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!

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.

Following 10 years in web design/development I have FINALLY found the time to create an identity for my business:

Shinytastic

It’s only recently I’ve really had a need for an identity of any sort. For the large part of my career I’ve been acting purely as a freelancer, and as such contact with the actual clients has been minimal, and whenever I did have direct client contact I just used the name of whichever agency I was working for them through. Last year I decided to take the risk and start up as an agency/studio of my own, it’s taken a few months to actually decide on a name and the interim has been filled with those awkward conversations when calling a client’s office:

Me: Hello, can I speak to Geoff MarketingManager please?
Receptionist: Who’s calling please?
Me: Bob Barker.
Receptionist: Where are you calling from?
Me: Urm…. my desk?

Ok, I deal with it slightly better than that (not much though). Now I have the joy of yelling SHINYTASTIC like an over-enthusiastic child.

Choosing the name was a bastard of a headache. I hate choosing names for long term projects, it seems to get harder every time. Line Out Records was a relative pain in the arse, but back then I didn’t think too deeply about the value of a name, as long as I liked it, it was fine. I guess it’s because I put so much weight on a name/identity now that choosing it becomes so much harder. I generally much prefer a nice abstract name that can be associated with anything, for the dual reasons that most of the projects I work on are fairly far reaching and I don’t like having them tied down to any one thing, I might decide I want to expand a project over time. Say for example I chose the name “Bob’s Web Design”, as soon as I start offering video editing (which I do) it looks like a web designer that does video editing on the side as opposed to a creative studio which can work with whatever you give us.

Aside from the possiblity of expansion I like a nice abstract name because it doesn’t put so many pre-conceptions in the mind of possible clients. I also feel it gives an air of creativity that a descriptive name doesn’t, this has proved, within my limited experience, to really make a difference to the clients you end up working with. It shows you are willing to take a risk, try something out, you are not likely to be lumping your clients with a boring standardized website/interactive CD/exploding monkey. The biggest jobs I’ve worked on have been through the agencies with the most abstract and original names and branding.

The actual process of choosing the name involved far more faffing about than should really be required. Lots of thesaurus reading, random word lookups, I even wrote a script that slices up selected lists of words and re-arranges them in a random manner. None of it worked this time (it has in the past). Shinytastic is based on the language I used when working with Damien at GD30* we were both a bit poor at using correct technical terms and so would just use 1984 style language (unintentionally) to discuss the jobs:

“You handle the server side functionality and I’ll do the styling” translated to “You do the tricky-worky-work and I’ll do the pretty-shinyness” a good design was “shiny nice nice” or “shiny-good”. Now I write it down I see quite how annoyingly smug we must have sounded, but it got the job done. Shiny was generally my favourite word for “good” and I’ve been known to excessively overuse “fantastic”.

I’m happy using a word for my studio that I’d actually use in real life. I appreciate it sounds a tad retarded, but it’s upbeat and positive, and I think it’s nicely original. I’m not interested in creating boring work, so I don’t want a boring identity. I hope it doesn’t put people off but then it can’t put them off anymore than a web designer without a website. Reactions so far have been mixed, but the reactions of clients and peers has generally been good, so I’m sticking with it.

The screenshot above of the current holding page is not final by a long shot but I needed something up there to show to prospective clients, I have an inbox full of enquiries to my lineoutrecords.com address (existing clients passed that on to their friends), I don’t want to be mailing from a new address - bob@shinytastic.com - where the domain has nothing but a blank “coming soon” page. The current image is certainly in the direction I want to take the branding. As suggested by the ever brilliant Tim of EvoHosting, I’m going for a Retro-Future look, which suits me because I like it.

I still need to sort a bank account, business cards, proper logo and branding, official announcement to existing clients, and probably a bucket of other crap. But at the least I have a basic identity.

* Speaking of which, he’s likely to kill me if he reads this, he spend a large portion of the time we worked together trying to convince me to do a creative blog. Sorry Damo.