Smashing Magazine article is now live!

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 feel free to Digg it etc if you feel it is worthy.

Hope people find it useful and feel free to get in touch if you have any questions.

Soon to appear on Smashing Magazine

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 experience and examples I had and also finding out what it was I actually wanted to write about - I got asked to write a trial article that will be published within the next two weeks.

The article is entitled 'Team Management Tips for Creative Folk' and I look forward to the feedback. I hope people find it useful and it sparks debate within teams. Let me know what you think by commenting below it when it is published. I will post again here with a link once it is live.

www.smashingmagazine.com

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:

ning - create your own social network

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 then upload your own stylesheets.

I have created 2 networks so far - one for the company i work for which allows only employees and is a central pool of resources, nice sites, good reads and general things web and design. The second is an open network you're free to take a look at (and join if you'd like) which will, hopefully, be a resource for budding novelists. There is little content there so far but more is to come.

Thank you ning