Website and logo I’ve done for Community Archaeology Ireland. The site can be found at http://community-archaeology.ie/
Website and logo I’ve done for Monumental Stoneworks, based in Carrick-On-Shannon, Ireland.
Currently working on web presence for Kandu Catering, based out of Sandyford in Dublin.
Kandu Catering Website
Testing the iPod WordPress app. It’s pretty basic but supports video uploads. And this is pretty nifty
Given that the iPod Touch now has a camera, albeit quite a lo-res one.
Dandy. Except every single time I attempt to insert media into the post it goes and crashes out the app. Quite a feat considering I’m using a brand new 32Gb iPod Touch 4. Get this sorted please, blogging on the go appeals to me. Or should I just have a wee look at Tumblr…
Wait one more try without a rescale seems to work.
And now for some video…
No. Crashes during compression and upload.
The Plum Brothers Logo
Site Logo
I’ve created a dummy site for the client, a preview version as their hosts are having problems with uploading Flash video (FLV). Check it The Plum Brothers here.
Checked back in to GMX to see if they’ve altered my design for the mail frontend since 2006.
Apparently not.
GMX Mail Interface 2006
4 years is a long time in web design. Or maybe I did something right back then. I still prefer the GUI update that I proposed.
GMX redesign proposal 2006
GIMP.
It’s an odd little name. It immediately conjures images of gas masks and rubber suits and Slipknot videos and zips that open from the inside out and unfortunate incidents in rooms with a single swaying bulb. On the other hand, it’s the name of the Nimrod of free design production tools.
Of which there are many. For every Illustrator, there is an Inkscape. For every Dreamweaver, an NVU. For every InDesign, a Scribus. Flash, to the best of my knowledge, doesn’t have a freeware equivalent. Unless you go the 30-day route and use, well, Flash.
All of the above have similar interfaces to their expensive, briefly-free cousins, with roughly equivalent workflows and they spit out the requisite filetypes. So why haven’t they completely replaced the Balboas in the room?
Simples. Because they’re free. They’re functional. They’re available on a broad spectrum of platforms.
So why is it that almost every designer still has the name Seethamaran Narayan lovingly etched onto their orbs on a daily basis?
Are there stability issues? GIMP boots up giddily enough and doesn’t have the font population issues that I regularly encounter in Photoshop. Kompozer has many of Dreamweavers functionalities and outputs nominally less buggy markup, in a more developer friendly interface. Inkscape suffers from the same lack of multiple artboards that Illustrator, now in its Xteenth iteration and a mature application by any standard, still hasn’t addressed.
So why, with all this readily available freeware goodness do I have a nodding relationship with GIMP and its ilk?
The problem’s not the software. It’s the designer. Not the bloke who typed those first few tentative lines of code after accepting a challenge from some other online buddy to create a program that does everything Adobe Everyt’ing does for free.
It’s the person who’s just read a brief and twitchily scribbled some stream-of-thought tangentials into the margin, that may contain the nascent kern of a really interesting jump-off point for a visual concept.
Or may just be an absent-minded doodle of what a Terminator would look like if Skynet had turned humanity into zombies instead of freedom fighters that, to the untrained eye aren’t much bothered with roboflesh. A Terminator that looks like your Nan taking her teeth out with one of those things that parkies use for picking up cigarette butts.
Many designers are actively discouraged during their college years from using Photoshop. The attendant philosophy being ’tis wiser to conceive the design without allowing a tool to dictate the end result. ‘Shop before ‘art, as it were. When you did progress to the production phase, Photoshop was invariably your first port of call for roughling up layouts and flats. And oh how you learn to love that stage. Hours of pixelpushing in an environment that was created just for you.
It is your playground, your four walls, your Judge Dredd Lawgiver, your Swiss Army knife of pixels. And everyone uses it differently. It is a VAST program. Everyday you tap new potentials, discover new tricks, enjoy the tickly new “Holy Batturd” frisson of unlocking a new way of making the Photoshop pony earn its hefty pricetag.
Bring out the GIMP.
It possesses a lions share of Photoshops capabilities. It has an interface that bears equivalence with Adobes Pretty Little Hydra. Mostly, it’s free.
Yet when I work in GIMP; I’m haunted and perplexed by the ghost of Photoshop. It does exactly the same job, produces the same filetypes and again: it’s free.
More’s to the point, in terms of production quality, when I produce my designs in GIMP they look inferior. Not just to my eye.
Is it because I know all the shortcuts in Photoshop? Nope.
Here’s a comparison. One logo design I did in Photoshop. One I did in GIMP. Laptop died hard and I had to switch to a Linux box to get a job finished.
Guess which one is which. Both started as scribbles in the margins. One was done in GIMP. One I’m not really proud of as a logo design.
So is it all in my head and GIMP isn’t to blame for a less than mediocre design? Possibly.
Is it also possible that my 15 years of Photoshop use and subsequent design experience have turned me into an Adobe monkey? Yes. Totally.
Is my perception of quality contingent upon my Photoshop use? Absolutely.
I think it’s a great idea to start people into the design world relying on GIMP. Not just a matter of fiscal expediency. Perhaps that’ll inculcate a bunch of design novices into a production environment relying on a tool that’s free and beautifully functional.
What’ll be really interesting about GIMP and its use is how users f(l)are when they migrate from GIMP to Photoshop. Perhaps the Space Station will become a moon again.
Personally, I’ll stick with Photoshop.
But I’ll use GIMP.
It’s starting here before the US (5.9 and 9.9 respectively), but I’ve just finished up the designs and animations for the German promotional campaign for the sixth season of Discovery Channels Deadliest Catch. More for Der Checker, Die Modellbauer and Bear Grylls to follow.
Deadliest Catch \”Rectangle\”
Website for Dublin-based Orthodontists, P. Lawlor & Sons is now live online. Still some teething issues and we’re missing appliance content, but all in all pretty happy with the end result. Please try and break it 😉
Site online here at Ortholab.ie.
A few moons back, I was asked to redesign the frontend for the Westfield Sportscars website. A UK-based custom kitcar manufacturer, I decided to clean up the frontend and go for a crisp, magazine-like style and layout. From the archives:
Westfield Website Redesign
As seen on Top Gear. Against the Zonda.
Designngised Portfolio Blog 