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

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.

Quick design/mockup for my Dad’s new business. Needs a bit of tweaking and cleaning up but not bad for a couple of hours work.

InkyStuff Website Mockup

Rough advert concept…

Rough Ad Concept

Sometimes it’s good to experiment and be a little intentionally difficult. Emily had the joy of being a test subject. It’s not the most challenging or original design ever but I liked the idea of a three column design with the navigation in the middle*. I think it works ok because the left column is very mimimal.

First version:
(The blackbird is just a filler photo while we choose the appropriate image, we’re probably going with nice nature/inspiring nice things so it was an appropriate holding image).

Moonshine PR website visual (version 1)

We’ve updated it a little to make it a bit more accessible, the contrast between the background and the body copy was a little low so we’re trying a white content background. Also removed the “Recent Projects” bit from the footer and replaced with a selection of logos from associate businesses (proper logos to come).

Moonshine PR website visual (Version 3)

* I make no claims to originality here, I’m sure this has been tried before.

Not entirely finalised but I doubt we are going to for for any more changes prior to the printing. These are the first two business cards I’ve designed, and really the first two proper logos. I may post a breakdown of the process involved in each if time allows. I’m pretty happy with the Moonshine PR logo and cards, although we went through far too many variants to get to this stage (entirely my fault). I can’t work out if I’m entirely happy with the Shinytastic cards, I find it very difficult to do things for myself/my own business. I think I achieved the desired end (intentionally over the top silliness).

Too much caffeine to sleep, too tired to work. I present to you… ‘Stuff that was never used (and not really finished): Part 1′. I was going to upload ‘Stuff I have recently completed’ but none of the interesting stuff/stuff I can get away with posting on here has been absolutely finalised and I just can’t bring myself to post something that may change again before it’s signed off. I suspect I am mentally ill.

Artifact 1: Everything Starts website (work in progress). I’m sad that we never really got off the ground, but then given it was a project combining two people neither of whom had any spare time to start with it’s not a massive surprise. We may resurrect in the future but I would imagine with a new website. As you can see by the trailing off of the design this was dumped mid-design. I quite like it but can see that I was being influenced by Web 2.0 and Bioshock fairly deeply at the time. I am aware the whitespace is a bit fucked.

Artifact 2: Marquee Website. This was abandoned as it was one of two designs submitted to the client for a job. They went for the other option. I can’t argue, this was a bit more ‘out there’ than they were after (the final chosen design was a much more conservative, photo-centric option). The background colour is a poor choice and I obviously spent all the time available on the header and ran out of time for the rest of the layout (please note: this is not my usual working method, this design was done as a free-bonus-extra, proper design submissions to clients are finished properly).

I love the header, I have since re-used most of the bits of it elsewhere, apart from the marquee, which is a shame, I put effort into that damn marquee

More soon…

I did a wordpress!

My first crack at a Wordpress Template and I’m fairly happy with it. The template is for a site called “Conversations with a Cuban Sow” which I’m working on with Emily (Moonshine PR site doesn’t actually exist yet, this is on the list of “Stuff which must be sorted soon”). The Cuban Sow site is a PR blog for Emily’s mother’s forthcoming book of the same name which Emily is doing the PR for, in her words:

Conversations With a Cuban Sow is the forthcoming book by Elisabeth Bird, an English national living and working in Cuba.

This is Elisabeth’s blog, complied from letters sent to her daugher Emily over seven years and gives a fascinating insight into the daily toils and troubles, highs and lows of life in Cuba, both political and personal.

The WP template is very much a work in progress as currently Emily is still compiling the information for the site, technically it’s not been launched so I’m effectively making her life harder by now linking to it in advance of us finishing it off (sorry Em). It’s an interesting project to be involved with, there’s going to be a fair amount of content to come along with information on press coverage/etc so we will be modifying the template as the PR work builds up. I’m just going to have a quick tweak to make sure it’s all W3C compliant then lay off until Emily get’s her copy in order.

The layout itself is very simple and clean, it’s not aimed at designers it is purely a framework for Emily and Elisabeth’s words so it needs to be easily legible and simple to navigate. Emily drew the pig!

Working with Wordpress templates is a surprisingly pleasant experience, my background is very much in bespoke, ground up applications so it feels a little weird to be fiddling with something someone else has initially built, but the documentation is brilliant and the way the WP system works is so simple and effective I wish I’d started playing with it an age ago.

Aside from this I’ve been working on a mountain of other bits and pieces, the majority of it being paid work which isn’t of particular interest. I have just finished some nice Actionscript work which I may chuck up later on, also working on the complete branding for both Shinytastic, Moonshine PR, pretty much completed the History Of Guns album graphics, so now moving onto sticker and T-shirt designs for them while we plan the PR campaign. I’ve started writing a ‘Recommendations for Clients’ guide on how not to utterly piss off your Graphic Designer/Web Developer/etc which I may chicken out of posting. Still trying to get to grips with my new D40x, I purchased the Magic Lantern guide as recommended by Jen although forgot about bank holiday postage issues so probably won’t get a chance to read it until next weekend now. I did post some fucking awful photos from the Line Out Showcase in Southampton last weekend I really need some low light practice, I wanted to try and edit them but time really is not on my side right now. I also need to find time to completely rebuild OnLineOut.com, it’s starting to age badly. My big non-paid priority right now is to sketch out the long term plan for the label, but I want input from other people before I even start to think about that.

Happy Easter!