I may live to regret this. Damo created me a twitter account an age ago which I used for approx 2 minutes before smashing his monitor in an defenestrating him (ok it was the ground floor and the window was open so no hard done). I hated it with a massive intensity on first use, it appeared to consist entirely of back patting vacuous twats. Anyway, I never logged back in, but over the last year I have received multiple updates informing me I have plently of followers (which is odd for an account that’s never been used, I suspect spammers/nutters). I forget what my original account was, so I created a new one:

http://twitter.com/anxious_silence

I may decide I hate it again very quickly, but am willing to give it more of a chance, some people of substance appear to be using it. This doesn’t mean they are posting anything of substance but I need to communicate with the outside world more. I may be forced to change my ‘microblogs are for twats’ stance.

No new design right now. Up to my pits in PHP5 Objects and Frameworks. I long for pixels and vectors.

Took today off, mainly to take Karen to an exam, but also because I damn deserve it damn you. Had three hours to kill while examinations took place so went into Reading and experimented with the concept of NOT BUYING STUFF because I have a fucking mortgage now. Lovingly stroked some nice design books an CDs then spent a couple of hours taking photos. I like the idea of restricted creativity, usually I’d visit somewhere I actively want to go where I expect to find some decent shots. I forced myself to try and find something interesting to shoot in Reading town centre (been there? dull as fuck). Quite happy with the result.

Full set is here.

Sick of coding tonight. I’ve been on a massive coding binge the last couple of weeks, amongst other things researching and writing a Best Practice Manual for Shinytastic, drastically improving my OO skills and coding patterns and other such stuff. Part of me wishes I could just drop coding and stick to design work but right now the coding pays the bills.

Working on a possible logo for a possible project I may possibly be involved in as a bit of light relief, here’s two of tonights sketches.

Work in progress.

Got some more History of Guns artwork to sink my teeth into soon, started it a month or so back but need to find the time to get working on it again, this whole house-moving/new business nonsense doesn’t half eat your life.

See you in the trees.

A quick holding page that appeared to transform into something a little more flamboyant than expected. For Moonshine PR

Moonshine PR Holding Page

Hopefully Emily doesn’t beat me to death when she sees what I’ve done to her website. I very nearly animated it in flash but fortunately (for you and her) time is short tonight.

I have just launched the Shinytastic website v1.0 – http://www.shinytastic.com

Again I am not 100% happy with it, but I suspect it’s a case of being too close to be able to look at it properly. I’m going to be spending more time on it later in the week (hopefully). This month sees me hit ten years of doing this stuff for cash and this the first time I’ve had a website advertising my services. This is possibly the hardest site I’ve done in years. I think the homepage needs a good rehack and the template is possibly over-simple. I’m willing to take the risk on it. I’m not lacking work right now and (outside of this blog) I’m not going to be overly promoting it for a while so I’ve got a chance to hack it about and improve on it in the interim. To be honest I look around at a lot of my peers and they all seem to be as damn useless at their own websites as I am, regardless of the quality of the work they do for their clients. Am I just making excuses now? Possibly, but it’s two in the morning. Goodnight.

Shinytastic Screenshot