nypo:creative:news

Professional Team Management Tips For Creative Folks - as featured on Smashing Magazine

2010-06-01T19:06:00.010Z

It has been some time now since I was commissioned to write an article on Team Management by Smashing Magazine and I thought I would post it up here also for anyone who may stumble upon it. Feel free to get in touch with any comments, feedback or advice on this subject and I will be looking to write a follow up to this on SM over the next few months inluding research on several project management

On the Job hunt

2010-05-26T15:23:00.015Z

As many people within Manchester have already heard Idaho Technology Ltd will cease to trade by the end of this week. It has been 6 years in total I have worked for the company and have worked through the ranks from a Graphic & Interactive Designer to project coordinator to General Manager over this time.Everyone will be sadly missed and I am hoping to find somewhere equally as rewarding to work

A sneak peak of a design makes it onto the BBC

2010-01-21T10:47:00.002Z

I just did a quick freebie for a friend. Not a whole site just a header image. Apart from the fact it took 5 minutes it was simply to jazz up the site in case they wanted to show it on the telly.Today BBC tomorrow the world :)http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8470596.stmThe site is a goal tracking site called GoalHappy and is run by an ex colleague Paul Bibby. Visit http://www.goalhappy.com for

I have successfully completed the Accidental Managers course

2009-10-26T13:36:00.010Z

The course is now over. Having finished the 6 month course on Accidental Managers I now feel I am more of a Manager than an accidental one. The final day and presentations went well and it was interesting to see what everyone else had taken from the course as well as report back about ways in which I have used it to improve the team.As with many people in creative industries designers/developers

Wigan AWP is Live!

2009-10-01T14:42:00.002Z

Another one of our very successful 14-19 (AWP) Area Wide Prospectus sites has gone live. For more information on the product in general see the previous post about the Tameside AWP launch. This one is for Wigan and you will notice that the new crisp, clean style of the Tameside one resonates through this one with the addition of some nice banner graphics using the new Wigan Life logo. The clean,

Smashing Magazine article is now live!

2009-09-04T08:38:00.003Z

I am proud to announce that my first article for Smashing Magazine has now been published and can be found here:http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/09/03/professional-team-management-tips-for-creative-folks/Seems to have gone down well so far which is promising and I am already looking into what to write about next. Would appreciate it if people can comment - good or bad - below the article and

Soon to appear on Smashing Magazine

2009-08-17T08:39:00.004Z

I am proud to announce that Smashing Magazine will soon be publishing my first article. I contacted them regarding becoming an author for their design/development blog that currently has 142,000 thousand RSS followers and is often the first place to go on a Monday morning to see what new posts they have up there. After they vetted me - a process involving seeing who I was, what previous writing

Rochdale AWP is live!

2009-07-23T12:37:00.004Z

Our second 14-19 (AWP) Area Wide Prospectus has now gone live. For more information on the product in general see the previous post about the Tameside AWP launch. This one is for Rochdale and you will notice that the new crisp, clean style of the Tameside one resonates through this one. The clean, easy to use search functionality takes pride of place and all the fancy ajax and javascript

Tameside AWP is live!

2009-07-16T14:12:00.005Z

Our first prospectus site is now live. It is, in my opinion, the nicest looking, has the best functionality and is the easiest to use on the market for this type of product. Each area across the UK is required by the government to provide a searchable online database of learning provision available in an area. This site is, essentially, a user friendly, fully searchable directory of education and

Let's all be Geese

2009-06-24T18:35:00.009Z

I have completed the first two days of the new Accidental Managers course and don't know where to start in describing what we have covered. Not only did this course deliver some amazing managerial skills and insights it also, as strong as it sounds, potentially improved my whole way of life and how I interact with people.The course was expertly delivered by Greg Orme (Founder of Kirkbright) and

How to Spot Quality within Web Design: Examples & Tips by wefunction.com

2009-06-17T14:53:00.004Z

We all have certain RSS feeds we regularly keep on top of. I have certain ones pulled to my Google homepage that I like to check often like Smashing Magazine, Web Designer Wall etc etc. I have recently added a new one and found an interesting article on how to spot good web design.Below are a sample of points taken from their article to give you a taster. Make sure you get over there and check

