Although I never wrote a 2007 blog post I thought that this year was more pertinent than the last. So much has happened and so much has changed from the start of the year, its been a heavy whirlwind of excitement, joy, fun and busy time.

Back in February I talked about nvmax and how much I missed the old days of being a part of a bigger web community centralised around one subject. I dabbled with the idea of revisiting those times and setting up a new nvmax. After chatting with Andrew (the original founder) about doing just that we decided that it would be extremely difficult to build up our contact list again as so much time had passed. Not going ahead with it wasn’t a major issue as my diary was jam packed with other things that I didn’t know what to do at that present moment in time.

I’ve now taken a role of Creative Director at a Newcastle Design Agency called carrotmedia. This was something that came out of left field and wasn’t planned, it fell into place. I believe in fate and things that happen will happen regardless of what you try to do.

Over the year the whole team has been through a lot at carrot,we’ve launched some pretty nifty websites like Victor, Designer Desirables, Poplar Tree Garden Centre and Brambledown to name but a few. We’ve got a wild client base ranging from Industrial underwater equipment to a holiday let in Italy and an awesome cosmetic dentists. Every day is different and I love it for being just that. The clients I work with are tremendous.

Something majorly changed in 2008, I’ve grown in confidence. Whilst I believe I am fairly confident, there were certain issues I had to deal with personally and one of those was my work. The growth in confidence is shown by the fact that I’ve now started opening up quite a lot and showcasing my work which I’ve not done before. Together with uploading my designs to flickr and being showcased on various CSS Galleries it does give you a sense of pride and the thought that you’re headed in the right direction with the work you’re producing.

I setup Validation Icons in 2007 however it didn’t have as much of an impact than I thought it would and because of this I redesigned the site  in 2008 which brought a ton of traffic. Since its launch the website has been showcased on a number of CSS Galleries as well as the icons being showcased on various design resource websites. It’s an honor and I hope in future the icons can be of some use to someone. I’ll be developing some new icons in 2009 so watch out for them.

I changed the design of my blog after a long wait, the original was held together with shoe strings and bubble gum and was plainly not robust enough for the amount of things I wanted to do with it. I opted to go with WooThemes, I’ve admired the work the guys are doing over there for a while now and had to tell everyone why I’m overeasy. Although I have a strange stance on premium themes which I will be writing about in the New Year.

In November I launched floobe.com, it’s a mix of showcasing, resources, interviews and freebies. It houses everything under one roof and the Interviews are going well. It will grow more through 2009 so I’m looking forward to that.

And now it’s Christmas, it’s time to relax, enjoy and look forward to a busy 2009.