A few days ago, while sitting watching TV I happened upon the ad embedded below for Strongbow, centred around the main character Marcus Graftus who champions his fellow hard workers, Roofus (the roofer), who brings us shelter, Gas Fittus (who brings us warmth) and Little Dish Fitter who brings us Pets Do The Funniest Things in HD. Graftus gives them a stirring speech as they presumably run for the pub.

So there I was, watching TV and saw it. Being a huge twitter addict I tweeted about it:

Loving the new Strongbow ad, it’s that kind of creative thinking that gets an ad noticed. Not that I’m gonna buy more Strongbow.

A little while later, I got a reply from a Marcus Graftus:

@synthesezia We salute you, Tommy. For you bring us graphic design! Strive on!

Brilliant. This is such an ingenious use of twitter for a campaign that it should spur more people on to create campaigns that bridge more mediums and break the fourth wall, it’s a surprising way to interact with the people on the other end of your marketing.

Recently as well, the Coke Cities campaign by eboy has been getting a lot of attention on Twitter due to the design community in Ireland and they’ve been using an account to keep in touch with those talking about it. As I’ve been told before, it’s all about the conversation.

Today I saw a number of talks which I will hopefully learn a lot from. Lee talked about The 7 Deadly Sins of Wordpress, Paul May (of Design by Front) spoke on how to get bigger contracts, Paul McKeever (also of Front) spoke on the shift in media consumption. What had the most impact on me though was the Contrast guys, Eoghan McCabe, Des Traynor and Paul Campbell. Speaking on The Principles of Success, Business Analytics and Customer Service respectively.

The Contrast guys presentations really hit home to me (just like David Rice’s on Monday at Refresh, another Contrasty and ex-Fronty), speaking on such broad topics means that what they’re trying to get across won’t just apply to large companies or established freelances but also students like myself. Not to discount the other presentations as I am sure that they will come in handy when I leave Uni and have to cope in the real web design world, but the wide reaching scope and damn sexy Contrast Keynote template means that the business analytics, success and customer services principles told to everyone today allow me to take these on hopefully during my placement and beyond.

Overall, a great day by Andy and Ciaran, who was known by the title of @goodonpaper’s bitch. Can’t wait for next year!

1: Start from scratch

Customising a theme such as K2 can be good sometimes when you want to keep it simple, but for learning I always found that trying to figure out why certain parts of code were doing things I didn’t expect or trying to modify styling was always really difficult. The best thing to do with an existing theme is read the code and figure out where the loops are, what each bit of code does and certainly copy and paste snippets of code into your own theme but I advise you to stay away from trying to change an already existing theme as complex as something like K2. If you really want to modify an existing theme, try the Classic one. I’ve found that it’s code is a lot simpler and easier to understand.

2: Search for help

A lot of the time, when trying to do certain things within Wordpress, especially when I was beginning out learning about the customisation aspect I found a lot of tutorials including code and telling you what exactly the code does. Long tutorials often fall into the trap of giving you the code to paste in and not telling you what it does, if you’re doing this at least try and figure it out.

3: The Codex

The Codex is an amazing resource for everything Wordpress and contains a tonne of example situations and code. It also does a great thing of explaining what the code does (mostly) and has an entire section devoted to designing your own theme.

4: Look at other sites

A lot of the sites that run on Wordpress often will let you know somewhere that it uses it (Pro tip: if it doesn’t, add wp-admin/ after the URL of the index and it will load the admin login page). A lot of these sites have made a theme in such a way that it doesn’t look anything like Wordpress and figuring out how they have done this will help you wrap your head around designing your own theme a lot. Bluecube’s new site is a great example of this, you can’t tell it uses Wordpress unless you add wp-admin/ or notice that the URLs filter by category.

5: JDI

Follow a bit of advice from Nike and Just Do It. Reading about Wordpress theme creation won’t help you at all unless you jump in and force yourself to do it. After I quit my old job I took a week off from start to scratch to do everything, including design, coding the HTML templates, learning Wordpress and adding the WP tags.

The project started when Chris Huston forwarded a guy onto me to discuss the project, the website portion sounded well out of my depth and so I got Adam on board for that while all the branding and design was my responsibility.

Logo design was a hard nut to crack, a logo says a lot about a company, especially a new company that people haven’t grown up with and as such we went through a few different directions until the idea of the rising sun came up and this stuck with us right to the end.

Last night however the flyers I designed were put through around 2000 letterboxes in South Belfast while 1000 stickers were put up on doors. Along with Mark Craig, the area manager for the Lisburn road and a few others we done a number of different streets and afterwards Matt, the company director drove me around University Avenue. It was a bit surreal, seeing something I made in Illustrator on my little white Macbook being up everywhere and after going into Queens Union we saw a business card behind the bar. Samples will be added soon, either way, hopefully you’ll see the logo about South Belfast a lot more when the company starts having houses to let. If by some fluke you are a landlord and want to know more, send me an email.

