Manchester Web Designer and Developer | Web Designer & Developer

FOWD Tour 2009 Leeds

Following on from FOWD London it was announced that Carsonified were taking FOWD on the road! This year the tour bus is stopping at Belfast, Glasgow, Bristol and Leeds.

I decided to grab a ticket straight away for the stop in Leeds and I know the early bird tickets are no sold out. If you’re thinking of going then stop dawdling and grab a ticket before they sell out!

The day is split in two, a morning of tutorials and an afternoon of presentations. To top it off they offer a chance to meet 15 potential clients during a speed networking session. I’ll definitely make sure I take my new business cards along with me!

The Leeds stop hosts some great speakers including Simon Collison. The days presentations will include talks on:

* Unnatural Experiments in Web Design
* Developing Your Ultimate Package
* Top 50 Rookie Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

If you are popping along then let me know so I can come say hi!

Business cards from moo

After a few days of very slight alterations to my business cards I decided to go ahead and use a service I’ve always wanted to try, moo.com

Using their website is overall straight forward, but there were a few confusing parts which I thought I’d share in case anyone else comes across them.
Being a web designer I had to ensure that the design was in CMYK and at a resolution of 300DPI. This was minimise any risk of the cards coming back with a lower quality print than I expected or slightly different colours.

Finalised business card designs

Once I had my design I went off to moo, created an account and uploaded the 2 images I wanted to use, the front and back of the card. The next stage is to place the front image exactly where you want. In my case the image was too wide so I had to go back into Illustrator and change the image dimensions. A Simple fix to do but moo do use slightly different bleed dimensions than a few other sites I had looked at.

When you’re happy with the front of the card the next step is to design the back of the card. By default the back of the card is plain text on moo so you have to change the layout style then upload the rear image. You can then place/zoom/rotate the image in the same way you could with the front image, nothing new or different to confuse you here!

After entering my payment details and click submit I received an email at 9:21pm saying they had received my order details and were now processing it. This was on a Sunday night with the next day being a Bank Holiday in the UK so I wasn’t expecting anything until the end of the week.

Wow! Well what else can I say about the speed of moo. From ordering to receiving the cards on standard delivery it took 60 hours including a Bank Holiday, which in my eyes is outstanding.

Moo.com Exterior
Moo.com Interior

As soon as the moo package dropped on my desk I opened it up to see some nice simple packaging to keep the cards from rattling around during transit. However the first card I pulled out was disappointing, it seemed to have a white mark on which I hoped wasn’t continuous through all of the cards. Fortunately it seems that only 1 or 2 of the cards seemed to have these marks on whilst the rest are what I expected, not perfect quality, but for the money and speed I really couldn’t argue.

Front of the card
Rear of the card

So if you’re looking for a quick, affordable and good quality service then moo are very well suited to this. But what company did you use if you already have business cards, were you happy with the speed/quality of the prints and would you recommend them? I’d definitely recommend moo to anyone looking for a simple printing solution!

I’ll be handing these cards out like candy at the next conference I attend, as unfortunately I didn’t have time to get them prior to FOWD London! Have you already bought your FOWA London ticket? I heard good things about the Dublin one but I’m waiting for the speakers to be announced before I grab a ticket, so maybe I’ll see you there in October…

Trip to London

I’d booked my tickets for FOWD as soon as they were released and thought it’d be best go down the day before so I could have a wander round London. Having never been to London I wanted to see as much as possible but I think I walked a bit too far!! I went down with the lady and we randomly decided that the zoo would be a good choice, not been to a zoo in years! We only stayed in the zoo for under 2hours but I managed to go snap happy with the camera and take about 350 shots. I’ve just uploaded the best ones to Flickr so feel free to have a look around and let me know what you think!

What a long and exhausting couple of days that was and I’ll be posting about FOWD over the next few days and what I thought about each speakers presentations, some were great, some weren’t!

Nice new website!

A brand new website! Whoohoo!

Finally after months I decided to get moving on my own websites. I’ve had holding pages up for ages and I’ve wanted to do something about that and seeing ExpressionEngine
working pushed me in the right direction.

So far I really like EE, had no problems with it and the community really seems helpful. I was going to go down the Wordpress route but I wanted to learn something completely new and the way EE seemed to work is more suited to how I like to work. I might do an EE for beginners tutorial, or series depending how much I waffle, to help other people to get started with the system.

If you have any working knowledge of PHP or a CMS then it really is simple to pickup. I’m fairly certain that there’s a steep learning curve somewhere, but for now I haven’t encountered anything too troubling.

Business Cards

So to go inline with the website I decided it was time to get myself some nice business cards printed!

I’ve got the designs all ready for the printers and I’m looking around for the perfect place to get them done. I’m torn between going all out and getting them letterpressed like I really want, or just some standard prints to see how they come out for now!

Let me know what you think, love to get feedback on new designs, especially for myself!

National Bread Week

This was a micro-site designed by the great flash guys at LOVE. I helped develop the HTML section of the website where you can enter a competition to win £1,000 a day during National Bread Week!

So if you buy anything of Warburtons with the “National Bread Week” logo on it then make sure you go enter the competition!

Even if you don’t, go check out the National Bread Week and make a picnic portrait, its awesome!

Afflecks Palace

In their own words, "Afflecks is an emporium of eclecticism, a totem of indie commerce in Manchester’s Northern Quarter".

The site was designed and developed all in-house at LOVE and runs on a customised install of Wordpress. From the front the site really suits the look and feel of what Afflecks represents whilst the back-end lets some user interaction with a heavily customised Flickr plugin. Mixed with a splash of jQuery it really gives the unique feel that Afflecks required to keep people up-to-date for what's planned within Afflecks and what you can expect to find on a visit there.

The site and emporium are both definitely worth a visit so make sure you check it out!

Dr. Martens For Life

This is the first project I’ve just finished since joining LOVE and the first time I’ve ever seen CakePHP. Cake is a powerful PHP framework using the MVC approach, all of which was completely new to me, but so far it looks good!

Hopefully we’ll be using it in the future so I can learn a bit more about it but the basics will do for now!!