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…

Often in the past I’ve discussed the possibility, in a tongue in cheek manner, of writing a manual that prospective clients must read and be tested on before I/we will start working for them. I’ve had a few experiences lately which have reminded me of this concept, and although I will certainly not be sending these notes to actual clients I feel I should get them down here, if only for my sanity, and possibly your entertainment. I’ve created a category ‘Client Manual’ which I’ll post them in. This is the first one.

Copyright, it’s a difficult concept (apparently)

One of the problems with being so heavily ingrained in an industry or culture is that you sometimes forget that those outside it may have trouble dealing with concepts you take for granted, and explaining them can be, putting it politely, a challenge. I spend a fair amount of time reading Not Always Right which seems to mainly focus on retail customers. It amazes me, the utter lack of logic people can display on a day-to-day basis, but then I compare it to my own industry, where people are spending ten times as much dealing with long term projects, but still they don’t appear think it through any more deeply than if they were buying a Big Mac.

As an aside, I feel I should point out, that although I will rant and bang my head on the desk over the decisions and dealing with some clients, for the most part (I’d say 80%) the people I deal with are intelligent, easy to deal with professionals. I don’t talk about them because there’s no story there.

Anyway, back to the point. We were recently approached to do a website for a small business. Should be a simple job, a straightforward attractive layout with 10 - 15 pages of light content. Basic SEO and some nice photographic treatments. So, off I went, did my research, got the quotes in from the designer, copywriter, etc and went back to the prospective client. I had, as is habit, sent the proposal/quote to a few colleagues and peers as I like to ensure we are generally competitive and not about to charge massively outside the going rate, feedback was that we were massively undercharging, but I let it go on this one as it was for a startup business and it’s good to hook ‘em in when they are young.

Prospective client was not happy, quote was apparently MASSIVE, and way more than anyone else had quoted. I doubted the veracity of this claim but agreed we could try and cut it down a little for them if they were happy for us to cut out some of the services we were supplying.

I offered a discount on the photography and copy if both could be supplied up front. No problem says the client, they can supply both photographs and copy. Excellent, that will make life easier all round. Here are some of our competitors and suppliers brochures for they copy they say. Excuse me? Here are some of our competitors and suppliers brochures for they copy they say. Err, we can’t do that, I explain why not. Oh.

Photography, we don’t really need that do we? Well, it will help sell your products. We can take some photos ourselves? Urm… you can but they may not be up to the quality we would like for the website (no offense and all that). Oh, ok here’s some trade magazines, just scan in the pictures and use those. Excuse me? Oh, I know some of the people in the trade mags, it will be ok. Urm… not sure about that, if you can give me the photos in a sensible format with some written permission we might be able to do something but we can’t just take other people’s photos. Why not? I explain copyright again.

Some time passes, prospective client is not happy, we are messing them about, they need a website and they need it right now, we are not playing ball by being difficult over this whole copyright thing. In what I suspect may have been a moment of utter madness I get a missive from one of the heads of the business something along these lines

Can you visit [url of another web studio], they did a website for one of our competitors, can you just copy that website, just get it done and then we can work out the money later.

I nearly cried. Although it did clear something up. This other studio is where one of the alleged ‘reasonable’ quotes came from. I checked their pricing guide, their price for an absolute basic 2 page site was what prospective client has said they quoted, their price for what prospective client wanted was pretty much the same as I had quoted. At this point I am considering a polite ‘please go away’ letter to prospective client. But I can never give up on a challenge.

The saga is a continuing one, I would imagine if someone points prospective client at this they will decide to go elsewhere, I don’t mean any malice towards prospective client but they have made several basic mistakes in their dealing with us, let’s go through these:

Copyright is serious business. I’m not going to go into details here because I would imagine you know this. The client didn’t. They did not understand either the legal implications or the moral implications. Basically, you cannot just take someone else’s work and use it without permission/license/etc.

There often seems to be a misunderstanding over the value of services, I find people don’t get why they should pay for one or more of:

• Copywriting
• Photography
• Design

These are all things that people have to work on, as easy as we make it look, it isn’t. We have studied and practiced at our respective areas and as much as anything else you are buying experience and knowledge. We will not lead you down the wrong path, in fact we will steer you straight as much as possible. If you ask for something retarded we will tell you as much (politely), we won’t just do it because it’s what you ask for. Ok, that was off the subject a little, but my point is that effort goes into creating this stuff. When someone has created these things for someone else we have no right (morally or legally) to just take them and use them. Don’t think for a moment that no-one will notice. If we do our job right and promote your business effectively then I hope someone would notice.

