Fresh solves that “Where did I just save that file to?” problem. It also allows you to instantly find attachments you download, no matter what weird name they have.

Recently…

I downloaded Fresh for a run-through on the recommendation from AppStorm and I must say, I’ve been very impressed. At first I was skeptical, Leopard already has a similar feature with Stacks for accessing those recently download files and I could use the desktop to store temporary files. Yet they don’t save any recent files you might have modified anywhere on your system, which is where the brilliance of Fresh comes in.

To bring up Fresh you can either click the dock Icon or assign a hot key (I used cmd ` so i can toggle Fresh with my left hand, much like cycling through windows with cmd tab). Once you do, the Fresh Interface is overlaid across the whole screen – as such:

The top row is a list of recently modified files and the bottom is The Cooler (more on this below). Anything that you have recently opened, saved, downloaded or modified will appear in the top row and you can click and drag these to perform any action you want.

This becomes extremely useful when you want to share some bit of work your currently working on by email or chat. As a designer, I’m always doing this and now its as easy as saving out a design, invoking Fresh and dragging the file (or multiple files) into the appropriate window. Simple. Before, I would have had to save out the design, then bring up the finder and navigate to the appropriate folder and then drag the file. Fresh cuts all this nonsense out.

The Cooler

The second row of the Fresh interface is The Cooler, which you can use to store files that you don’t want disappearing from the top box when other recent files are added. For the short time I’ve been using Fresh, I haven’t really used this feature that much and if the option were there, I might have disabled it. Saying that, I can see its use if i were working on a particular project with a number of files over a period of time.

Other features include tagging and excluding particular folders and files from appearing in Fresh. This would be useful if you have files that constantly change, but that you don’t need access to. Here are the full features of Fresh.

Improvements

I love Fresh in its simplest form because that’s what it is, simple. But there are a few minor things that could be added (or removed):

• Colour Scheme – I’m not a big fan of the green and turquoise colour scheme and it would be helpful to be able to change it. This isn’t a massive issue however.

• Remove The Cooler Option – This feature might become useful to me at some point, but at the moment I’d prefer just the recent files box to appear.

• Dock Icon – I use a keyboard shortcut to invoke Fresh, so hiding the dock icon would be useful. I know it’s there running in the background anyway.

There doesn’t need to be any big changes to Fresh, it’s such a simple and effective tool. It has cut down my time drilling through the finder and sharing files has become a doddle. It’s well worth the $9 for any Leopard user – although at the moment you can get the app free my signing up to Macheist – It’s in Loot under nanoMission 2.

Fresh is really what Stacks should be and, if Apple clocks on, what it should become. Give it a whirl.

This post came off the back of another blog about the UK design education system, which quite rightly outlines there is fundamental problem with the system not preparing the students with the right skill-sets for work. Many students rely on their course to give them the best preparation, after all they will have made a significant financial outlay to be on the course in order to improve their skills for future employment. The reliance however is firmly with you as a student.

Reality is, your not guaranteed a job , but you’ll stand a much better chance by following these points:

Become Self-Dependant

You probably already are self-dependant, being a student, but regarding your work you should start to rely on nobody but yourself. Of course your tutors are there to help and teach you, but expecting them to carry you through is only going to end in tears when they don’t.

Start working hard by yourself and only go for help when you definitely need it. Going asking for help at every stumble will not only annoy the pants off your tutors, but will come back and haunt you when they’re no longer about after you’ve completed the course. University is all about developing yourself and becoming self-dependent – something any future employer will appreciate.

Start Preparing Early

You may think that you should concentrate on your post-graduate career towards the end of your course. Actually you should start preparing at least 12 months before you graduate – 18 months is better still.

A university course will seem a long time when your on it, but leaving your post-university preparation till your final year is not the best idea. Not only will you become mega stressed with work deadlines on top of creating a CV and Portfolio, you’ll be wasting precious time you could be using to scour for potential jobs and making a name for yourself.

Do Personal Work On Top of University Work

Most Designers will already be doing this, but surprisingly some don’t. It’s vitally important to pursue personal projects and could be the key difference in securing a job or just missing out.

Even if you’re an amazing designer, going to an interview with a portfolio containing just work from your course is not going to cut the mustard. Going to an interview with a portfolio containing some of your own work on top of university work shows the employer you have drive and the passion to find and develop work for yourself. Personal work will also give you key experience working with a client.

Create and Regularly Update Your CV

Making a CV (Resume) is obviously necessary, but some leave it till towards the end of the course to write even their first CV. Unless your very gifted, your first CV won’t be the best and a CV can always be improved upon, so it doesn’t make sense to have your first be your final.

