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.

I have finally found the time to do a template for my own WP blog, and in the process have an even greater love of Wordpress, I was quite fond already.

Been fighting to find time to learn to do WP templates for months, since before I started this site. I have done one template before (Cuban Sow), but in the interim had completely forgotten everything through cramming plenty of other crap in my head (Actionscript 3, Joomla, and all the other crap I spend my life forcing into by brain via the medium of my eyes). Anyway, such is the goddamn simplicity of WP that I pretty much managed to re-learn + learn more and knock the whole thing together in an evening. Which is nice.

I know it’s far from perfect, let’s call it a ‘Work In Progress’ but I’d rather stick it up in it’s current state and fiddle with it over time than hold off until I think it’s 100% perfect and hence never launch the damn thing.

I say it took an evening to do, I had to install LAMP on my graphics PC so I could play with the design offline, the LAMP install took about 30 minutes, then getting mysql and php to talk to each other took another half a day, which was entirely my fault for trying to be lazy and use the installers. Eventually just uninstalled everything and redid php and apache manually (always the better method).

The graphics have been kicking around for ages to the extent that I’m a bit sick of it all already, but will live with it for now. The face was inspired by Tara McPherson (who is awesome). I suspect the boundary between inspired/infringing may be a little close, but I did draw it myself. The horribly over-the-top horizontal rule flourishes came from a pack (I’ll dig the link out later), everything else was drawn by my own hand. The colour scheme was an accident, I like it, I care not if others do not. The mass of grunge textures were either from my photos or Machine Wash and inspired by Tim keep banging on at me about using more grunge textures in my design.

Anxious Silence Wordpress Theme

Next up is getting a grip on Joomla extensions, how exciting.

Believe it or not, I have actually started writing about 5 articles for this blog, and have a load of recently completed work to upload, I’ve just not found the time to finalise any of it. Shinytastic is doing well, too well in some ways, the workload has been increasing and I’ve so far been unable to find any new staff I can trust. Any good at PHP and live in the Maidenhead/Reading area? Drop me a line (freelancers only for now). I do really want people who are local as I want to build good working relationships, both with the freelancers and Shinytastic and between all of us and the clients.

Adrian, fellow typophile and general purpose excellent designer was recently involved in an exhibition which I completly failed to be aware of until after the event but I loved the photos

Here’s Adrian’s write-up and more photos.

I absolutely promise to write about some of my own work in the near future, although before I do, check out Miranda’s new site.

It’s time to start blogging again. Something I’ve consistently failed at since the concept first raised it’s head. I’ve failed for several reasons in the past, mostly through viewing blogging as an incredibly low priority activity, there’s always been something more important to do. While this is still technically true, I do have slightly more time at the moment but I also have several other reasons for intending to maintain a regular blog (outlined below). Previous attempts have also failed for a variety of other reasons, sometimes I’ve ended up trying to be too professional and it’s become a horrible chore to try and edit a post into something I’d be happy for my clients to read. Sometimes I’ve ended up just meandering into general wittering about my personal life or really just using it to chat to friends (LiveJournal).

Although this is still a ‘personal’ blog, the intention is to make it more of a ‘personal creative blog’, so I’ll include stuff about work projects, record label stuff, personal design work and anything to do with the running of assorted projects but will avoid the personal life crap that tends to creep in. So mostly making stuff and as little whining as possible.

I’ve some specific reasons for starting blogging again, and in the spirit of blogging, here they are:

• I’ve never used Wordpress (or any out of the box blog solution) before, and increasingly clients, and friends want quick blogging solutions for their websites. I used to write my own blogging systems, which did the job nicely, but in reality it’s a lot less costly for clients and easier on my time when working for friends** to just install and configure a Wordpress blog. This way I get to learn to use one properly and can assist others without resorting to a manual every time they need help.
• I don’t have a portfolio. Of any sort. This is frankly a shoddy situation for someone who has been designing websites for 10 years and working on assorted other creative endeavours for just as long. For about 5 years I’ve been intending to sit down and set up a portfolio site but have never quite found the time. This is still something I intend to do but for now this at least gives me somewhere to post about works in progress that I can point people at. I am setting up a limited portfolio for my more corporate clients as there’s likely to be some fairly NWS and Not Brain Safe stuff on here.
• Following on from the porfolio point, it should keep a nice log of the work I’ve done recently for those days when I absolutely cannot remember who I did that logo for.
• I need to lean to write. Really. Not in a serious, write a book manner, but I need to learn to edit copy better and I really need to learn to write press releases. This gives me a semi-serious place to practice. If you are reading this, you are really just my guinea pig.

So, yeah! Let’s see if I last longer than a month, and let’s see if I bore the shit out of you sooner.

* There is no picture of my cat. There will never be a picture of my cat. I don’t own a cat.
** No, you can’t have a free website, extra special situations only!