I managed to get a place on the heavily sought after Accidental Managers course

2009-06-15T14:29:00.005Z

'Accidental Managers is a training and development programme to help the rising stars of the creative and digital industries in the Northwest'. The course is to be delivered by Kirkbright a specialist in creative industry management training. After visiting the launch party at the Tate, Liverpool only a few weeks ago I am to attend the first session later this month and believe I will take an

Careerstube - The Largest Collection of Inspirational, Relevant and Real Careers Based Videos Online

2009-06-10T14:24:00.008Z

I just realised today that one of our products at work has never been featured on my site so I thought I would give it a bit of publicity. One real issue that education has is that learning paths and careers are getting more specialist and young people are increasingly disengaged from the way that information about their future is presented. Look at their consumption of online self published

The new Idaho Site is Live

2009-05-07T09:33:00.006Z

After much hard work and sweat the new Idaho site is live. It is a million miles from the old one and I have really enjoyed working on it. It reflects the product based company Idaho are and the subtle, minimalist colours allow the vibrant product branding to stand out.You will see many little fancy bits like a 3D flash carousel that uses XML to pull in images of each side of the box, a google

IE8 Compatibility

2009-04-27T10:55:00.002Z

As most know IE8 is now available to download. Yet another browser to test in. Think I'm up to 3 IE's, Firefox, and then Safari and Opera on the Mac. Life would be so much simpler if all browsers rendered the same but that will never happen.Just a little pointer to help you guys out. If you have it looking right in IE7 and want to force IE8 to render it properly you can simply add:(<)meta

Nypocreative in a design book

2008-11-14T13:15:00.000Z

I am pleased to say my portfolio site has appeared in a new design book by Patrick McNeil called Web Designers Idea Book. It is actually the old version of this site that you can access here. It appears in the Muted Colours section and I would like to thank Patrick for including my work in his very useful resource that you can buy here.

Pixel Perfect - an amazing tool

2008-10-22T08:57:00.001Z

I colleague recently told me about a firebug plugin called Pixel Perfect. I thought the idea sounded good so had a look - creating looks of concern from the surrounding developers who already think I pixel push too much already. I was amazed. This simple tool creates another tab in your Firebug extension and allows you to overlay a jpeg visual in the actual browser. This has two benefits: 1/From

BT Challenge Cup Site goes live

2008-07-31T15:42:00.002Z

BT run a competition called The BT Challenge Cup every year that rewards it staff for creating ideas that will improve the service in some way. It required a pop up site that would fit in seamlessly with the BT Intranet and provide the ability to register teams for the competition and update information about your team members, travelling details etc etc as the final was in Portugal.As this was

Smart City futures goes live

2008-07-31T15:26:00.001Z

The website for Smart City futures is now live. This was a great job to work on and I enjoyed the simplicity and cleanliness I applied to the visual treatment. It was nice to create a site with such nice imagery. The site is completely content managed down the the main pages in the navigation (only Home and Contact Us are set in the navigation structure). The site was built in .NET and couldn't

PRINCE2 Practitioner

2008-07-31T14:12:00.004Z

I am now a fully qualified PRINCE2 Practitioner. PRINCE2 (PRojects IN Controlled Environments) is a process-based method for effective project management. It is a de facto standard used extensively by the UK Government and is widely recognised and used in the private sector, both in the UK and internationally.As part of my Project Manager and Design Manager role I thought it might be useful to

North West Biodiversity goes live

2008-06-25T14:51:00.001Z

The new North West Biodiversity site is now live much to the appreciation and applaud of the client. This completely content managed site displays huge amounts of quite complicated data in a friendly, unobtrusive way.http://www.biodiversitynw.org.uk

My site is going to appear in the Design Meltdown Book

2008-06-18T19:12:00.001Z

The Nypocreative site appeared in the minimalist section of design trend and gallery site Design Meltdown over a year ago now and although the design of my site has changed since then I am still looking forward to seeing my work in print.Check it out here >

Tattoo design

2008-06-18T10:27:00.000Z

I was recently asked to design a tattoo for a colleague which I have enjoyed doing so far as it's not something I have done before. Luckily he is into the vector type stuff that I like and I used some vectors from vecteezy.com to create this. I also like it as a t-shirt design.