Even if your not applying for jobs (Kudos to those getting placements while still on the course), it helps to get on paper your current skills, qualifications and background which might in the future land you an interview.

Write your first CV early on in the course, then regularly update it every 3-4 months. This ensures your CV will be tip top come graduation, because you will have been improving it regularly by adding new skills and a more accurate perception of yourself. Also, having some sort of CV in place before you get underway with your final year work will reduce a lot of stress.

Another couple of points on CV’s – Don’t go overboard. Less is definitely better in this case so keep it simple. I use a one-page CV, which means it’s easy to update and maintain and is easy for any potential employer to skim over (because that’s all they’ll do initially). Obviously some people need more space if they have more employment history, but keeping the basics to one page means you’ll never go over 2.

Don’t be afraid to be adventurous with the design either. Again don’t go overboard, but subtly improve the design aspect to make sure you stand out from the myriad of bland CV’s out there – This is a good place to demonstrate your typography skills, after all you are a designer.

Learn To Present Your Ideas

When I started university I used to shake uncontrollably when presenting my ideas – I still do sometimes but it’s much less infrequent. I got better at presenting by basically doing lots of presentations. Practice does really help in this area. Becoming better at presenting will also help you in interviews, when you have many eyes starring at you waiting for you to tell them how amazing you are. Being the most nervous person in the world is not going to work as an excuse in any circumstance.

If your course is any good, they will have you presenting your work left, right and center which for some is horrible, but it does get easier. For sure avoiding them won’t help. My tips are:

• fake confidence – Of course your not an actor, but try and make yourself look as confident as possible for your audience. If your confident they will be relaxed and in turn have confidence in you and your work. However, by faking it you don’t want to seem in-genuine, but with practice it will become more and more natural.
• Take your time – Pauses are better than stuttering and taking things slowly will make you seem relaxed, just don’t pause for too long and make people uncomfortable.

A good book on presenting is I Can See You Naked which has invaluable advice on every part of presentations.

Make Connections

Your probably not in a better position to start networking than in a university environment. It makes sense to start making friends and connections with everyone, but in particular with people who are good at the things you don’t do.

You can’t be great in every area of design, so it’s better to concentrate on one area you are good at, then work to improve at it and become great. It’s better to be great at one thing than average at everything. You can get to know other students during the teamwork projects you’ll do, so use this time to figure out who the good ones are and develop a relationship with them.

In the future, they may have to recommend someone for a particular job that they don’t specialise in and if you’ve done good work with them in the past, they’re likely to recommend you. These connections could help you out when you need it most and there is no better recommendation than a personal one.

Develop a brand for yourself

It may seem a bit impersonal but it is a smart idea to develop yourself as a brand. A strong brand that has a visual identity and some sort of recognition will greatly enhance your job prospects.

So use your name, or think up a brand name for yourself, and develop a logo that represents you and your skills. Use the identity across all your communications such as your portfolio, website, business cards and social networks like Twitter. Don’t stop there. Start to push your brand and get exposure wherever you can. Setup a blog and write about design related subjects, share skills, and offer tips/advice to the web community.

This will all help in gaining exposure and a reputation that could land you work in the future. Having some sort of identity will look very professional and, even if it doesn’t get you a job, will give any potential employer something to remember you by. If you’re struggling to develop an image for yourself (the hardest client to design for can be yourself) then try and describe yourself as a designer in one sentence and develop it into a strap line of some sort. It could help picturing yourself from another perspective.

There are many more things you can and maybe already are doing to help you get a job after graduation. What other things do you think are important, it would be great to know what other students/graduates think?

After I graduated, I attended numerous interviews. In one of those interviews I was asked what design process i followed and how I developed my work towards a final product. Naturally, I began waffling about the same old idea process that every job candidate probably spurts out.

Realising this I paused for a moment (a really good idea if your stuck on a question – thinking is perfectly acceptable and it shows they’ve asked a good question), before responding by saying I thought design was more of a journey, than a task.

Well I think they liked the answer – so did I! I was able to elaborate on my design process by associating it with a journey, resulting in a confident answer, which they as non-designers could relate to. I was reminded of all this last week when i read an article at GoMediaZine: 10 Tips to avoid designer’s block. The article isn’t particularly related to this one, but in it the author states:

“…drawing and designing is not executed in a perfectly straight line. It’s not a math equation. It’s a process”

I completely agree, yet I think that design is much more than a process aswel. ‘Process’ still seems too linear to me – like you know exactly where your going and what’s going to happen. Maybe it’s just my inability to picture how a design is going to pan out down to the exact pixel. Anyone that can do that then please, give me your brain.

