Wigan AWP is Live!

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, easy to use search functionality takes pride of place and all the fancy ajax and javascript fanciness is here on this one as well along with the Careerstube content relevant video case studies and the advanced search and refining slider techniques.

Take a look and see what you think - all comments welcome.

Wigan AWP
http://www.wiganprospectus.net/

Careerstube
www.careerstube.com

Rochdale AWP is live!

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 fanciness is here on this one as well along with the Careerstube content relevant video case studies and the advanced search and refining slider techniques.

Take a look and see what you think - all comments welcome.

Rochdale AWP
www.rochdalebp.org.uk

Careerstube
www.careerstube.com

Tameside AWP is live!

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 training available in Tameside. Additional extras like ability to expand the search and look for courses within so many miles of your postcode, at certain providers, levels, age ranges etc, Boolean searching so you can look for a provider that supplies “art AND English AND Spanish”, embedding of relevant videos from our vast Careerstube video library for individual courses, searches and providers and integration with Ofsted to show school/college reports and a number of other fancy visual bits and bobs make this a great package all round that is at the forefront in this sector and one I really enjoyed working on. The design is simple and not cluttered yet visually interesting enough to appeal to the fairly broad 14-19 age range.

We have a load of other areas going live shortly with all sorts of fancy functionality and also some ILP (Individual Learning Plan) sites that allow users to record their educational experiences, arrange content on their dashboard, create CVs and the ability to create CV’s and information tailored toward a specific college/employer and send a token based invite to them to view their ILP as well as integration with our prospectus sites meaning when a user adds that a careers aspiration is to become an English teacher they are supplied with a series of links that are relevant to this career from the prospectus site and also a series of links to the pathways tool that shows them what they need to do to become and English Teacher and also what they can do after that.

Have a click around, see what you think. All comments are welcome and I am glad we have created such a solid product that can help 14-19 year olds plan their future.

Tameside AWP (Area Wide Prospectus)
www.yourchoiceintameside.co.uk

Tameside ILP (Individual Learning Plan)
www.ilp.yourchoiceintameside.co.uk

Careerstube
www.careerstube.com

For more information on the product and other Idaho products visit - www.idaho14-19.co.uk/products/prospectus/

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

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 out what they have to say.

Design using a grid system
Using a grid certainly helps you to understand the importance of spacing

Try & Try again
You can always use a method of trial and error until you find what looks right.

White Space isn’t a wasted space
Just because you have an empty area, it doesn’t mean you have to fill it.

Less really is More
Rather than trying to fit more in an area, fit less, give it space and keep just the vital important information.

Keep it Subtle
Small details that compliment the content are the key.

Think in Pixels
Borders, gradients, lines and shadows etc don’t have to be huge to be effective.

Before & After
Compare your results to how they looked before you applied the effects. Then you can see just how effective they are.

Is it Readable?
Don’t be scared of making your titles big and bold.

Have you thought about spacing?
Spacing can vastly improve readability.

Do your fonts fit the mood?
Make sure your fonts compliment the design.

Design using a Grid
Grids allow you to make the most of your space.

Test the Placement of Elements
Be the visitor, would you be able to use it.

Remove any unnecessary Elements
Anything that isn’t essential should be removed, or out of the way

Balance of Attention
Some things need to stay simple to allow others to shine

Build up your layers
Never just use one brush or texture, build your details up.

Experiment with opacity & Colour
Sometimes even 3% opacity can have a positive impact.

Don’t worry, Be Brave
Done be afraid to be too subtle, or too faded.

Experiment
A boring topic doesn’t have to have a boring colour scheme.

Variety
Try using gradients, patterns, brushes on your colourful backgrounds. Colour alone doesn’t make something look good.

Stick to a Theme
Make sure your colours are relevant to your product/service.

Keep it Relevant
If you’re going to do something very new and unique, ask yourself “does it make sense” and “does it fit with the branding?” if so then go do it!

Ignore everything you know!
Okay maybe not everything, basic principles may stay the same, but there’s no point looking for inspiration on new ideas, you’ll just be heading in the wrong direction.

