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Archive | July, 2009

Designers, what was your first piece of work?

By Gavin on July 28, 2009 in Design, Editorials

As designers progress through their careers they sometimes forget where they started. Some designers can spend well over 40 years in the industry and will still carry on designing well in to retirement. The trouble of HDD errors and random formatting throughout a computers life can erase a designers early days. Unless you’ve been willfully backing up your work from the early days it’s very difficult to keep track of where the “old stuff” is.

I spoke with quite a few designers who still had some of their “old stuff” to show off, and to see what kind of work they started doing way back when. A lot of the text is un-changed from the emails I received as I wanted the designers themselves to critique their own work. It’s amazing to see how far most of them have come.

David Perel – http://www.obox-design.com

I do indeed, in my spare time I used to design helmets and the first design I ever did was a helmet which created using Microsoft Paint in order to create the outlines and then Fireworks to paint it. It is attached.

Ryan Downie – http://www.ryandownie.com

Here is a screenshot of the very first full websites that I did. I am not scared to show it.

It was my own portfolio site that seemed to do pretty well on the CSS Galleries, and was launched just over fifteen months ago.

It was coded all in html and css without a CMS solution (as I didn’t know what one was back then) and i soon got fed up of having to go through and edit all the pages. I soon realized the error of my ways and scrapped it.

Version 2 is in the pipelines and a few of you will have seen this, and is expected to be launched towards the end of August.

Tim Van Damme – http://www.madebyelephant.com

[Gavin] – Tim was in London at the time of the post being but together and still very kindly emailed providing a link to his old work. One piece is below. [/Gavin]

Pasquale D’Silva – http://www.darkmotion.com

These are my first vector pieces from back in 05ish:

David Airey – http://www.davidairey.com

I’ve kept that online to remind myself how crap I once was. It’s a veritable feast of MS Frontpage and tabular design, with a horrific logo and a jumped-up, generic business name.

Chris Spooner – http://www.spoongraphics.co.uk

An old print design project from my first job, a magazine page ad for local events.

Gabriel Segura – http://www.cssmania.com

My first design in 2004 worth to show, attached. The rest, can be seen in http://nv30.com up to today, 2009.

Oliver Ker – http://www.oliverker.co.uk

I created this way back in high school, must be about 1999/2000 when we were just allowed to start using computers and photoshop for projects. This isn’t the first piece I did but I remember the first piece. It was when we got our first PC for Christmas ’95 and I drew a golf green with flag pole in PAINT – it was awesome! Back to this piece – it was for a packaging project as part of my GCSE’s. The Video cover (yes video!) was created in photoshop and I managed to squeeze in as many cliches in as possible (hey, it was the first time I’d used a computer for design!) Look at the ‘graphic pen filter’, unnecessary emboss, and really bad cut outs! The photos were fine, but the deadline got so tight that when it came to printing it out there was a problem with the printer and not even the teachers could get it to work correctly and this is how I had to hand it in!

I could have chosen a piece that looked kinda ok but thought this is the fun of it and probably the first time I got onto a computer, all my designs previous is drawn and sketched and not too bad!

Chris Merritt – http://www.pixelightcreative.com

Screenshot of version 1.0 of pixelightcreative.com. Tables, baby! Be gentle in your article!

Jon Phillips – http://www.spyrestudios.com

I did this website for a friend of mine. He’s a magician and the website was (and still is) for promoting his services and booking. Of course when I built this website I did it all with tables and inline CSS and put as many keywords in the meta keywords and description as possible. I did this website back in the days when people thought you could just stuff a page with related keywords and easily end up on the 1st page of Google for those keywords. Things have changed a lot since!

Kevin Crafts – http://www.kevincrafts.com

I’ve attached a screenshot of my personal site in flash (yikes).

Steve Smith – http://www.orderedlist.com

So, I remembered this website that I made back when I was in high school. I used to keep and breed a fish called the Jack Dempsey, and I made a Geocities website about them. I haven’t seen this site in years, but thanks to archive.org, I managed to pull up a version of it from 1999, which would have been about a year after I stopped updating it. Hope you enjoy! (oh, this is hideous!)

Lee Munroe – http://www.leemunroe.com

I did this for a cinema about 5/6 years ago (It’s still online)

Jonathan Snook – http://snook.ca

A portfolio site that I had put together in late ’99. I did sample company layouts to demonstrate my design and HTML skills. Sadly, I don’t think it helped me land a single job.

