So, let’s say you hire a builder to build a wall in your garden. The builder gives you some advice about where he thinks the wall should go, how high it should be and what sort of bricks it should be made of. You ignore his advice because it’s your garden and you know your garden better than he does.

He builds the wall where you ask, using the materials you requested and at the height you felt appropriate. You decide you don’t like the position so he knocks it down and starts again in the new position.

This time you decide the wall is too high, so he does some builder stuff and makes it lower. But then, suddenly, you realise it looks stupid at that height in that position so you ask him to move it elsewhere. He knocks it down and starts again.

Oh no! It’s the wrong sort of bricks. It clashes horribly with the shed where it is now. You ask the builder to change the type of bricks in your wall to nice yellow ones. He knocks it down and starts again.

Damn! It’s too low, you can see the neighbours ugly child over it. Not a problem, the builder makes it a bit higher.

So you’ve got a nice yellow wall that carefully obscures the ugly children next door but doesn’t clash with the shed. But something’s not quite right. Oh, you can no longer see out of your kitchen window. You are sure the builder mentioned something about this previously but you opted to ignore him because you know your garden better than he does (silly builder).

One last time. You ask the builder where it was he thought the wall should go (and how high, and in what colour), he tells you again what he said at the start and you agree to it (of course it was completely your idea all along, he knows NOTHING of your garden). You finally have a nice wall that obscures whatever you need obscuring while not obscuring whatever it is you don’t want obscuring. You are happy, the builder is happy.

The question is, how many walls should you have to pay for? You only have one new wall in your garden so surely you only have to pay for the one wall?

Work in progress for the new Shinytastic site.  Definitely needs some robots and rabbits adding.

Rough design submitted for an invite to a local formal event.

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.