semiDad: 20 week update
semiDad
If I've been a bit quiet for a while, it's partly because we've been putting this together. Should be an even more exciting Christmas than usual.
Generic Text: relaunching my portfolio
Last night I finally got around to relaunching my long-suffering portfolio site, Generic Text. Any designer will tell you that rebuilding your own portfolio is pretty fraught, so my aim with this was to keep both the site content and the process as brief as possible.
Linuxguy illustrations
“ I was thinking about a typical unix bearded guy (think comic book guy from The Simpsons, but more hairy). ”
Officially the best brief ever – had a lot of fun with this. It was for a couple of illustrations I did for Andrew Taylor, who's running a learnable.com course on production Linux and needed an image thumbnail for the course.
There's a couple more illustrations in the full post – including the first version which didn't make the cut (but which I'm still very fond of!)
No-one’s a Critic
A couple of days ago, my friend and colleague Gavin Logan wrote a short post which has got me thinking about criticism (or lack thereof) in the local web community:
“ A local web design agency that I used to admire has started to churn out insipid work. It’s made me think about this aversion we have for talking publicly about this kind of thing. I don’t want to name them, and I’d consider it rude if I did, but I don’t know where this politeness comes from. ”
While I don't know which agency he's referring to, I'm more than familiar with this situation, both from my time in the North East and previously. While criticism is a vital element of the design process it's a tricky area even under the best circumstances – for instance, between good friends or long-time associates. As Gavin says, giving polite yet firm feedback to local designers and agencies – and lets face it, we're often talking about competitors here – is next to impossible.
I was a Freelance Teenage Hermit
A daftly-titled article I wrote for Codeworks' recent freelancers feature. Above (for posterity) is the illustration I did to accompany the post!
PHP North East: the first of many
Last night, Anthony Sterling kicked off the first meeting of PHPNE, a Newcastle-based PHP user group in the style of several existing regional get-togethers. I joined a dozen or so other local developers at the Town Wall, which has kindly agreed to host the group for the forseeable future.
Distract me not: Faux WriteRoom in the CMS
In which I jury-rig my CMS to emulate the excellent WriteRoom, and thus maybe write articles a little bit quicker.
semiBad version four: more old school than an old school
Earlier this weekend I decided to add a few bits of new functionality to the site. As is so often the case with these things, it quickly snowballed into an early spring-clean, and the first proper refit of the site's backend since I built it the first time. Here's a quick rewrite of what changed and why.
What the Haggis did next
“ Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face, Great Cheiftain o' the Puddin'-race! ”
You should know what's for dinner tonight. Here's what to eat tomorrow.