I personally, and this extends to Shinytastic, have a zero tolerance attitude to stealing other people’s work. We will not lift photos, copy, design elements, etc from another site without express permission. By express permission, I mean from the copyright holder, not from the client as a sort of ‘we’ll deal with it if anything goes nasty’ type permission.

Quoting is no fun at the best of times, it’s less fun when the client pulls unrealistic numbers out of their head and claims they are quotes from reputable sources. We do this for a living and we have a fair knowledge of what other people charge for the same service. Frankly if I’m given something astoundingly unlikely I’ll just phone the studio/agency it’s purported to have come from and ask them if it’s real.

A website can be expensive, but it depends on your demands and requirements, if you want something massively impressive, then I’m afraid it’s going to cost more, if you are willing to cut down your requirements it will cost less. We will not make it cheaper by just stealing the more expensive bits from elsewhere.

We don’t do cheap and nasty websites, I don’t think theres much point, I think it makes the client’s business look cheap and nasty and does nothing for our portfolio. If you don’t have much to spend now we can come up with a cheaper solution (within reason), but you need to take our advice on board. If you don’t have a multi-national budget you won’t get a site to challenge a multi-national, but that doesn’t always matter. Buy within your means and work upwards, we are here to advise as much as to create.

If you have a budget you need to stick to, just tell us. We are not going to screw you over and it makes it much easier to write a proposal if we know up-front if you can afford it. I know people like to play the whole battle of wills thing between client and supplier to see who does best of out of the pricing, but honestly, it’s a waste of both our times, tell us what you can afford to spend and we will tell you what you can afford.

Supplying assets can be a source of confusion. Putting the legal issues aside for a moment. If we were willing/able to take copy and photos from an existing printed publication we would expect the photos supplied on disk and the copy supplied in an email or word document. Otherwise we are just going to have to charge for the time spent slaving over a hot scanner/keyboard. Fine if you have the budget, but if your aim is to cut costs in the first place, this isn’t the way to go about it.

One last thing Logos. As part of the package offered to prospective client, we included a corporate branding package, just a simple logo with colour scheme and stationary. Prospective client decided they didn’t want to pay for the logo and asked, ‘Can’t you just do us our name in a pretty font instead’. Yes, we can. We call that a logo.

…

I feel I have waffled far too much and strayed from the point to a silly degree. But there’s lessons in there for both clients and studios (if you can cut through my crap to find them). Have I missed the point? Am I being too much of an evangelical perfectionist?

A monotonous task captured for posterity?

Soooo…. an explanation: I had to package up 200 History of Guns CDs and send them out to reviewers. An exceptionally dull task, actually an exceptionally frustrating task as I kept running out of stuff (ink/envelopes/etc). For the most part this task takes the form of making great piles of stuff, doing something to each item in that pile then moving them onto the next pile (add address sticker -> move to next pile -> add airmail sticker -> move to next pile, etc etc). In the interests of making a boring job ever so slightly less boring, I stuck my camera on a tripod and took shots at random intervals. I then fed the pictures into Edit Studio, the result looked quite pleasant so I did a set of 3 credit sequences (Intro, middle, end) using the same technique, stitched it all together in Edit Studio and uploaded it to the web.

This was completely unplanned, no retakes, no colour correction, no lighting, just hacked up as I went along.

I used a Nikon D40X for all the shots. It worked well for the credits but not massively well for the actual time lapse as if you don’t use the remote mode for a couple of minutes it switches back to normal mode and you need to then use the shutter release on the body, which of course causes a little camera shake/position change. I assume I can adjust this but didn’t plan in advance.

The credits were done using printed A4 sheets taped to a cardboard box on the patio with me scribbling over the text with a marker in chunks, I gave myself unpleasantly sore elbows from lying on the concrete (lack of planning). I like the credits, I’d assumed the sunny day would have given more light than it did (lack of planning) but it’s all legible.

All editing was done in Edit Studio which I still adore, I still have not found the cash/motivation to pay Adobe for a video editing suite, although I have done a few bits of paid video editing lately, Edit Studio has managed nicely thankyouverymuch.