Officially, the redesign has been since the 9th of November, however, a crazy thing happened to me. Usually when I get an idea in my head it doesn’t change a lot and I work at it until it’s right. Not this time though. I scrapped the original idea I had when one hit me in a flash of brilliance one night while watching QI.

With this idea however I kept the colour scheme I imagined in my head as well as using Helvetica and the border underneath the header sections. Taking cues that I have learnt in Uni as well as the experience of creating version 1 of the site I added some things, such as borders around the ‘main’ clickable images under the work section.

A post will hopefully follow within the next few weeks to explain the design process. In the meantime, I hope it doesn’t break.

Two other things have also happened lately which I feel are of note, I got my first freelance design job for an exciting local business which I will be able to talk about more in the next few weeks and I am currently waiting on my 15″ Macbook Pro to arrive.

I’ve been working on it for about a month now and I’m still not finalised with the layout of the index. I did have another layout but scrapped it. The reason being that I find it hard to pick a colour scheme for any website and I picked one very different from the norm but one that I still think looks good. The previous mockup I had was good, but not right for this site. It also was white and red, something which identical to the IMD website I had at the time so I did not want to use it. 

This being the 2nd full site I’ve developed from scratch I found it was very good to sketch ideas on paper as they allow me to mess with size and layout a lot quicker than Photoshop, instead of the usual style wireframes that people use what I do is sketch the layout of the divs and what they will contain. I think this is a lot better instead of the usual logo, image and text layouts that we usually see being used. 

That’s about all, but my past week has also involved:

• Cursing Photoshop
• Learning Illustrator
• Looking longingly at a Macbook Pro
• Messing with Espresso
• Wishing someone would buy me a YWFT Gift Voucher 

More on the redesign when I get round to it.

My first proper website I’ve ever made and I think it went alright, not bad, not great, alright. I put the most of my work into the homepage and the rest sort of came together just off the back of single.php, which wordpress uses for posts and pages.

Most of the stuff I design is quite minimal and I just like simplicity, I think this is a strength in my site. I tend to design to the absolute bare minimum of what I think looks good. To add to this and more here is a bit of a summary:

What sucks:

• Possibly colours
• No navigation
• No proper contact page (yes, my email is on the about page linked from the main screen but without a nav it is hard to find)
• Half arsed after home.php

What is good:

• Black on white and white on black
• Big typeface
• Some of the layout
• Aggregation and work section all being done through Wordpress admin + plugins

So what I need:

• A colour scheme, even if it is black and white
• A navigation
• A proper contact page
• More work done on pages other than home.php
• No half arsed-ness

I am going to force myself to redesign this website, even if it takes months and I have to re-edit the custom keys I use, it will be done. Stay tuned.

The best thing about going to lectures like this for someone so new to the industry is that you find out the process which the big companies and studios go through. First comes the brief, then the ideas start bouncing around and one idea is taking further with everyone still chipping in, pieces are added and pieces are taken away but most of the time the original idea can still be seen in the end product, what did surprise me however was the amount of research and thinking that goes into these briefs.

Jane spoke about Red Bee’s rebrand of UKTV G2, a formally pay per view channel which involved them taking a look at the competitors and why people didn’t watch the channel, they found that the name and branding made it look like another one of UKTV’s cast off channels (such as Living, Home + Garden, that crap) but that the programming didn’t reflect this image, what they did was create an identity of the channel by naming it Dave and producing the idents, each ident had the same cast and playful nature, one featured a snowball fight with fake snow on a sunny day, another had a man riding an elephant. The channel was also removed from PPV and placed on the Freeview channel list which immediately boosted the ratings.

I find it extremely difficult to do research for my design class, simply because I pluck ideas straight out of thin air (usually) and find it hard placing my thought process into words but this shows it is an established evolution of any piece of work. Even Nik’s portion about the Orange Unlimited site and how it evolved from the branding of What if good things never end? (Pay particular attention to the genius faux-scrollbar giving the impression of one giant web page instead of a flash site)

It seems this is the norm in the industry and something I will have to improve on.

Pictures of bottle and video after the break.

TDR

Anyone who knows a tiny bit about design will know that Wim Crouwel is a famous typographer having mostly worked with grid aligned and square fonts and his most famous work was New Alphabet. I have been researching him and although respected it appears his work at the time was groundbreaking and most importantly rule breaking.

Crouwel's New Alphabet

This single font can be seen to have influence everywhere, from The Designers Republic to Leftfield’s logo to the general 8-Bit culture. This single typeface although hardly ever used (at least as far as I’ve seen) appears to have had great influence on modernist and minimalist work. The man is a definite genius.