New site design

2008-05-27T16:40:00.001Z

[update - 04.06.08] - I have now implemented this new design across the entire site.As you can see the layout and design of the blog has changed dramatically over the past day. I have been working on a redesign for the whole Nypocreative site and thought I'd implement this on the blog before anything else. I have kept to my principles of simplicity is key and have basically gone for the opposite

Book cover design

2008-05-15T16:32:00.002Z

As well as being a Graphic & interactive Designer I am also a budding novelist and have completed my first, full length young adult fantasy fiction novel which I am currently revising. I created a cover to go with my book and although it is seen as not very professional to include your own artwork when submitting manuscripts I wanted to do one anyway for the fun of it.The original idea and design

Manchester Pride 08 goes live

2008-05-06T09:45:00.000Z

After a competition run by Manchester Pride to create a new brand identity was run this year the site needed sprucing up a little and here is the final outcome with fancy swirly lines, butterflies, sIFR flash replacement text and everything.Visit the site here: www.manchesterpride.com

Font Creation Online

2008-04-10T12:27:00.000Z

Amazing idea this. Back in the day at university I had a go with Fontographer and haven't really touched it since. This is similar but online. There are limited shapes so you don't have anywhere near the control you get when created characters in illustrator but it is still impressive. The tools are intuitive and the keyboard shortcuts make it feel like a desktop program. The fact you can

Image and video smoothing with actionscript

2008-03-06T17:29:00.000Z

Image SmoothingFor some reason when Adobe released Flash 8 they gave the user the option as to whether to smooth an imported image or not. In the past this has been done by default and I can't really see why anyone would want the image not to be smoothed when scaling up but maybe that's just me. You now need to right click the image in the library and allow smoothing. This is all well and good

Manchester Independant Economic Review goes live

2008-02-01T13:13:00.000Z

Just thought I'd post another site that has gone live recently which I did the lovely design for. It was a fairly basic content managed site that allowed the addition of multiple pages, content, downloads, webcasts etc etc.http://www.manchester-review.org.uk/

Quarantine is now live

2008-02-01T12:42:00.000Z

Quarantine is an experimental theatre group based in Manchester. They work on the cutting edge of new theatre and production and required an update to their previous site. This involved creating a clean, crisp, stylish site that was unique and utilized white space to maximum effect.The content management system was pretty intricate for this site as it allowed the client to select any combination

North West Business Club goes live

2008-02-01T12:34:00.000Z

The shiny new business club website is up and running now. After a complete redesign and update to the existing content management system we built ensured a happy client and a fresh new look.http://www.nwbusinessclub.com/

litmusapp.com has arrived

2007-11-05T11:09:00.000Z

For those of you that haven't discovered Firebug yet, well, shame on you basically. Anyone that is still adding background-color: red; seriously needs to get with the times because tools like this make your life so much easier - as a designer or a programmer.Firebug basically worked on the idea of being able to edit the code of a page whilst looking at it. What litmus have done is try to take

Great site for web design links

2007-10-26T15:24:00.000Z

This site has been around for ages now, and undergone a re-design to make it much more usable - but I reckon this is probably the most useful web design links site at the mo:http://www.alvit.de/handbook/You go any more sites like this? Let me know :)

Create a flash game in under a minute

2007-10-03T12:11:00.000Z

Make games | Share | Play free online games | User Generated Games @ PictogameThanks a lot to Reece over at guerrilla-gorilla for this little link. Pictogame is a fun and easy way to create several flash games with the faces of all your friends. Simply select a flash game from the extensive list, upload an image of a friend, use the easy crop tool to select their face from the image and enter a

Useful stripe generator

2007-10-03T12:04:00.000Z

Hello all, I'm really sorry it's been so long since my last post. I hope to get some more useful links and tutorials up soon but I've been so busy lately I've not had chance. I've added a few new projects to my portfolio section that have gone live recently and will be adding loads more soon.Just wanted to add a quick note about a stripe generator I've recently come across. Although striped

ning - create your own social network

2007-08-06T14:50:00.000Z

It was only a matter of time before someone made a 'Create your own MySpace' site and ning have done an amazing job. Not only does the site function like a dream but the sample designs they have created are really nice and you have quite a lot of customization available - such as the repeated background I have created on Creative Writing. You can also use firebug to find id and class names and

Manchester is My Planet goes live!

