October 08, 2006
I’m a little late for this one, but I’ve now managed to go Pink for October in support of National Breast Cancer Awareness month. At the moment, NBCM is a US based thing, although a pink month was done by Cancer Research UK a while ago. Anyway, the point is, breast cancer awareness shouldn’t be limited by country.
If you don’t know much about breast cancer, please take this opportunity to go and read a little about it, and consider a small donation.
The normal green service will be resumed in November. Although, I am quite liking the pink. Maybe a touch of brown as well…
September 25, 2006
I was listening to the @media ‘Hot Topics’ podcast the other day, which unfortunately I had to miss. The section of it which I found really interesting was the discussion on a professional body (which is about two thirds of the way through). Although the panel agreed that a professional body for our industry is overall a bad idea, I actually think they were talking about several different things.
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September 18, 2006
You may guess from the complete lack of updates here that I’ve been rather busy since returning from holiday. Getting into the swing of things after a holiday is bad enough, but getting back into the swing of being a commercial designer again after four years at a public service broadcaster is a challenge. I’d like to think I’m up for it though. That said, working client side is an incredible challenge and, if presented with the opportunity, I think every designer should jump at the chance.
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August 25, 2006
A few weeks ago, I wrote about my difficulty managing an increasing amount of requests for work and creating and tracking the paperwork associated with this process. I decided to build something in Expression Engine to solve my needs, but it was far from perfect. In fact, there was so much missing from my prototype, that it made sense to develop it further.
So, without further ado, let me introduce you to Flow; a money organiser for freelancers and small businesses.
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August 24, 2006
Apologies for the down-time over the past 24 hours. I was Dugg (or is it Digged?), and felt the Effect.
Dreamhost, who took over 24 hours to even acknowledge my support request (seriously bad form fellas), have removed the throttling from my domain which resulted in the 503 errors. Everything is, fingers crossed, working OK now. Thanks for your patience.
August 10, 2006
Yesterday I finally received my new mobile phone, a Sony Ericsson k800i, and it’s a little beauty. There were a few problems though.
Firstly, it’s a little larger than I expected. Not in physical size though - it’s a bit of an illusion. Because the sides don’t taper, like my Nokia 6230, the k800 just seems larger. The fact is, it’s only a couple of mm taller and about 3mm either side wider. I can live with it. Secondly, Vodafone ships the phone with it’s own ‘branded’ os and by God has it been beaten with an ugly stick. So, I took it upon myself to reflash the OS and install my own OSX theme.
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August 05, 2006
First off, let me thank everyone for their kind words and support over the past week, it really has been fantastic. As you may know, a week ago, I handed in my resignation from the BBC. Before that day however, there’s been a lot to do in order to make the transition from employee to self-employed a little bit smoother. As I mentioned in my last post, I want to document this journey as much as I can so that I can look back in the months to come and see where I went wrong!
So, this first post is all about putting the pieces in place: Company and financial stuff, working environment and some systems.
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July 27, 2006
Emma and I have just returned from a celebratory meal from our favourite little place in Cowbridge, which is about ten minutes drive from our house. The reason? Well, you may have guessed from the title of the post, but this morning I handed in my resignation from the BBC. The 25th August will be my last day. On returning from Portugal, the 7th of September will be my first day trading as Mark Boulton Design LLP.
Excited? I can barely contain myself.
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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