August 26, 2004
This site has also been featured on unmatched. Great write up as well.
“Upon viewing this site for the first time, it gave me this feeling. Too bad the feeling was, “damn it, I want that design.” Very few designs do that to me, but when I see one that fits me so well, and looks so good, I get jealous.”
August 26, 2004
Help! I can’t seem to get my favicon to appear in NetNewsWire as a lot of other sites do. I’m using the default RSS 1.0 feed from movabletype 3.0 as a template. Any ideas, anyone?
August 25, 2004
Here’s some articles I was thinking of writing. Let me know if any of these would be of interest…
August 24, 2004
This site has been put up on Stylegala and is currently number 4 in the voting. Nice one.
Not the best write up i’ve ever had, but the comments back are good and has made me think about altering a couple of things.
August 22, 2004
Update: Slight changes to the design, some problems with the old design. Mac Ie stylesheet deleted until I can get it to work properly.
Here it is, my new site.
As you can see a lot of changes have happened. In fact a (near) complete redesign has taken place. Only the journal remains pretty much intact (data wise). Everything else you see is brand spanking new. In fact I can’t quite believe it myself.
A year in the planning and designing and two months in the making. It’s been a great learning experience, even if it’s one I wont be repeating the near future.
I still have tons to do, such as populating the portfolio with old and new work. In the meantime you can still look at the old portfolio here .
A more detailed post will follow this shortly regarding the redesign. Until then, feel free to have a look around.
May 17, 2004
Just finished upgrading Snooch to use the Developer Version of Movabletype. There’s ben a lot of discussion on many blog sites I frequent regarding the licencing. Six Apart have now started charging for versions of MT, dependent upon the author base and the amount of blogs. There is still a free version available, which i’m currently using, but all other versions have to be paid for, which is fair enough if you ask me.
MT is cheap as chips compared to other CMS based software. This new version has transended the underground ‘bloggey’ world and into a more mainstream, serious content management system which can be used for commercial applications as well.
A lot of mainstream CMS are trying to catch up with MT in terms of the valid XHTML it produces. A few are getting there (Drupal, Mambo etc) but they are still built around a fairly rigid, object based model. This is the strength of MT. You can make the objects yourself (they are after all just chunks of code.) Because of the new API Six Apart has implemented in this version of MT, the scope for much better plugins is a reality. In fact Six Apart have launched a plug-in competition. Hopefully we’ll see some kind of photo-gallery plugin come out of that rather on relying on rather tedious hacks.
As when I get more news on this, i’ll post it up.
April 29, 2004
It’s been on my mind for a while. It was always part of the plan to include my portfolio and have a more generic section for CV stuff etc. I’m getting pretty familiar with MT now, my CSS knowledge has also increased. So, i’m starting to think about what i’m goign to do with Phase 2.
The site as it stands is a bit to “Bloggy” which I don’t like. It doesn’t show my design skill off very well, and i’m not the most interesting or technically adept author so it falls down there also. I think in terms of the direction of the site, it’s lost it’s way a touch. So, i’m bringing it back to what it should be. A portfolio (true with a journal, articles and resources too, but mostly these will be my benefit)
I’ve made the decision to do this properly again. So, i’ll be starting with mapping the content and structure. Defining Categories and Access Structure as well as cross-site navigation issues. From there i’ll begin wireframing the templates and begin prototyping, once the “white site” is working how I want it to in MT (hopefully version 3 will be up and running by then) I’ll apply the visual design. I’m goign to do my best to get it right with the CSS, or as right as I can in terms of ease of updating, validation etc. I’ll also be making the move over to XHTML Strict to get a handle on that (I think this site is almost there anyway).
So, that’s the plan. But first i’m getting married. I’m hoping to phase the launch over a period of a couple of months, but we’ll cross that particular bridge when I come to it.
April 22, 2004
I’ve added a “Recent links” linksblog to the right. At the moment this just pulls in a limited RSS from Delicious and at the moment this is the default one for Design. There are many other feeds which you can link to such as Usability, IA, CSS etc. You can set up your own as well, which I will do when I have the time.
Thanks to Jeff Veen for the idea and to Ben Milleare for the implementation
*Amendment* The feed isn’t dynamic. A CRON job is set up to run the perl script every 30 minutes, to get the RSS, to convert it into a txt file and then to display it as an include. that’s how it works.
These links are now pulled from my del.icio.us account. You can subscribe to the feed if you like.
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I'm a graphic designer from near Cardiff in the UK. I've been a designer for over ten years now and primarily work on the web. I'm still partial to a bit of print every now and then though. I used to work for Agency.com in London as an Art Director before working as a Senior Designer for the BBC in sunny Cardiff. This was all before I took leave of my senses and formed my own design consultancy, Mark Boulton Design Ltd.
I've got a thing about grids and typography and occasionally ramble on about them to anyone who will listen.
If you're after simple, clean and effective web design; let me know.