Mark Boulton

This last month has been a bit crazy. First of all England’s dire per­form­ance in the world cup has pretty much con­sumed me over the last four weeks. I’m hon­estly not much of a foot­ball fan, but inter­na­tional tour­na­ments (espe­cially this one) really get me hooked, so what do we reckon? Italy: 2 France: 1? That’s my prediction. 

Then there’s been the work. I’ve got some news, which I can’t talk about just yet, but will in the com­ing months. It’s all very excit­ing but it means I’m cur­rently work­ing my ass off, and along with being ill again with the damn colitis, it’s made this past few weeks a pretty dif­fi­cult time.

There’s a been a num­ber of sites I’ve worked on which have gone live. Foot­ballkit­designer has just launched in Beta 2. Lots more func­tion­al­ity in there such as team kit design­ing and now you can pur­chase your kits online. The Kit Designer sec­tion is excel­lent and offers ways of adding team player names and pos­sibly cor­por­ate spon­sor logos. 

Secondly, I’ve developed a brand and web­site for film industry sculptor, Bruce Gor­don. It’s primar­ily a port­fo­lio site which uses Expres­sion Engine as its backend and lighbox.js to dis­play the images (keep­ing it all nice and trim). What is inter­est­ing about this pro­ject is the pho­to­graphs which are up there. There are some incred­ible con­struc­tion pho­to­graphs of sets such as the chocol­ate river in Charlie and the Chocol­ate Fact­ory and the Bat­car for Bat­man Returns. Fas­cin­at­ing stuff.

Next month I’ll be get­ting my new phone. I like new gad­gets and this little beauty prom­ises to deliver. I’ve opted for an Sony Eric­sson K800i (the new Cyber Shot 3.2 Mega Pixel cam­era phone). I’m hop­ing with a cam­era this good on a phone, I’ll begin to take a lot more pho­to­graphs as I’m wan­der­ing around. Also being a bit of a self-confessed Mac geek, I’m half way through design­ing an OS X theme for it using the delight­ful Sony Eric­sson Theme Cre­ator applic­a­tion for OS X. I’m cur­rently work­ing on a blue aqua theme, but I’ll prob­ably develop a num­ber of dif­fer­ent hues over time. The only prob­lem is I can’t change the default icons which is a bit of a shame. 

August is look­ing busy but then Emma and I take a well deserved break to my parent’s place in Por­tugal. I’m so look­ing for­ward to just sit­ting down, sans-laptop, and just read­ing a book. Of course that will only last for about a day, then I will be bored and will prob­ably end up redesign­ing this site. Again.