Out with the old and…

…in with a large black and white picture of a French Bulldog.  Nothing says ‘new website’ more than a cute dog giving you an unnerving stare.  At least for me anyway.

That said, I’m proud to announce the completion of my new portfolio site.

Enjoy!

Somebody stop me…

…no really, stop me!  Maybe it’s a designer thing or just me, but there’s nothing worse than looking at your own portfolio site and feeling slightly queazy (just me then) and getting that ‘lets have a revamp’ urge.

Well folks, the queasiness has crept up ones throat and a new design in currently being passed out my brain like fresh vomit after a decent night out at university.  It’s now currently being beaten to a pulp and cleanly processed into html and css!  Now there’s a picture for you!

The above is a quick snap shot of what I have so far, the background image is just for a placeholder and I’m glad to say that the yellow is still being used!

Hopefully won’t be too long till I get it up.  Giggedy!

I love After Effects…

No sarcasm! I really do. Have began one of our briefs recently to create an animation to lyrics of Bob Dylan song.

Having never used After Effects before, I set off down the dreaded route of watching one of those 9+ hour dvd’s on how to begin getting your head round. As with most things, if you half enjoy what your doing then its not so bad.

After this one brief, I cant keep my hands off it. So hopefully over the next few weeks I will finish these short movies and place a link on here shortly.

For now, I will be posting some great animation as of when I find them. Woot & Cheer!

15 minutes of fame

As previously posted, I have now managed to record the working prototype of my concept iPad magazine ‘Twisted’ – you can see it here.

As per my previous shenanigans in the DIY world, you will know I love getting my hands involved in the nitty gritty.  But this time I was not alone in my task of recording, my very good friend Tom Watherston had alot to play in this.  He was able to supply me with the HD camera, created the backing music of the video and even borrowed me his model like hands (which are now insured for £millions since recording this!).  Credit where it’s due, thanks tom!

So how did we record this masterpiece? Just as you would imagine, get a table, balance tripod and camera on top of table, then get a good friend to sit under tripod… sorted!

There no place like home…

I have been a very busy designer this past couple of months at University, after creating a fully working iPad Magazine (video still to come) through Adobe Indesign, I am now looking to finalise a design of a iPhone app – that may even get turned into a real app on the App Store if all works out well!

But in that time, I have now also managed to finish off a full redesign of my website: www.richteadesigns.co.uk – Huzzah!

I have gone for a very minimal and clean feel this time, whilst trying to keep it all to one page for ease of use.  I’m a great believer in the age old saying “if you dont have much content, then you dont have much website!”*

For any previous attenders of the site, you will now notice that the bright eyeball bleeding yellow background has been removed and a very calm off white is in its place. I know how much you all enjoyed turning down the brightnesses of your screens when you visited; but dont panic! This blog will always be the next best thing for an early check-up at your local opticians, courtesy of moi.

*possibly made up….

My next project – iPad Mag

Yesterday I finally managed to download the Digital Publishing Suite for InDesign, having scoured the internet for resources and tutorials, I came across… well not very much at all.  Due to the software being so new and recently out of its BETA stage, coupled with me probably looking in the wrong areas, I decided to go down my least favourable route and actually look at the manufacturer’s website for help.

I should really do this more often, as the manual is pretty straight forward, and they have a handy bunch of videos to go with it! My aim now, as part of one of my university projects, is to take the magazine I designed for the iPad in InDesign (image above is just a mockup) and actually convert it to a working iPad magaine! Check back soon for the outcome!

Update: The video is now complete, you can view it here.

With all that said I thought I would put together some links for those crazy designers, who like me just want to have a good search round the ol’ interweb for something interesting:

Start here, the Adobe DPS manual (for both cs5 and cs5.5) – trust me, you win half the battle after reading this.

The Adobe video guides, another great place to start if you prefer to watch.

As of todays date, buttons in DPS don’t allow two actions – so when you tap to open up a full screen image, you then need another button to close it.  This article and also this one show you an effective away of doing this.

Want a movie to start playing on one of your articles, and smoothly transition into the readable bit. Check this out, great tutorial.

And another video about button placement inside a tooltip image – really well explained and easy to do.

Update 25/11/11: Have found the main DPS Help Area here, enjoy!

Have anything to add to this list, get in touch and help everyone out!

If he ain’t blogging, he’s…

…finishing websites, sorry for the long pause.  Have been working on a website design for a pre-cast construction company, which is near completion!

Check it out here

With all clients I deal with, I like to offer choice and never like the ‘boxed-in’ approach. That said, I would like to examine the simplicities involved in striking the right look for your clients business site. For the company above, I started with two styles of sites containing the relevant information, one a very strong a rigid corporate look, and the other and more curvy, friendly, and eye catching affair.

You can see both here:

Corporate

Friendly

*All text and images used in these examples are for illustrative purposes only.

That said, neither of the examples were never intended to be the final look, but just to show the client what can be done and allows there imagination to open up to you for guidance.  I like to get user feed-back and go from there building from the ground up, maybe design another 4 different variations of the theme to see which they like and so on.  Luckily for me there was an instant like to the corporate design, and viola’ – website design done.  Coding begins; a 100 html pages and more cuppa’s later its almost finished!

Without going into too much detail, you can see the differences instantly and the whole site has a different feel for the user.  Always give clients choice, not only does it make them feel involved  in certain aspects, but it also makes your life easier too!