Just Point In The Right Direction

When I think of a design I’m about to do, I have a sort of map in my head of what’s going to be where, what colour scheme will be used and what particular style I’ll employ. Then I’ll start off (on paper of course) planning it out and making changes as I go – foreseeing any potential problems as and when they occur. As I go from paper, to the digital graphics and then to coding & layout, I generally come across many problems which mean I have to change the direction of the design. Most design is never as simple as just doing it.

A ‘journey’ is a good analogy for design. You can go left or right – dark or bright. You should stop when your tired and lost – resting might show you a different route. You should have a time scale that budgets for being late. After all you might run into designer’s-block traffic. Nobody likes it but you just can’t help it.

If you carry out design as a task, then it will probably look like a task. I remember designing this website in my student bedroom and spending a lot of time changing and redesigning it. My mates would come in and tell me to stop working on it and just get it done, but if I had taken their advice it would have looked naff. I think it’s better to go with the flow of the design and let it change and develop over the course of the journey. You’ll get there in the end.

I’ve not been reading books since i was on my Interactive Media course at university, but thought I must get back on the word wagon sooner or later! ‘Hey Whipple Squeeze This’ is a guide to creating great advertising – well that’s what it says on the cover, it’s more of a history and best practices to advertising.

It’s not just for people interested in advertising, I think the book would be extremely useful to anyone involved in a creative industry: Writers, Editors, Designers or just anyone who likes advertising – this is why i read it!

The book not only showcases amazing extracts of advertising from the past century, but invaluable advice for creating, developing and producing ideas. After all everyone has ideas in some form or another, but is unaware how best to put them in practice. The best bits of advice come in the later chapters, with Sullivan’s insights into working with clients and colleagues. I’m fairly new working in the design industry, therefore haven’t had much experience working with clients or co-workers, so I found the tips invaluable and the stories bloody hilarious.

Just Read It

I’d recommend the book to anyone, but in particular those working in a creative environment…I found it extremely relative to web design for some reason, probably because design agencies are setup similar to advertising. I suppose a lot of web design is just glorified advertising.

Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This!

I began designing this portfolio site at the end of last year, but i was never happy with any of the designs i came up with so i ended up restarting a fair few times. However, I’m glad i did this now as i am very pleased with the finished product. Here are a few of the designs that got churned through the mill (Obviously the name changed from Design at Will to Create at Will, mainly due to someone else have a similar name for a website across the pond – and let’s just say i didn’t want people mistaking that website as being mine!):

Inspiration

As you can probably tell some of them designs are pretty terrible – or at least i think so after putting them in the bin! I decided that the site needed to be more individual than what i was initially coming up with, after all it is my portfolio, so i started experimenting with sketch ideas – scanning drawings from my sketch book and fiddling with them in Photoshop. I found the results were very good and realised there is something very pleasing about hand-drawn elements on a digital screen.

A lot of this inspiration came from a number of sites. I discovered some brilliant websites along the journey of my portfolio that influenced me in many ways. Here are a few I really like:

• Web Designer Wall
• Satsu Design
• Jesús Rodríguez Velasco
• Loworks Store
• Jeff Sarmiento

Obviously some of these are very well-known if your a web-designer, but it’s the originality of the design i like as well as the implementation – none of them go over the top with the design.

This is the effect i wanted to achieve with Create at Will. I wanted it to be visually pleasing when you first visit, but not something that distracts the user from the work – which is the most important thing.

Textpattern

Another reason that site took me so long was because I wanted to implement a CMS so it was easy for me to update. I hadn’t previously used any Content Management System seriously and it was definitely something i needed to learn – enter Textpattern.

I did a bit of research into some options and it came down to either Textpattern or WordPress. Although Wordpress is hugely popular at the minute, Textpattern just made more sense to me after going through the documentation. The way it uses sections made it seem like more of a CMS whereas WordPress came across more of a blog tool that can be adapted to a CMS. I am going to learn WordPress in the near future, as that many people use it in the industry, so my stance on this argument could be revised in near future. For now Textpattern does a brilliant job.

What’s Next?

I do want to carry out some minor improvements to the site, so expect it change in the near future. For now I’m pleased with it but never completely satisfied. I’d like to know what anyone thinks about it, so please leave a comment.

