Fifty People One Question

And I’ve got to say that I was amazed at the original idea, production value and beautiful music that was contained within. It’s not often that I write about stuff that I find on the web as I find stuff all of the time, but this was different.

I was really taken by the reactions of the different people to the questions as well as the people themselves, how varied they were and how the answers were clearly indicative of where they were in their lives and the type of people they were. You can really pick up on some of the subtleties as well, look at the mother and father of the young boy watching him think of where he would like to be, as if willing him to say that he is a happy child and they are great parents. Also the Portuguese man, hiding behind the glasses and removing the gum from his mouth as if to open up a bit more to the question.

Watch it and see what you can find, makes me want to live in London just for the beautiful diverse range of people and personalities there. 

All of this from one question.

I made the change about 2 years ago and there are a few things about my mac that makes it infinitely better than the dell PC I used to use. Some of them are software things and some are hardware but then when you use a mac you are buying into both really as they come as a package whereas it doesn’t really feel like that with a PC.

1. It has never taken me longer than 5 minutes to shutdown my mac
2. I have never had any issues logging on to a network or the internet
3. I have never had any problems installing software or hardware
4. My hardware and software co-exist as one and there are never any conflicts
5. I am not constantly looking to upgrade parts of my machine to make it better, it works perfectly and when I need a faster one I will buy a new one
6. My Macbook pro has never crashed
7. My Mac will play everything I asked it to (unless corrupt)
8. My Macbook Pro has a good battery life
9. There are millions of useful apps that are made to look beautiful and work perfectly as mac users would not tolerate anything that doesn’t have similar standards of usability and design as OSX

Now these are all of the good things about my Mac that I have noticed in comparison to a PC. I bought my girlfriend a new PC recently and have been constantly and consistently reminded of the inability to do the simplest of things. There also seems to be a real worry when changing stuff that it could actually render the computer unusable, something I never worry about on my Mac. Now below are the minus points:

1. It isn’t as quick to browse files
2. It is much more expensive
3. Some of the widely used and accepted software doesn’t work on it
4. Upgrades, fixes and Warranties are very dear
5. I worry about scratching it

So there you go, make your own mind up but I can honestly say that I would never go back to using a PC now and my recent experiences have only backed this up. I think it will take 2-3 months to have your PC running on a optimum level of performance whereas my MAC works to it’s highest level straight out of the box (I spose that’s why techies like PC’s and designers like MAC’s).

But last night I had to make an exception to the rule and like a smoker trying to ween themselves of the ciggy’s, stepped into my the store lips trembling. Anyhow that soon passed and I made my way upstairs as one of my favourite and Bristol’s finest web designers, Gavin Strange was giving a insight into his career so far. 

I go to a lot of webinars and the such and always find them very useful but a little formulaic and serious, with the emphasis on trying to out think the client. This was, however, a very refreshing talk in that it was simply Gavin taking us through some of his projects from start to finish in a very casual, genuine and moreover enthusiastic way.

It was clear that there was a lot of late nights and hard work in there, that may not have been emphasized by his relaxed demeanor, but I could really relate with a lot of this and just wished I had the confidence and skill to produce beautiful products for my own clients.

Conceptually the work had a very strong basis and Gavin believed in this and with his skill as a designer it seemed he was able to convince his clients that his way was the best way and I must admit the results are impressive.

So well done Gav for getting where you are today (not everyone is featured on the Apple website or indeed invited to speak at their tiny Bristol store) and thanks for the insight as it has really made me think about getting back to basics with my graphic design and firing up Illustrator whenever I have a good idea and a bit of spare time.

More important than that is the continued success of my two football teams in the new season and booking holidays to such places as serbia and Ibiza, the former is for exit festival, whose 10th anniversary it is this year. Should be awesome fun I simple cannot wait.

Highlights of recent months have included going to see Ugly Duckling, who were brilliant and should be releasing a new LP soon. They were also supported by the excellent Dr Syntax and if you don’t know who he is then you should definately go and check him out.

First up is a very useful PDF from sitepoint that I think is also available printed but is a great introduction to the art of CSS:

http://twitaway.aws.sitepoint.com/

Secondly is a site that promises free icon sets, themes and much more depending on the amount of donations made. So maybe not exactly free but there are some nice icons on there already and if you all club together then it’s cheaper for everyone.

http://freebiesdock.com/

Merry Christmas

Capture the Valley

Beautifully designed single page site.