Keep a level of quality
I think generally if your new idea looks good, and works well it’s much easier for you to justify.

To view the article in full click the link below.

Quality within web design

Text and image above are sourced from the article in question and copyrighted to FUNCTION

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

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 video and you immediately see where Careerstube fills the gap.

Our solution was to develop a sophisticated video publishing system that can take any type of self published video - even from mobile phones - and publish, in context, transparently into any member website. Relevant content from people like them resonates in a way that cannot be achieved with traditional methods. The simple licencing and video sharing model offers members all the content for a fraction of the overall investment.

What it boils down to is an enormous pool of videos that 14-19 members can search through, add to and rate and then call upon the library to insert relevatn video content in their 14-19 prospectus sites. This is an amazing product and has already ammassed great interest and some great content. If you would like to view some of the content follow this link to Careerstube.

The new Idaho Site is Live

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 map on the contact page that uses the latest in Google map functionality allowing directions to be pulled through to the site and styled and also a subtle little javascript effect that means the quote on the homepage fades up to black when hovered over rather than simply going from one colour to the next. We are also using some nice carousel effects on the product detail pages that allows you to scroll through the key benefits and then jump down to more detail.

http://www.idaho.uk.net

Take a look and let me know what you think.

Pixel Perfect - an amazing tool

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 a designer/bug checking point of view it allows you to overlay the visual and see what is out of place.

2/From a developers point of view it ensures precision by allowing them to overlay the visual when creating a layout, lower the opacity so they can see what they are coding below and ensure the visuals are met exactly. This will result in fewer visual issues needing to be fixed at the end of the project.

This tool seems to be feared by many developers who are happy enough to make it close enough to the design. However, they know deep down that the designer will only come along and say move that 2px up please so they might as well start harnessing the power of this tool and improve their accuracy and standard before it's spotted.

www.pixelperfectplugin.com

BT Challenge Cup Site goes live

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 to be based on the BT Intranet there was relatively little design work involved as many of the styles had to come form their existing style sheet. However, it was still nice to work on a job for such a large client and to try and insert a bit of creative flair and general tidying up of certain styles.

North West Biodiversity goes live

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

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

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

[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 to what I had. I have had a clean, crisp, white site for far too long now and thought I'd go for the darker with vibrant colours approach.

I also wanted to see if it was possible to create a completely new design and cross over from the whole site on a very tight deadline which I accomplished so am happy.

Feel free to let me know what you think.

Thanks

Book cover design

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 came from Reece over at CFH and I have refined it and created the book name and added some colour etc. I have included the original Reece did and my near-final one to show how a design can evolve from a simple idea.

If you want to learn more visit my Creative Writing network where you can find extracts.

Initial concept:



Development:



Finished thing:

Manchester Pride 08 goes live

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

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 download your typeface or view a gallery of others is a great idea. It's the equivalent of, say, Vecteezy but with a stripped down version of illustrator on the site to allow you to create the vectors there and then.

Check it out at: http://fontstruct.fontshop.com/

Manchester Independant Economic Review goes live

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

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 of text boxes (size, position and colour), images (placement, size) and allows the client to overlap these elements as they wish.

http://www.qtine.com/

North West Business Club goes live

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

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 this a step further by allowing you to edit the code of a page and actually save it to the original file meaning you can make changes live, see how it looks and save it. Amazing stuff. I'm still trialing it at the minute so I'll let you know my opinions but, so far, so good. Although, it would take a lot for me to stop using Firebug - I feel I have a loyalty to it as it has, literally, improved my life.

The other intersting product form Litmus - the one you actually have to pay for - is the testing program. This allows you to test what email bulletins and websites would like like cross browser and cross email program. There are loads of other features as well and we'll be doing the 30 day trial at work so I'll keep you posted.

For those of you who want this kind of stuff in your own product / site there is also an API buy in section with more info.

Cheers, keep well.


http://litmusapp.com/labs
Firebug add on

Great site for web design links

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 :)