Yes sadly, my Macbook has shed light on a very visible design flaw in most of my designs, until now that is. I’ve been accidentally using Color Management in Photoshop, and that renders the colours differently on OSX. And I’ve been doing this for years. There should be a very big warning when starting Photoshop to stop idiots like me from doing this. And to think, if I hadn’t switched OS’, it might have been years until I had realized the mistakes I have been making, I might have missed out on important clients, lost grades in college, and considered generally to be the worst designer of the 21st Century.
But today I unveiled version 9.. yes version 9 of my not-so-popular website/blog/portfolio. 9 designs in the space of 9 months. That has to be some kind of record, no? And if it isn’t , it should be. People say that a designers worst client is themselves, they are never happy with their site looks. But I think this one has potential.
Dark and Dirty. The icons are not mine, but from two free icon sets from Function, and while they are fantastic, they dont go very well. I like the form of the icons, but they are too varied and I really wanted some consistency. I may ask them to develop some, once I have failed miserably in Illustrator.
I’ve added a lot of functionality into this one, some of which were evident in my previous design iteration. Things like the auto-incrementing Twitter followers number in the sidebar, the links at the bottom of this post that post to Twitter, Facebook etc.. really adds some interaction to the site, which I want. Unlike utterly generic web 2.0107868689769 crap that looks out of place, but is seen on over a million blogs.
I’ve finally gotten to the stage where I can pretty much do the design I want, usually I would do something in Photoshop, but be too worried that it would be impossible to replicate in a Browser. Also I’m pretty proud that I did this solely on a new machine, a machine which I have so much to learn still. I used Coda for the first time too, and honestly it is without a doubt the best text editor I have ever used.
Overall, am I happy with this design? Sure. Do I think I could improve it? Definitely. Does this mean that I wont change it drastically in under a month? Perhaps.
The signature guitar of Muse’s frontman, Matt Bellamy, is being produced commercially, and it truly is the guitar of the future. The Kaoss pad can control anything from lighting effects to midi controllers.
Up to now, I have just been redesigning my blog. As you can see, its even more different now. That’s because I have changed my site to actually bring clients .
My favourite part of the site has to be the tabbed content on the top-right. It allows me to display a huge amount of information in a small box. These lists were grabbed by using SimplePie, which is without a doubt my favourite way of integrating content (besides WordPress of course).
The homepage is not up properly, and there are tweaks to be fixed. Some of the links may not work, and although I shouldnt let that happen, they are bound to occur. My portfolio is not up yet and my about page is minimally styled. But so far, I think this is the most complete design I have ever made.
32GB (pwoarh!) of memory with microSD slot (48 GB total)
1.5 days of battery with continuous audio playback
5MP Carl Zeiss Camera
Oh and did I mention that it had a 3.5” touchscreen?Indeed Nokia have been working very hard at this. It’s like they took a page out of James May’s book and kept repeating “Poweeeeer!”
My contract with o2 is not up until the summer of 2010 which gives Nokia enough time to lower the price and to give me time to save.
Following the sneak preview of Digg’s latest online tool a few weeks ago, it has finally arrived. Yesterday, Kevin Rose introduced the toolbar publically for the first time. It has a short-url service, easy posting to Facebook, Twitter, and Email. Articles are now easier to Digg, and (finally) you are able to see just how much of a Digg effect each page gets.
Digg has come along way, this is the natural evolution for a site like this, and it might be the most significant as of yet.
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