Kin-terface was my final piece of work on my University iMedia course and is a project done instead of a dissertation. It is an independant piece of work where you choose our own direction following research and skills gained from other modules. I decided to explore interfaces and their relationship with users through physical methods. The work was shown at the Liverpool Screen School end of year exhibition on the 28th, 29th and 30th May 2008.

Kin-terface is an installation setup with 9 pressure pads, 2 push buttons and a projected screen (right). The actual application was created with Flash and actionscript, using the Phidget Interface Kit to detect inputs from the mats and buttons. To navigate Kin-terface you simply move from square to square to highlight, then jump to select – similar the mouse hover and click on a computer.

A fundamental theme of the project is the physicality of information and applying more analogical actions to interact instead of digital methods. Users often employ physical mental actions with interfaces – “if i go up to”, “if i move this” etc. – and this type of interaction is applied heavily in Kin-terface: You move yourself to information and perform a physical action to manipulate.

What’s in it?

Kin-terface features a collection of 6 mini-games and tasks. The first part allows you to customise the interface by inputting your name, changing the colour scheme or changing the sound track. All of this is optional, but the the experience becomes more personalised the more you customise as a relationship is developed between the user and the interface.

Navigation is consistent throughout – move to highlight, then jump to select. Inputting your name (right) is identical to text message input, with multiple jumps to select different characters. The rest of the interactions are games or tasks that play with interface concepts in fun and engaging ways.

Squares It Gone? disorientates the user, Whats The Meta-phor? shows user perception of different imagery and Square Invaders utilises spatial memory as a skill within a game where you kill aliens by jumping on the relevant square.

Objective?

The whole interaction is supposed to display different skills users employ with interfaces and the difference between different users. For example, in What’s the Meta-phor? users can select an image and input what they think about it. Only once they have done that can they see what other users have said about the same image. This has produced some very interesting comments on the different images that highlights user diversity with political, symbolic and iconic imagery.

As mentioned the exhibition was open to the public on the 28th, 29th and 30th May. It was also displayed in BBC Liverpool from the 12th June – 14th June 2008 , along with other students work from my course.

In 2008, Liverpool has been chosen to celebrate the European Capital of Culture. This project was a follow on to our first team project for Design Solutions, Scribe but this time our ideas would be presented to an actual would-be client – in this case BBC Liverpool.

The BBC were in the process of creating a website that aggregated all information about the Capital of Culture that helped the public find out more about upcoming events. Our task was to work in a team and produce ideas for the website based on two different budgets:

• The first budget was based on no finances at all and required us to be creative with the resources already in place at the BBC
• The second was reliant on the BBC Liverpool being granted a budget to be decided by management

The World in One City

My input into the project was being involved in brainstorming and developing ideas and creating the layout and design of the website. We decided to create a website whose visuals represented what Liverpool is all about – which is basically different to any other place you could go to. One problem was the fact that all BBC websites have strict accessibility standards and websites are required to conform to there strict template layout in order to be visually consistent with the rest of the BBC.

To overcome this we were experimental with the colours and other aspects, such as the menus, backgrounds and images which didn’t impact on the overall template and accessibility. We also made the website as interactive as possible, incorporating interactive elements such as maps, mobile podcasts and user-involvement in order to engage the users and help them find information about events.

The actual website was mocked up using fireworks for the presentation as we didnt have to have a fully-functioning site. An incentive for this project was that some of our ideas might eventually make it onto the final site, but it seemed The BBC never recieved any budget. What I did achieve from this project was invaluable experience of working for an actual client in a team-based environment.

Liverpool Unsigned was intended as a music review site for unsigned bands in Liverpool. It was an idea that never got off the ground because of university commitments, but i decided on using it for this piece of work as a mock advertising campaign.

The campaign aim was to generate the interest of the people who go to see unsigned bands, who could then log onto the website and review any particular band they have seen. The main driving force being that these people are like the unsigned bands themselves, as they are not professional journalists, so the reviews would be orignal and raw.

Big, Big Posters

The first part of the mock campaign was posters – Big ones. They consisted of billboard posters, bus stop posters and flyer posters that would be situated around Liverpool City Centre to generate interest. They all follow the same visual style and are designed to draw the viewer in through intrigue by being visually striking yet not over-complicated. The posters are below. Click them for a larger image:

TV advert

The other part of the campaign featured this TV advert that would be used on a wider scale. It was created in After Effects and was actually one of my first experiments with the program – i think the final effect looks a tad unrealistic yet it definatley served its purpose as a learning curve. You can view the file by visiting the link below.

Usigned Advert (swf)

*** I don’t have the original file for this as i had a computer crash and lost some work. Therfore the quality is quite poor, but you get the idea ***