Matthew Smith – http://www.squaredeye.com

Mike Kus – http://thethingswemake.co.uk

Whilst the site is very nice, Mike assures me this is the first site he built. I checked the code, it’s all in tables so it must be a first!

Jason Santa Maria – http://www.jasonsantamaria.com

Sure thing. I actually wrote about this a while back and the previous versions of my sites are online:

http://jasonsantamaria.com/articles/my-first-website/

http://v1.jasonsantamaria.com/
http://v2.jasonsantamaria.com/

Jacob Cass – http://www.justcreativedesign.com

This was one of my very first logos for a heavy metal band called Anno Domini or “After Death” back in 2004 (was aged 16) before I had any design training at all.

Veerle Pieters – http://veerle.duoh.com/

I had to dig into my archives and go look for stuff that is not laying around here since it is so old I started out in ’92 so that’s ‘pre-internet-dino’ time I was a print designer back then. I still am, but it’s not the mayor part anymore like it was back then.

My very very first design of a brochure is incomplete (I only found parts of it) so I’m showing you my 2nd one. It dates back to ’92. Computers (Macs) had only 4 MB of RAM back then (imagine!) So some of the things were done by hand (analog) still: photos were placed into the layout at prepress agencies etc. This 2nd brochure is also designed that same year. The logo is not designed by me btw, so it’s just the layout of the brochure. On the back there is a watercolor I made. I still have the original watercolor.

This is really old stuff and definitely not ‘my best’ design (I came a long way since then). The means were different to, like I mentioned before. All imagery was still done analog e.g. the illustrations of the tiles, is not digital, it’s paper that was scanned in at the prepress agency.

Cameron Moll – http://www.cameronmoll.com

There’s something so childhood-photo-ish about diving into one’s personal website archives. But it’s amazing to see how far we’ve really come—or how far we have yet to go.

Prepare yourself for legendary FrontPage 98 code.

Andy Sowards – http://www.andysowards.com

Basically when I was learning to use photoshop I was like 18 or 19 at the time, and would take pictures from my camera phone and grunge them up and post them on myspace, thankfully I don’t use myspace anymore LOL. This is probably one of my first attempts of that.

Rob Palmer – http://www.branded07.com

Ok don’t laugh!! Please find attached a visual of the first website I ever designed!

The site was called Torqair, and it was a micro site advertising Brake and Motor products. (Built solely in flash!) Oh the fun!

Elliot Jay Stocks – http://www.elliotjaystocks.com

This is nowhere near my first design project, as I’ve been designing forever, but this was one of the first websites I designed after joining EMI as Junior Web Designer, and that was my first ‘proper’ job after leaving uni:

Not everyone had a screenshot…

Paul Boag – http://www.boagworld.com

Unfortunately I do not have a screen shot of my first website anyway. It wasn’t much to look at to be honest. It was a site for Rank Films and consisted of the rank logo (you know, the guy hitting the large gong) centred on a grey background (no background colours at that stage) with a load of left aligned text underneath (no table based layout yet!).

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I interview Andrew Disley

By Gavin on July 21, 2009 in Design, Interviews

Andrew, thanks ever so much for taking part in this interview so close to Christmas.

1. Full Name and Age please.

Andrew Disley, 23.

2. Favourite Biscuit and Drink.

Biscuit: Chocolate Shortbread. Drink: Latte with extra shots.

3. Last Book you read and last movie you saw.

Last book: Double Cross by James Patterson. Last movie: The Dark Knight.

4. Where and When did it all start?

My passion for the web began during my early high school years, I remember first being introduced to Google a few months after it launched by one of our teachers and I even remember the excitement I got while waiting for music to download using the original Napster which just amazed me, I was hooked. I spend all my hard earned paper-round money on our Dial-Up connection and it wasn’t long before I began to play online games like Counter-Strike. I joined gaming clans which inevitably got me into designing and building sites for these clans. I started out in Frontpage but soon found myself hand-coding the HTML because I didn’t like the “ugly” markup that Frontpage produced and much preferred to know what was going on under the hood. Professionally my career started when I was offered a job a local firm JJB Sports Plc looking after their websites.

5. Is there anyone in the industry who you look up to?

Lots of people, many of the people I’ve worked with in the past and many of the well-know names along with local folks I know through GeekUp and the likes. There are way too many people to list here.

