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

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

'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 awful lot from the course. As the title suggests it delivers training to individuals who perhaps did not attend university courses in management but who have found them selves "accidentally" in that role as their positions have expanded and progressed within a company.

I believe that, combined with my Prince 2 practitioner qualification, this will make a great addition to the management side of my qualifications.

I have just had to complete a psychometric test before starting on the course and the results are spookily accurate.

I am definitely looking forward to the experience and will post again once the course is complete on my experiences.

View the programme here

Nypocreative in a design book

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.

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 >

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

Design / Development Programs Poll Results

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(2), eMacs(1), UltraEdit(2), TextWrangler(1), Lotus Notes(1), VIM(1), VI(1), PaintShop Pro(1), ZEND Studio(1), GoLive(1), Coda(1), XARA(2), TextMate(10), skEdit(1), CSSEdit(1), OmmiGraffle(2), Notepad(2), Smultron (1), Quanta Plus(1), jEdit(2), PHP Designer 2007(1), Homesite(1), Inkscape(2), CrimsonEditor(2), SCITE(1), Textpad(1).

I also discovered after posting the blog that it is difficult to decipher between designers, developers and people who do both so the poll should probably have been split into separate elements really. For example, coming from a very technical company I assumed programs like Edit Plus and Visual Studio would feature higher than Dreamweaver but it was probably Graphic Designers as opposed to Web Developers who checked this box. I have analysed the results and split them into the two separate elements.

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

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 overlooked. There is also a bookmarks file for you to import straight into your bookmarks / favourites and an updated OPML RSS import file.

Enjoy - and add your site in the comments section if you feel it should be up there.

Design links and RSS feeds

[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 been updated so you may want to download them again to include the new sites and feeds.

After seeing several sites offering collections of design links and feeds I thought it might be useful to bring them all together into one mammoth list of ones I currently subscribe to or visit. Hope this proves to be useful.

You can import the entire list of RSS links into your reader using the OPML format. Click here for the entire mammoth list and select File > Save As to dump it on your desktop. There will be an option in your reader to import RSS feeds.

Feel free to add comments with sites you think are useful or just good and I'll add them to the list. This is more of an ongoing thing which I hope will grow into a useful resource for designers / developers.

Interesting Reads on Design and the Web

• [*new - 13/04/07*] Designorati |


• [*new - 13/04/07*] Creative Design |


• [*new - 13/04/07*] Computer Love |


• [*new - 13/04/07*] Brand Spanking New |


• Creative Review |


• A List Apart |


• Vitamin |


• 456 Berea Street |


• Lounge72


• Design Observer


• Bite Size Standards |


• Devlounge |


• Digital Web |


• Smashing Magazine |


• Stylegala |


• UX Magazine |


• Andy Budd |


• Cameron Moll |


• PingMag |


• Boxes and Arrows |


• Fadtastic |


• Resource.reh3 |


• Creative Behavior

Design Showcase

• csszengarden


• CSS Beauty |


• CSS Remix |


• CSS Vault Gallery |


• Design Melt Down |


• Design Shack |


• Inspiration King |


• Screenfluent |


• Styleboost |


• Webcreme |


• Stylegala |


• Linkdup


• Design Snack


• Screenspire |


• Website Design Awards |


• Design Charts


• Big Chip Awards

Useful tools

• [*new - 13/04/07*] Moo.fx |


• [*new - 13/04/07*] TempInbox


• [*new - 13/04/07*] CSS Play


• [*new - 13/04/07*] Moo.fx |


• [*new - 13/04/07*] Good Widgets


• [*new - 13/04/07*] Bubbl.us |


• [*new - 13/04/07*] Design Meltdown Colour Search


• [*new - 27/03/07*] adobe kuler - Highest rated |


• [*new - 27/03/07*] adobe kuler - Most Popular |


• Protolize


• Colour Lovers


• Color Jack


• Colr


• Crazyegg


• Google Analytics


• Firefox add-ons


• Typetester


• Identifont


• swfIR


• Script.aculo.us |

Web Design

• 9rules Network |


• Andy Rutledge |


• Mezzoblue |


• Design 2.0 |


• Design by Fire |


• hicksdesign |


• Mark Boulton |


• ryan werth design : blog |


• Shaun Inman |


• Clearleft |


• 37 Signals |


• SimpleBits |


• Veerle's blog: full articles |


• Web Design from Scratch |


• Schillmania


• Abducted by Design |


• Aetherworld |


• BD4D |


• Computer Love |


• FAMFAMFAM |


• Infosthetics |


• Max Kiesler |