If you have an obsessive compulsive disorder you’re going to love this, Things Organised Neatly is a treasure trove of well-ordered miscellany. Curated by art student Austin Radcliffe.

Via: ISO50.

Some friends of mine have been busy making a Kids book, The Little Boy / Girl Who Lost Their Name is personalised print on demand storybook based on your child’s name. I gave them a little bit of help on the recent site update, now you can preview your custom book before you buy. Just head over, add a name, select whether it’s for a boy or girl and flick through your book!

Simple graphic representations of the Windows of New York. A lovely little pet project by Mexican graphic designer living in New York Jose Guizar. Completely pointless but utterly beautiful.

Via: Yewknee

Just back from my first trip to Mexico, other than briefly stepping over the boarder when starting the Continental Divide Trail. It didn’t disappoint – the weather was hot and sunny, the food was hot and spicy, and plenty of tequila to wash it down :) Not a bad recipe for and short winter break. We flew into Cancún, hired a car and worked our way down the Peninsula along the Caribbean sea.

2 days in Cancún

Lovely beach, sea was a bit strong for swimming, too many big concrete hotels for my liking, Nicky loved the swimming pools and air conditioning though.

3 days in Tulum

Tulum was lovely, all the accommodation along the coast was wood and thatch Robinson Crusoe style cabana’s. Everything had bags of character. We visited the ruins nearby, interesting enough, there’s access to an awesome beach by the ruins, make sure you take your trunks, we forgot…

1 Week in Mahahual

I really liked Mahahual, it’s about a 5 hours drive from Cancun, if I came back to the Yucatán I’d just drive straight here. We spent 4 days in the town, lots of beach side bars and nice places to eat, very relaxing and quiet. We quickly found our favourite bar – Chiquita’s, they had swings hanging from the roof as bar stools. An innovation I’d have to say I quite liked, a very relaxing way to enjoy one of their mean margarita’s. On the 3rd day two cruise ships pulled into town and the place was transformed, we quite enjoyed watching the sleepy little village spring to life to service all the cruise ship passengers before they embarked later in the afternoon. The sea is that amazing turquoise blue colour, calm and great for swimming, there’s a reef just off shore so it’s a bit like a lagoon. We stayed at Luna de Plata just on the outskirts of town, 700 pesos a night (about £35) very good value for money.

Then we drove down the coast road for a bit and stayed at Almaplena eco resort, probably the nicest hotel I’ve ever stayed at. It was twice the price of Mahahual, but it felt like it was worth the extra. Extremely comfortable rooms, right on the beach, nicer water than at Mahahual – deeper and bluer, palms trees hanging over it, awesome. I wanted to continue down the coast to the ‘naturalist retreat’ Playa Sonrisa, but once we’d found paradise Nicky didn’t want to budge.

All in all it was a pretty awesome break, wished we’d gone for longer. I’ve uploaded a set of holiday pics on Flickr is you want to check it out.

Finally! First post in ages… This blog hasn’t changed a great deal since 2006, it was in desperate need of an update, so here we go. I’m just going to start out with the standard WordPress template and design it as I go, I need to learn a bit more about designing in a browser – these responsive layouts have made Photoshop fairly redundant.

The thing I most want to explore with this re-design as you might of guessed by the title of this post is Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). I was shocked how shite to internet looks on Nicky’s new retina display laptop, fuzzy scaled up bitmap graphics when they have to potential to look so crispy clean is a sad thing to see. The future looks like it’s all about the vectors (again – r.i.p Flash).

It’s a bit of an arse though, even though SVGs have been around for ever, they still aren’t that well supported. I had to install a plugin so WordPress would recognise them as an image format. If you’re look at this blog in Safari you’ll already see the bug which scales the width but not the height… But I’ve only just started to scratch the surface, more soon.

I‘m just testing post formats of this theme, but this video happens to be my favourite section of New Zealand if you fancy a watch.

It’s been many-a-month since I last posted a desktop, so just in time for Christmas I’ve drawn this reindeer to bring your screen some extra festive feeling :) It’s actually re-purposed from the site I’m currently working on, hopefully should launch in the new year, will be good to get some fresh work up on the internets after my long sabbatical.

Download the dimensions that suits you: 2560×1440, 1920×1200, 1680×1050, 1440×900, 1280×800.

For those interested in such things, the Phyllotactic Spiral used in the background was created with a Scriptographer script, their Illustrator plugin is my new favourite thing. And their Paper.js HTML 5 vector graphics scripting examples are blowing my mind.

Last week was the opening ceremony of the trail me and Nicky walked in New Zealand – Te Araroa. To mark the occasion I thought I’d share some of the progress I’ve made on all the photos and video we brought back.

I edited the photos first, there was about 25,000 to go through so I’ve only just finished! I got them down to reasonably easy to flick through 200 photo set of the highlights. And then a slightly longer 1000 odd photo set that covers the trail in a bit more depth.

We even got a few photos published in Geoff Chapple’s official trail guide, got our copy through the post the other day :)

If you followed our progress on Nicky&Cookie.com, you’ve probably seen most of these before, but you might be interested in checking out this short highlights video I’ve just finished putting together. It’s roughly in chronological order from the Top of the North Island to the bottom of the south, unfortunately I don’t have any footage of us getting to the end due to a memory card malfunction… Hopefully I might be able to recover some of it though. The rest of the video should be finished in the New Year.

Across New Zealand in 3 and a half minutes:

So we’re back, we’ve found a new home in sunny Shadwell, but… We can’t move in until the 1st August, problem is we start work at the beginning of July – we need a place to stay in London Town for 4 weeks. Weren’t sorted now thanks :)