As this is the internet and anyone can comment (and probably will), I feel I must add that this was NOT a professional piece at all, it was a bit of fun to take the edge off a thankless task. There are many parts of it (all of it?) that could be done better/in a different manner but this was more about the process than the result.

It was never intended as an advert for History Of Guns or for public consumption but I’m fairly happy with the result (as far as unplanned noodling goes). I added the HOG bits as they seemed appropriate (and otherwise I’d have little to say on the credits). I’m a little disappointed I didn’t include the entire HOG press push, I’d already posted about 100 copies and had packaged about 60 copies before I started taking shots.

More soon, I appear to have a backlog of recent creative STUFF I’ve failed to upload. I keep feeling the desire to write articles about random subjects but trying to reign it in and focus on notes on my own creative works. May actually update the WP template at some point as well.

I have a mac. It’s an interesting experience. Not unpleasant, but certainly not the life changing experience certain people would have me believe (you know who you are).

To be specific I have a MacBook, I considered a MacBook Pro but I couldn’t afford it at the moment, plus I’m not certain what the difference is, the MacBook seems to work fine for my purposes.

This year is my tenth year of self-employment in the internet industry, and also my tenth year of not owning a laptop (actually Roger gave me an ancient one a while back but it was pretty ancient at the time and I didn’t make much use of it due to it’s massive size and weight). I wanted to give it a try and see if owning a laptop would make much difference to my work/life/existence in general, given that previous to yesterday I had no way of testing any of my work on a mac it seemed to make sense to pay the extortionate fee and get a mac laptop.

I’ve been generally opposed to macs for a while, not because of any technological reason but because of the MASSIVE SMUGNESS of a large number of the mac users I’ve met. I have a very low tolerance for any sort of aspirational marketing, actually, I believe it to be one of the main causes of the disintegration of our society. So bearing this in mind, I don’t react too well to the simpering mac fanboys. For those impressionable fools (again you know who you are) I’d like to remind you that:

1. Owning a mac does NOT make you more creative.
2. Apple are not a friendly local company. They are as evil/capitalist as any other company, actually possibly worse as they’ve convinced far too many people that they are not.

I get exceptionally irritated about the first point, your tools should not define your ability. Some of the most talented people I know are PC users, some of the least are mac users. But then, others of the more talented are mac users and some of the less talented are PC users, what does that tell you eh?

Since I first switched the machine on I feel like I’ve been immersed in a smugfest of epic proportions, the first time you start it up you get this HORRIFIC animation which insists on saying ‘hello’ to you in an assortment of languages while some twee music plays over the top of an uber-smug animation. I nearly wanged it out of the window before I’d had a chance to use it. Actually, there’s another thing (off the point a bit) PLEASE corporate marketing drones, stop using twee folk music to advertise your wares, it doesn’t fool us, it may fool some people, but you could sell to them by waving shiny things around a bit.

The smugfest continues unabated as a small selection of acquaintances give me a cheery ‘Welcome to the club”, do I really need make any more comment on this?

I appear to have strayed off the point rather horribly, I was going to write about my experience of using a mac for the first time after over a decade of exclusive PC use. Something seems to have sucked away my attention span, I blame this creativity inducing black box sitting on my lap.

(p.s. I’m actually quite enjoying the process of learning a new O/S, I might write some serious notes when I’ve had more of a chance to play with it)

I’m not sure where I stand on Flash/Actionscript. Not to suggest I don’t like/approve of it, I think it’s an amazingly flexible language/set of tools, I’m just not sure I should be playing with it.

My problem is that I rarely get offered Flash work so I don’t get a huge amount of practice. I have no real sense of how long it will take me to do something or what it’s worth, so in turn I tend to warn clients of this and probably end up undercharging them to a stupid degree. I enjoy the process of working with Actionscript, although ONLY if I’m using my PC with the stupidly big monitor. Theworkspace has improved since Adobe took over but it’s still far too cluttered and has hints of the old Macromedia workspace that I was never able to get my head around.

Anyway, once I’ve got past the “Oh fuck do I have enough hours to do this job in?” stage it always pans out ok, I HATE doing Flash work in a hurry, I’m happy to hack up PHP and HTML in my sleep but anything with Actionscript involved needs me to open my eyes and concentrate for a while, I like to leave that bit of space for the inevitable bit that turns out to be slightly trickier to code than expected.

