Future of stuff and things

Oops, should probably use this blog for some blogging. Okay, cool.

I’m at the Future of web design conference in Kensington Town hall.

10:48

Watching a presentation on creating websites for mobile devices. The presentation is beautiful – really nice slides and images, well thought out. Meagan Fisher showing off www.dribble.com

Technical difficulties with the microphone at the moment. Oops.

11:06

Listening to Brett Welch and his talk about better websites and happier clients. Some really fun slides :D

11:51

Breaktime! Got my free tshirt from GoodBarry through tweeting @HiGoodBarry with the words Kimono and Cake. Nice idea, little creative exercise in getting people to relate words. First speaker of the day had us try and come up with combinations of books/films etc. “The Lionel, the Richie and the Wardrobe” was my fave.

12:00

Listening to Mark Boulton now – should be really good. Use of typography in web design :) Book recommendation; Typography – Emil Ruder. Provide smart design defaults, choose good fonts, encourage use of styles over typefaces. “Help users make good design decisions”

Fonts built for the web specifically – Verdana, tahoma, georgia. The new Vista “C” named fonts.

12:37

Watching Robin Christopherson’s speech on web accessibility. Incredible to see someone use a screen reader, reading at 300wpm – scanning through H tags with Jaws.  For mobile/screen readers, reduce the amount of headings and links. Try and keep heading heirarchy (ie. Dont skip right to level 5 or 6 headings like The New Scientist site!

11m Disability registered people. 3m Web users. 100,000 with vision/hearing impairment.

13:22

Absolutely loving Mike Kus’s talk on design. Get inspiration from print, buck trends. (“Check out SM’s 2009 trends and avoid them like the plague!”)

Holy crap it’s April

I haven’t made a post in ages, I am a terrible, terrible blogger.

Most of my updates have gone directly into Twitter, my lovable microblogging friend, leaving this log book all crusty and unused. I’m sorry, Logbook – please forgive me.

I’ve settled into working at RoSPA. It’s great, I love it here.

I’m making all sorts of sites and getting the opportunity to flex both my technical and artistic design muscles. Today I’m mocking a couple of designs up in photoshop for one of our upcoming projects, with magnificent results. When the final site is up, I’ll be adding it to my portfolio, of course.

Life is grand.

A challenger appears

Nice man from a recruitment agency called me up yesterday and sent over a graphical mock-up of a web page for me to turn into an actual page.

Though scary, and challenging, (going through someone else’s idea and turning it into reality) it’s quite refreshing to be doing some serious design thinking again.

The place is in Leamington Spa though, so not exactly near.

Updates here and there

Updated my site today, plan to get a working portfolio in the next week.

Got rid of all the shiny flash in favour of quick loading HTML that will work in all browsers.

My site is valid XHTML 1.0 Strict! Let’s keep it that way.

Deviant Tart

So, I’m posting on DeviantArt again, and slowly remembering why I left in the first place. It used to be somewhere where I could relate with similarly skilled ‘artists’ and post up some stuff. People would comment on things, albeit with smiley faces, but it was a pleasant community of creative people..

It now seems that unless you draw like a god, anime, furries or fan-art, there’s not much hope for you. Classic photographers and digital artists are swamped by the deluge of Final Fantasy and Pokémon fan art. There’s no hope for the artist who wants to do his own thing. Considering DA started up as a place to share custom skins for applications it’s come a long way, and arguably in the wrong direction.

I really want to put my stuff ‘out there’, and let people see it, but DA doesn’t seem to be the answer. However, I’m one step closer to fulfilling my 2007 resolution. I’ve signed up with 4uhosting.co.uk. I’ll be installing WordPress there tonight, and installing ComicPress on top of that. Vlad might well be on the way to his very own space on the webbernets, quite shortly.