I had high hopes for the Wacom Inkling, of course I was dubious that it would accurately convert my drawings into a digital form just by using a sensor and special pen but the demo and marketing of the product looked so damn good and Wacom have a great reputation for their graphic tablets. Before I begin I will say that I read all the tips on how to use the inkling, tried different settings and even different types of paper.
As you can see above, the results speak for themselves. Okay, it doesn’t look aweful but there are many descrapancies between the original drawing and the inkling version mainly in the form of lines being in the wrong position. As I draw comics, the accuracy of the lines is pretty crucial, so really even minor differences can be quite bad.
But it gets worse: Read more
For the last seven months I have been creating comics and publishing them on my tumblr blog – mindvomit.co.uk. In my first month I received around 240 unique visitors and in my last month (November 2011) I received 58,828, a 24411% increase in traffic! However, this was mainly due my Narwhal – The Baddest Mother F*cker in the Ocean post that was unusually popular, generating 56,015 unique visits. If we take an average month like October – the percentage increase in traffic is 174%, which I think is still pretty good. Read more
Of late I’ve been posting a weekly comic to my tumblr blog. I’m fairly new to tumblr and have been trying to get to grips with various tactics to help the success of posts in gaining tumblr likes and reblogs etc so I thought I would share my learning thus far: Read more
When a post gets shared or ‘liked’ on Facebook you want it to have the best possible chance of getting noticed and more people to ‘like’ it for the viral explosion that everyone dreams of! You want the news item on Facebook to have a nice thumbnail, sadly Facebook doesn’t always pick up the right picture, so adding some meta content to the head of your tumblr theme allows you to set either your profile picture or photo post as the thumbnail.
On tumblr, it’s really simple, just customise your theme, go to the theme tab and add some custom HTML. Where you see all the tags, add the following code above or below: Read more
While I’m working on my new site I wanted to display a gallery but exclude the featured image / post thumbnail from gallery because this would be a custom thumbnail size and would look rubbish in the gallery.
In wordpress you can pass attachment IDs of any image you want to exclude from the gallery. So all you have to do is get the ID of the post thumbnail ala:
< ?php echo do_shortcode('[gallery size="full size" exclude="' . get_post_thumbnail_id( $post->ID ) . '"]'); ?>
I enjoyed creating this jack in the box illustration to promote the soon to go live redesign of Superbreak.com.
I intended to have a strapline below saying ‘surprise… we have redesigned… blah blah’.
Adapted to included a textured background for this blog post. I enjoyed creating the sketchy style in Adobe Illustrator and giving the box an elaborate / magical feel. The main thing on the spring is from the superbreak logo.
I just used this excellent plugin:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/newsletter/
On my friend’s website – David Kupelian.
It’s fantastic. Was really easy to install, basically just putting in the plugin directory and then a few configuration things in the wordpress control panel such as sender’s name etc. Read more
In response to a recent tweet by Elliot Jay and discussion with Craig Burgess, I felt I needed to air my views on what skills a web designer should possess.
I think it goes without saying that a web designer first and foremost, should be able to design! This encompasses a wide variety of skills – creativity, knowledge of usability, accessibility, technical restraints, good communication, to name a few. A good web designer should be able to create a design that fulfills its objective.
A good portfolio seems to be usually the most important aspect when going for a job. Your work should speak for itself. But from a technical point of view, what should a web designer know?
Elliot Jay made a slightly controversial statement that all web designers should be able to code their site ( i presume he means HTML/CSS opposed to php, asp.net etc).
All the web design jobs i’ve seen have HTML/CSS as a requirement, it’s classed as ‘front end’, which the designer generally deals with.
But should designers be writing html/css and do they need to know it to be a good designer?
Certainly, design is a creative industry and most designers come from artistic backgrounds. Given that HTML/CSS is not artistic or creative, should designers be doing it and is it detrimental to their design skill?
Personally I believe that HTML/CSS is not to the advanced, technical level of programming languages such as PHP or C#, so isn’t hard for a designer to pick up. They’re not complex or mathematical and the amount of time taken to learn them shouldn’t be so intense that it takes away from all the things that enhance a designer’s skill.
Also I believe that knowing how a page is constructed, the possibilities and restraints of the web medium benefit the designer’s ability to create something suitable. And the best way of understanding this is to use html/css yourself and create websites.
In short, i don’t think there’s any harm in it!
Maybe if the process of having a guy doing the designs and guy doing the html/css was faster, but I don’t see that making much of a difference.
Print designer, web designer or ‘designer’?
It comes down to experience. I may offend a few people here but many web designers i’ve met who’ve come from a print background aren’t as good at web design as they are print. Then again with practise, there’s no doubt that their web skills would become just as good. There’s no reason you can’t be both or just specialise in one area.
Designer + programming hybrid?
I may shoot myself in the foot here as I do know a bit of php, asp.net, c#, sql, javascript and often refer to myself as a hybrid! Hey, I just love the name. But if a company wants the best programming and best design, hire a programmer and a designer. My design doesn’t suffer from programming but there’s no way I have time to get as good at programming as people who’ve been doing it for years.
Alas, I think I have aired all my views. In short, I think a web designer should know html/css as well as design.