I’ve just done my first Actionscript job of this year, I would have enjoyed it more had I had more than an evening to do it in but in this case it was an “OhGodWe’reAtTheDeadlineCanYouHelp?” type brief. I generally refuse these but Nick gives me a good amount of interesting work, and more importantly pays on time which really swings it for me. He needed a scrolling Flash menu system as part of a bigger flash project, I felt a bit in the dark trying to write functions for a system I didn’t have much information on but it worked out ok (pending Nick getting back to me). He needed it as a proof of concept to show the end client it would work ok, so to some extent I could have cheated and just shoved in some animation that looks like it works but frankly I’d rather do it properly first off.

Look at my sexy flash menu and read EXCITING notes on the brief and what it does.

It’s roughly based on a menu I worked on for Oliis. This one includes a back-end php/mysql system to edit it.

Just a note on the Killer B-Movie gig, it’s on the 31st March not the 21st. I am an idiot, I cannot read my own diary properly.

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!

Got a random call from Kneill of Killer B-Movie asking if I knew how to make an old horror film style hypnotic spiral that changed colour over time. Apparently I do.

This is only a sample of the full DVD which is an hour long and cycles through a variety of colours, a complete colour change every five minutes. I had been tempted to do something a bit more extravagant with it but Kneill really wanted something simple and uncluttered. It’s intended as a backdrop for their gigs so hopefully the audience will be looking at the band more than the animation. This is the first gig projection I’ve been involved with in years, I’m going to go along to the gig and see how it works out (Killer B-Movie, March 21st, The White Horse, High Wycombe), come along it will be fun.

The spiral was drawn in Adobe Illustrator, imported into Flash, animated as a simple rotation, exported to an AVI, imported to EditStudio, old film effect added and tweaked, Vignette added, colour change on a keyframe every 5 minutes. Exported to AVI burnt to DVD. I quite like the final product (given it took all of an hour), it reminds me a bit of the steampunk graphic style used in Bioshock (although nowhere near as good). Kneill was happy with it, he was still playing it on the big screen on the wall of his tattoo shop when I left, I like that he had a customer sitting in the chair watching the spiral.

I’m still tempted to get hold of the Adobe video editing suite, but the cost is just too much right now, EditStudio does fine for the two video edits I tend to do a year, given a bit of spare time and money I’d like a chance to get good at it.

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.

A while back Scott discovered a weird, slightly creepy and incredibly intriguing sculpture by a run down barn in the middle of a field somewhere between Henley and Reading. He took me along to see it a couple of times and we tookl a few photos. We did a bit of research (well googling) into it but couldn’t find any information on it or where it came from. I considered knocking on the door of the nearby farmhouse but chickened out. It didn’t help that the location reminded me of far too many horror films, a half collapsed barn and a yard full of rusted cars.

Scott, being more organised than myself, uploaded his photos to Google Earth and recently someone commented on one of them with an explanation of the sculpture:

“The Nuba Embrace” Several people have asked about the sculpture that has appeared by Copyhold Barn; it is called “The Nuba Embrace” and is by John Buckley. John created the sculpture on his return from a visit to the Nuba Mountains in central Sudan in 2000- 2001 where he was a guest of the Nuba Rehabilitation, Relief and Development Organisation (N.R.R.D.O.) during the time of the genocide. He witnessed first hand a mass attempt to wipe out a cultural identity through ethnic cleansing, slavery and fierce attacks on the traditional homelands. More recently there has been a fragile cease fire in the Nuba Mountains (the same agreement that is currently barely holding in Darfur) and when John returned to the region in January this year he says that, despite the suffering, he experienced a sense of resistance living in everyone he met. John finds it difficult to talk about his work (like most artists) but hopes that the sculpture asks the question “What is the future for the Nuba people?” and reminds us that in this ever-shrinking world we are never far away from what is happening in places such as the Nuba Mountains.

So, that’s good to know. We’re not sure if this is the final piece or if it’s a test piece for a final piece resting elsewhere. It seems to get cleaned up and repainted on occasion (although this may be our imaginations/the changing light), it’s not signposted in any way and unless you are looking for it you are unlikely to stumble across it.

Scott’s LJ Post

Photo on Scott’s website

My pics of it on Flickr (as ever, lacking any sort of editing due to lack of hours)

After far more faffing about that should be necessary my new camera (Nikon D40x) is finally with me and usable, we’re off to Worthing this afternoon so will attempt to get practice in.