6. What was a key factor in your professional growth and development?

It would have to be the time at Code, learning form the people there and working on high-profile accounts. I’ve also a real passion for what I do and the try to achieve the best possible outcome for whatever it maybe I’m working on.

7. Where does your heart lie, with design or development? And why.

Development, from an early age I loved taking things apart to find out how they worked and rebuilding them.

8. What was it like working at Code Computerlove?

Scary and quite intimidating at first, I’d never been around so many amazingly talented people before who had such love for the industry. Fantastically awesome people, and some great projects but there were some tough deadlines.

9. What was the biggest project you worked on whilst working there?

I’ve worked on some really big accounts and projects over the years at Code, but I think the biggest and most testing had to be the rebuild of HMV.com in July/August 2007.

Desc: HMV.com (Code Computerlove, September 2007): [Role: Front-End Development (CSS, HTML, JavaScript)

10. Throughout your entire career to date, is there any particular problem you’ve ran in to more than once? Clients, Jobs, Work?

The biggest problem I find myself facing is taking on too much, not just on the web work front. I’ve got that balance right, I think. I do still find myself pulling all nighters to meet deadlines. It’s the other projects I get involved with that stretch my schedule.

11. What do you consider to be the biggest contributing factor to your success?

Dedication and support from my family and fiancee, Kerry.

12. Where do you get your inspiration from?

Primarily online via the blogs and showcase sites, looking at what people are doing and how they’re pushing things technology wise.

13. As we all know you’re a mac man, what are your 3 favourite apps?

I’ve many more than 3 favourite apps but if I had to list only 3 it would have to be: TextMate, Quicksilver and YoJimbo as they are the most used apps on my machines.

14. What made you want to go full time freelance?

The flexibility, I found there just wasn’t enough hours in day to do my full-time job at Code and all the extracurricular projects that I take on. There were times when I could really do with taking a day of at short notice which you can’t really do when you work for “the man”. In all honesty there still isn’t enough time, but I can at short notice shuffle things around.

hillsfloristcoukcrop I interview Andrew Disley

Role: Design and Development

15. How do you balance your time between your different businesses?

It’s tough and I think I’m doing a decent job of it, although if you ask my fiancee I’m sure she’ll tell you otherwise. When I do figure it out, I’ll let you know the secret.

16. Where do you see the future being?

I want to grow my freelance portfolio and I’m also in the process of teaming up with a few other awesome minds and in the not so distant future we’re hoping to launch a couple of things.

17. Are you heading to any conferences over the next year?

Hopefully, I’d love to make it to Reboot this year, along with a few BarCamps and there are talks of a local live streaming of TED via the TED Associate Membership.

18. If you had one goal to reach (anything) within 3 years, what would it be?

I’ve recently got engaged and it would be absolutely fantastic if in 3 years time we’ve tied the knot and bought our first home together. That’s more than one but I put them both under the heading “building the family”.

19. If you had one piece of advice for anyone wanting to venture in to the your industry, what would it be?

Don’t be afraid to ask for help, there a lots of offline and online communities around that have members who are very happy to offer advice and support.

Links:

http://andrewdisley.com/
http://twitter.com/andrewdisley

http://simplified.co.uk/
http://geekup.org/
http://rollerstrut.com/

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Hundreds of Free Grunge Photoshop Brushes

By Gavin on July 20, 2009 in Design, Editorials

Are you looking for FREE grunge photoshop brushes? I have compiled a list of resources where you can find hundreds of free photoshop grunge brushes. If you can find anymore, send the link through and it will get added to the list.

Brusheezy have a massive range of brushes which you can filter to gain access to their hundreds of FREE grunge photoshop brushes.

Bittbox have 5 sets of grunge wings providing 10 brushes in total.

The Outlaw Design Blog have a range of photoshop brushes which are free. Some of the best brushes in this post are on that blog.

We Function have a free grunge brush set holding 33 subtle grunge textures and effects. They have a lot more to offer so head over.

Continue Reading →

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35 Amazing Stationery Pack Designs

By Gavin on July 17, 2009 in Design, Editorials, News

Brand creation and design is an awesome creative process and when it comes to transferring those brands across a companies stationery the fun starts all over again. I’ve decided to look for some of the most amazing and creative stationery pack designs across the web. This post shows a showcase of 35 creative stationery designs for business cards, letterheads and compliments slips. Hope you like it!