2007-07-06T13:11:00.000Z

Manchester is My Planet brings together the ten Local Authorities, organisations, businesses and individuals across Greater Manchester to address climate change and energy efficiency. We were approached to revamp their current site and to create a full CMS. The results can be seen at www.manchesterismyplanet.com

Tameside Prospectus goes live

2007-06-20T10:59:00.000Z

They're flying out of the door now. Tameside Prospectus provides an online database of courses for adults and employers in the Tameside area of Manchester. The site contains many features including a course shopping basket, google map integration and a PDF generator. The look and feel was designed as a more adult oriented view of the existing Tameside 14 - 19 Prospectus that went live earlier

Urbis and Routes Online

2007-06-13T12:24:00.000Z

In keeping with the run of sites I've been posting here as they've gone live I thought I'd add a couple more - Urbis (made live earlier this year) and Routes Online (beta made live last month).UrbisWe have worked with Urbis, Manchester for some time now and were recently asked to re-design the site to tie in with the new print and branding materials. Located at the heart of Manchester, Urbis is

LIVING-i site launched for Persimmon

2007-06-06T12:24:00.000Z

Another site through the door. LIVING-i was designed for Persimmon to showcase their new innovative homes built in Irlam, Manchester.The LIVING-i project was conceived to help Persimmon try and assess various materials and modern methods of construction for the future. Persimmon strive to improve all areas of house building, with focus on quality control, increasing the speed of build and

Manchester Pride 2007 site goes live

2007-06-05T14:57:00.000Z

After a complete branding revamp, idaho technology were asked to look at the 2007 site for the Manchester Pride Festival. Having worked on the site for several years we instantly knew the kind of approach they would be after and set about creating a neon-on-black look. This was a nice change for me as it is actually the first black background site I've designed. The neon colours are effective

London 2012 Olympics branding

2007-06-04T15:18:00.000Z

For anyone who has already seen the London 2012 Olympics logo my sympathies are with you.To my surprise it was created by Wolff Olins. I'm not one to openly criticize other designers work as there are always pressures and direction from clients and, quite often, reasoning behind things a lot of people miss but I have to say this is far from my favourite logo creation. He is responsible for some

Creating your own flash video skin

2007-06-04T12:48:00.000Z

Well, as promised here is a quick breakdown of the flash video player and how to create a custom skin.First of all, there are several ways to import your video into flash. I have mainly been using the src and the import method.Import MethodFile > import > import video…You will be asked how you would like to deploy your video. I have been using Progressive as using the Flash Communication Server

Customizing the Flash Video Player

2007-05-17T12:08:00.001Z

Just thought I'd do a quick post to let you know what I'm up to. I've been experimenting with flash video recently and have created a custom flash player. I realised there is a lot to video encoding and formatting I knew relatively little about before embarking on this current project. I have, however, learnt quite a lot of nifty techniques along the way and am over the moon with the outcome. I

Design / Development Programs Poll Results

2007-05-11T11:01:00.000Z

Well, a big thank you to everyone who took part in this poll. I've decided to cap it at 200 441 votes as it just keeps on rising. A big thanks to Cameron Adams who featured a link to this poll on his homepage and to Dan Lindop for your kind comments. Well, onto the results. I discovered quite a few programs in the 'other' section that should probably have been in the initial poll such as Indesign

What's your favourite design / development program?

2007-04-25T11:31:00.000Z

As I've never created a poll before I thought I'd try it out here. In response to a comment I received regarding my post 'Web design Good Practice - the basics' [09/02/07] that disagreed with me that Photoshop is probably the most used program for creating web layouts I thought I'd find out. Please feel free to complete this simple poll and add any comments if you want to expand on the subject.