Squawk Design

Impressive design by a graphic arts student, Dominik Lenk.

Holiday To Go

Love the red color applied on the tinted background.

Team Green

The torn paper and grunge effects are nicely put together. If you like my previous artistic design collection, you will like this site.

Radiant Plumbing

How can a plumbing website be so artistic (check out the header artwork)? If the contrast on the text area is higher, it would be a perfect design.

Alex Buga

Love the semi-transparent effects applied on the wood texture.

Burnett Dairy

Very cooperative, yet friendly.

Variable

Another artsy site.

Pixelmator

A Mac application site with nice icons and layout structure.

Jon Tan

Good use of web typography and grid layout.

Scrapblog

A beautiful web-app frontpage.

Marius Roosendaal

Single page portfolio site of Marius Roosendaal. Don’t forget to check out both “Day” and “Night” theme.

Trale

I particularly like the details spent on the typography of Trale.

Sarah Hyland

Very well-done on the header design.

Eye Candy

Mmm yummy… both the design and chocolate bars. Another good design site powered by WordPress.

RealaSponse

Nice 2-column homepage.

Flame Digital

Very unique layout structure and nice background images throughout the site.

Tickerville

I like the design a lot, but I’m not sure if this design/style work for a financial related site.

Webstock

New Zealand’s web conference website.

Cabedge

Simple, clean, and comfortable layout.

I Love Typography

A blog by John dedicated to typography.

Shylands

Simple, large bold font, great color contrast…

Superawesome

Very unique illustration style and color theme.

Happy Cog

A classic beautiful site.

Free People

One of my favorite ecommerce sites. The amount of details spent on this site is incredible.

Wish Tree

The wish/tag cloud in the background is simply creative!

Biola Undergrad

Another artsy design.

Viget Labs

Nice use of Javascript and CSS (I mean the scrolling effects).

Svenigson

Very clean and boxy layout.

Stuff and Nonsense

Site of Andy Clarke.

J R Velasco

Designed by Miguel Ripoll (one of my favorite designers). He has great sense of web typography. The layout looks very chaotic, yet the content is organized.

Explore Cascadia

One word, beautiful.

Yellow Stone Park

A very nice design within the box.

Elliot Jay Stocks

A design blog by Elliot Jay Stocks. He is a very talented designer with great personality (based on my personal conversations with him).

Freelance Switch

Good design and great content (freelance related).

Knoxville

Retro style in collage form.

Electric Pulp

I’m loving the watercolor effects.

Vivabit

I’m not a big fan of liquid design, but this is a good one.

Surfgarden

Nice and clean 2-column blog design.

Tanya Merone

Another great example of single-page site.

Matt Brett

A nice design blog by Matt Brett, he is a designer gamer.

Larissa Meek

A beautiful blog design by Larissa Meek, formerly a model, now she is an art director at AgencyNet.

Noodle Box

Nice use of color contrast.

Kineda

A blog by Terry and Tami Ng (celebrity and entertainment news).

Pod3.tv

Another nice design blog.

Kev Adamson

Another sketchy design.

Eleven3

Another retro/collage approach.

Turbo Milk

Nice icon.

Veerle’s Blog

Another classic beautiful blog.

31three

Blog and design portfolio of Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain.

You’ll be glad to know that this is now fixed and I will be able to post both blogs and folio work again, horray!!!

I worked on it a bit more and seeing as I have been thinking about re-branding for a while I thought this was a good time to do it. I’ve always wanted an original logo with the copper font and now I have one, horray!!! The sixty six obviously comes from when we won the world cup, football being close to my heart, it is also a lucky number of mine (6 that is) and I think it’s much more catchy and memorable too.

Now just got to get rid of that flowery background, look for more updates on the site and a post of the rebranding process that I accidently fell into…

Congratulations on all your good work and continued effort in the world of design and may you continue to impress and go onto to do even greater things.  

Secondly is a handy gallery of patterns that you can download as tiles for your designs and do with what you wish, very useful indeed especially if you want your website background to look like a tiled victorian floor.

Lastly I’m going to see Roots Manuva tonight promote their excellent new LP Slime & Reason, can’t wait, their first LP Brand New Second Hand is one of my most prized pieces….

Anyway check it out, he’s touring the UK as well so get along to a gig near you and please vote for my fish and hopefully I can go for free as well as getting a few pies, mmmm…. pies are nice.

VOTE FOR MY FISH