I’ve been very slack on the blogging front recently but all for very good reason! The last few months since January has been hectic in both work and life.
things of note since I last wrote here:
dozens of freelance projects came through. some will be on my portfolio page shortly.
Surfing took up pretty much any down-time I had as we had a good winter for waves.
I have new wheels! a Nissan X-trail jeep, which I love!
I’ve just got back from a 10 day surf trip in portugal, good waves, lots of beer, lots of food
Probably the biggest news however, is I’ve just joined Rehab Studio as their Interactive Developer, I’ll be joining a hugely talented team of creatives and developers working on some great projects. It’s a huge step-up for me in general as the client work they do is amazing and I cannot wait to get started..
I’ve really enjoyed the two years working for zirkus creative, It’s been great working with Rich, Bob and Trevor and I’ve accumulated so much experience in that time.
I’ll be diving pretty deep into the world of flash and Actionscript 3.0 at Rehab Studio. I’m keen to get blogging about all things flash and code so If any of you guys are flash designers/developers, follow my RSS! If any one knows of any good flash peeps to follow via blogs/twitter let me know..
This week at zirkus we’ve launched a new site we’ve been working on over the past couple of months - Green Party NI.
Through the research stage of this project, I discovered through other political parties websites that most were pretty drab and boring. Hardly any of them were effective in conveying the party’s ‘message’ and seems like it was just a place to deposit large chunks of text and and the odd pdf here and there. The one website that did stand out and inspired me was Barack Obama’s site, it’s already been widely showcased in web design showcase galleries and talked about in the design community. Aside the great design, it was very effective in many ways.
We set about designing Green Party NI’s site with a similar mindset, we wanted to get users to stick around, learn about the party, the people involved, how to get involved, watch some of the youtube videos and maybe read some of the pdf’s.
I was tasked with designing the website and front-end build, which is XHTML and CSS, the site is updateable through the use of our Content management system so that the clients can keep their news/pdf’s/videos up-to-date.
As per usual, I’d love to hear any feedback, so drop a comment!
We’ve just launched a new site here at zirkus - George Best Signature Range. I was responsible for the design concept and front-end build.
The brief from the client was that they wanted to make the brand become a high-end fashion retail brand, and the website had to mirror this in line with other high-end fashion names. It also had to be very clean, simple and clutter-free. The online shopping cart was streamlined to 3 very easy steps, as opposed to the confusing, time-consuming and frustrating online shopping experiences found on many other e-commerce sites.
The clothing range is displayed horizontally, using the scroller, you can navigate through the range horizontally. The flash introduction on the homepage used photographs taken in-house and also the video of jeremy lynch on the video page was produced by us.
It’s by far one of the more simpler layouts I’ve worked on in a long while, but its all geared into making sure the user can come away thinking it was a very simple, easy shopping site.
I’ve been learning how to use After Effects for a couple of weeks now, Its an absolute must for designers wishing to push their flash boundaries further and I can say this is the most enjoyable software to use by far.
Above is my first attempt at motion graphics and it’s based on the lightning strobes from the famous apple ipod nano advert. I know its slow and skippy and after effects veterans may scoff (loudly), but for a first attempt im pretty pleased.
One of the benefits of starting a blog was that I could now air my views of the design world. There’s alot I wanna get off my chest about things I love.. things I hate and this topic is definitely no exception.
Okay picture this scenario, you need a wall built. It has to be 20 feet high by 20 feet or so wide, it could be bricks or it could be mud it makes no difference in this example. Obviously, we need someone trained to build a good sturdy, strong and durable wall but problem is, you wanna pick the best person qualified. Now there’s several people you’ve heard of who’s been recommended by friends or colleagues, perhaps you’ve seen their professional-looking website, maybe seen them in action but, you want to give them each a good reason why you should hire one of them.
One by one, you invite them round and you ask them to build a wall only 3 feet high, just so you can inspect their craftmanship, how they work and how fast they do it. You tell them you expect them to do this for free and the person who impresses the most, will be picked to build your 20ft by 20ft wall and be paid just for that wall only.
Sounds absurd already doesn’t it? I mean is there even any point in me explaining what each builder said in response? I can assure you it wasn’t pretty.