Nypo:creative site featured on Design Meltdown

2007-04-23T12:00:00.000Z

A big thanks to Patrick McNeil for including my site on Design Meltdown - it was a nice surprise. Nypo:creative has been added to the new 'Muted' colours section which features many toned down sites with splashes of more vibrant colours to add emphasis.Patrick says "...the goal of Design Melt Down has become to collect and categorize sites into classifications that you simply can't search for. In

Design links and RSS feeds [updated 13/04/07]

2007-04-13T12:18:00.000Z

Just wanted to say thank you to the growing number of people who have been visiting my site and subscribing to my RSS feed. Fell free to forward any links onto anyone who may be interested in the stuff I'm writing about and also to make comments on any of the posts here - whether you agree or not."The Design links and RSS feeds" [posted 23 March 2007] has now been updated to include some sites I

Online Software

2007-04-11T11:49:00.000Z

After reading an article this week I thought I'd write a post on Adobes plans for an online future. Following in the footsteps of Google - or realizing that Google may well take over the world if someone doesn't stop them - Adobe recently announced it is planning on making an online version of Photoshop. The plan is to create a hosted version of Photoshop that would be free to use. At first I

Funny Letter showing the mindset of some customers

2007-04-02T12:39:00.000Z

Came across this letter on Digg today. The author is unknown but there are some funny comments which, if you work in the world of the web, you'll probably be able to associate with: Dear Mr. Architect: Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion. My house should have somewhere between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure

Amaznode - ActionScript 3.0 for Amazon

2007-03-29T11:31:00.000Z

This is amazing. Not only does the initial homepage go back to the roots of great search engines (ie a just text box and simple options) but the scripting and linking between results is great. It was described by adobe as: “A relation-based search engine for Amazon.com that is made with Flash and ActionScript 3.0. Visualize a relation network of products from the data of "customers who bought

A special treat for you Sage users

2007-03-27T11:56:00.000Z

[update: v2.0 is available now]After discovering you can add your own stylesheets to the Firefox RSS reader Sage I set about trying to make it a bit nicer than the blue boxes that currently come as standard.Click here to open the nypo stylesheet. To install simply do File > Save Page As and save it to your desktop. Open Sage options > settings > and select 'Use Custom Stylesheet'.Although you do

Design links and RSS feeds

2007-03-23T12:31:00.000Z

[update - 13/04/07]Some new sites (and sites I forgot to add) have now been added below. I have now included a file to be imported into your Favourites / Bookmarks if you want the entire list. Click here to download it. You will then need to save it to your desktop and import it into your browser. Don't forget you can import the entire RSS feed list into you reader below. The OPML file has now

News Sniffer - Comment Censorship from the BBC

2007-03-20T13:06:00.000Z

The News Sniffer project aims to monitor corporate news organisations to uncover bias and it is possible to view the comments the BBC censored in the 'Watch your Mouth' section. It is also possible to see amendments to stories. Quite interesting to see the kind of things that don't get through the net. http://newssniffer.newworldodour.co.uk/

Breathing Earth - global CO2 tracker

2007-03-20T12:43:00.000Z

I first came across a video of this on Max Kieslers site and thought it was quite fascinating. I'm not sure how accurate it is but it's interesting to watch the amount of CO2 rocketing up in the left hand corner. Whilst watching it the USA emitted 1000 tonnes of CO2 every 5.4 seconds! It is also quite interesting to see the relationship between births and deaths. In a time period of 5 minutes

Firebug - Web Devlopment Evolved

2007-03-14T13:42:00.000Z

'Web Devlopment Evolved' is a pretty bold statement but from what I have seen so far it seems a pretty fair comment. I am a designer first, a still learning front end developer second, but already I have reaped the benefits this tool has to offer making development so much quicker and easier.The tool (available for Firefox) allows you to inspect elements on the page and alter values on the fly to

