous. It feels good to get ideas out—to try things because you feel you need to. More to come!

Trent Walton

Metroid Type Explorations

Echo Wolf

Expanding Upon Design Systems

What if we expanded design thinking to encompass the entire product development process?

Hyperlight

Voyager

Monarch

New Fonts on the Ol’ Blog

Mr. Robot Title Cards

The Strokes – At the Door

Sherlock Holmes: A Scandal in Bohemia

Why did it take so long to share it?

I’ve heard you trash talk scroll jacking! Hypocrite!

About the audio

Practicing what I Preach