Integrating Online with Bricks & Mortar Retailing

2007-03-13T12:34:00.000Z

It is now 4 years since I completed a dissertation on the impact of online retailing on the high street and the debate of its influence is still raging. Last month Future Laboratory - a trend forecasting group based in London - stated the advent of Web 2.0, wireless broadband and developments within mobile technology are significantly changing the format of traditional retailing.In the report,

Web Misunderstandards

2007-03-07T12:42:00.000Z

Having worked in the web industry for some time now I have learnt what is possible, what is impossible and what will be possible soon. Web standards are the basic rules all web designers should work to. It adds another dimension to the requirements designers are often faced with but, in the long run, results in a better design.Andy Rutledge (Creative Director of Netsuccess) states in his recent

Simple Rounded Corners and so much more

2007-03-02T12:31:00.000Z

I have just discovered a great flash replacement tool that I think, on the right situation, could prove quite valuable. Created by John Aldinger, Mark Huot and Dan Mall, the simple inclusion of some javascript will take your images (or specific images) and insert them into a .swf file letting you round the edges by simply altering the border value in the javascript: round.specify ('border-radius

Real Time Data Rendering

2007-02-26T17:18:00.000Z

There seems to have been a flurry of activity in this area over the last 6 months or so and a few of the best examples are listed below - 3 of which come from the Digg Team (in partnership with Stamen Design). Although these methods might not be the clearest way to navigate information there is a definite need for fresh ideas in this area. As the web continues to grow and the amount of

Flash user interface experiment

2007-02-19T12:41:00.000Z

I recently completed several tutorials from Lee Brimelowe (theflashblog.com) on creating carousel interfaces. It is quite a complex use of actionscript and external XML. The icons and text are completely outside of the flash movie and are contained within an external XML document. The size, positioning, reflections, movement etc are all created using actionscript.You can view the finished product

Web advent calendar with a difference

2007-02-19T11:14:00.000Z

Discovered a selection of web design tips and tricks in the form of an advent calendar. Thanks to Drew McLellan for the 24 simple techniques to help you create better site designs.http://24ways.org/

Web design Good Practice - the basics

2007-02-09T13:03:00.000Z

I decided to write this post after seeing far too often web companies receiving poorly structured and, occasionally, unusable designs from designers - sending PSDs with just several flat layers of pages, objects moving out of place between screen designs, text in points instead of pixels and blurred lines where objects have been resized.For a developer to successfully, and efficiently, produce a

New flash image library

2007-02-05T13:13:00.001Z

The other day i found a site called GoodWidgets which lets you link to your image libraries from places like Flickr or upload your own. The site then embeds your images in an interactive flash movie which you can place on your site or blog. There are several templates to choose from including an image gallery which resizes according to image dimensions, an interactive flash book, a slider gallery

Cross browser differences

2007-01-23T18:30:00.000Z

As a designer I am often frustrated with the differences between browsers. Obviously, there are ways around these differences (such as using browser specific stylesheets) but this adds unnecessary time.When will the day come when you can create a design and not have to plough through the many browsers and platforms to ensure it is pixel perfect all the time. I use Firefox now on a PC and have

Textorizer - create simple typographic art in seconds

2007-01-23T17:35:00.000Z

I recently discovered this site whilst using Stumble and thought it was quite a nice way to create typographic art by simply directing it to an image online and inputting some text. This is the result for the nypo:creative logo. Thanks to Max Froumentin and Paul Downey for this. Visit the site here: textorizer

New nypo:creative site

2007-01-22T13:32:00.000Z

The new updated site is now live. Conforming to current accessibility standards this clean, crisp design provides easy access to the information needed with the option to alter text size for users who do not know the short cut keys (Internet Explorer in CTRL and scroll mouse wheel, Firefox is CTRL and + / -).The site also features a fancy new asp.net contact form which helps prevent spam and also

The magical use of white space

2007-01-18T13:11:00.001Z

The use of empty space in design is a major factor, and often one which will distinguish good design from bad. In the world of the web - especially since the big "Web2.0" phenomena - the good use of white space is vital but it doesn't have to be 'white space'. Having a good eye for space in general is important.As I was taught at university, often it is not the placement of elements on a page