When an old friend of mine, Donny, decided to ditch his life and job living in London, to spend most of his time locked away in a shed in Norwich making bicycles, I was really interest to see what he’d produce. I think it would be an understatement to say the quality of his craftsmanship is astonishing. Every frame he makes is different, with painstaking hand crafted details, all finished immaculately. It’s not hard to see why I was excited at the chance to build his website.

We decided that building the whole site on WordPress (a popular blogging platform / CMS) would be a good start, allowing Donny to have complete control over the content and update the site as and when he pleased. This was also a first step for myself into using PHP and creating a WordPress theme from scratch.

The design is fairly minimal, allowing the photos of the bicycles to take center stage. We also created a Jquery lightbox gallery to diplay the images full screen. The photos were taken by Edmund Aves, go check out his work!

And of course, don’t forget to checkout Donhou Bicycles!

Arrived in Melbourne yesterday! This is the start of my year’s working visa over here. Going to relax, enjoy myself for a few weeks, find somewhere to live and then hopefully find myself some work.

Seems great so far, looks like an amazing city!

Here’s a little sneak peak at the new packaging for the Woodfruit grow your own mushroom kits. They’re currently in production at a local printers in Devon. One colour Pantone thermographically printed onto rough brown cardboard boxes. These will be sold at farmers markets in the Devon area in the run up to Christmas.

Should be getting some actual photos through soon, along with images of the accompanying instructional leaflet.

Visit the Viscom 2010 website.

Brief: Design and print spec for BA (Hons) Visual Communication Yearbook and design of accompanying website to be displayed at the end of year graduate exhibition.

Client: Leeds College of Art

Details: After the success of the previous years exhibition guide I was happy to be asked (now as a graduate) to design the yearbook and website for the graduating students of 2010. The brief posed an interesting problem… The course-leaders were keen for the design to represent the vast range of disciplines and specialisms that fall under the umbrella of Visual Communications. This immediately threw up lots visually busy ideas that showed ‘a bit of this and a bit of that’, but this also contradicted my instincts that the book should primarily be a gallery, with the emphasis on students work.

We reached a happy medium with the idea that we could actually let the pupils work speak for itself. The book took the form of a pack of postcards, allowing for different pages to be used as the cover. They were then displayed in a way that somebody entering the exhibition could see a snapshot of all the students work at once. After the event this then allowed for people to display several postcards at once at home, or even remove people they don’t like from the book! For practical reasons we bound the books with elastic bands, but this also worked well on a conceptual level, with a number of people comparing the elastic band to the course itself: a flexible housing for a variety of content. The book also featured information about the course for prospective students, these were designed as pull-out pages to help differentiate them from the student pages.

To help create a stronger brand which could be carried over to the website, I created a custom display typeface. Designed on a tight grid, it hopes to be simple but visually interesting. It’s form is inspired from the straight lines you get when stretching a rubber band between various points.

The website was very simple to put together, completely powered by the CargoCollective CMS, it only took some simple customisation to match the book, and all the content was managed by the students themselves.

Print Spec:
Dimensions: A6 book with double length pullout pages
Booklet Pages: 36 single leafs + 3 double leafs
Print: CMYK Litho + Rubber Stamp with black ink pad
Quantity: 1000
Binding: Rubber Band
Paper Stock: Robert Horne Heaven 42, 300 gsm, silk + 500 gsm greyboard slipcase
Typefaces: Helvetica Neue + Custom made display font
Printing & Collation: Duffield Press

visit lovethat.me

Now, the more observant of my readers may notice some hypocrisy there, but there is a vaguely convincing rationale behind it.

—Although I’m very happy to share the content, the blog, or digital scrapbook if you will, is primarily for myself. An instant source of inspiration.
—It was a great excuse to explore the world of Tumblr and customise a theme for myself.
—It keeps me in touch with an old friend who contributes occasionally.

Highfives all round.

While on the subject of Tumblr, I was very impressed to see they host your html files completely free of charge. I’ve been using this service as an online home for recent HTML, CSS and jQuery demos and experiments.

Pure CSS buttons
HTML / CSS Form (designed for Radiowaves)
jQuery experiments (still very much a work in progress, works best in Safari and Chrome)

Merlin x

As part of preparing for my big move to Australia in October I’ve moved back home to Norwich for a bit and into a lovely new studio. It’s a shared freelance space ran by The Click Design Consultants, and has a jazzy pool table and a cool fridge (no pun intended).

This also means the end of my full-time work with Radiowaves up in Leeds. I’m continuing working for them on a freelance basis along with new clients Centrum New Media in London as well as a few other small jobs for people.

Websites are notoriously hard to demonstrate in a static portfolio, they need to be viewed, interacted with and navigated to be understood fully. With that in mind I’d recommend you actually visit the following sites!

A website to document the journey of Julian as he broke the bicycle circumnavigation world record—18,050 miles in 165 days. I put this together when I was still at university and had little knowledge of web design. The website explained his journey, had an integrated blog and twitter feed as well as a GPS map so viewers could track his progress on a daily basis.

His journey is now over, but the website is still online— thisisnotforcharity.com

This was a full branding project and website design for a new sustainable mushroom farm in Devon called Woodfruit. This was also my first hand-coded website and I’m secretly quite proud of it!

The design features a slick CSS drop-down menu, some subtle CSS3 rounded corners and box shadows, a custom @fontface typeface and some JSON that pulls in the content from his Twitter feed. We also spent some time refining our SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) keywords, and I’m happy to say (at time of writing) that we are currently in first place for UK google searches of “Gourmet Exotic Mushrooms” “Fresh Gourmet Mushrooms” and “Devon Gourmet Mushrooms”.

Visit the Woodfruit website.

Cherry Cherry is a cute little independent shop in Norwich selling hand-made gifts, prints and all sorts of other goodies from various designers, illustrator and crafty types. I worked closely with Kate Seaward, a freelance illustrator who owns and runs the shop, to help her ideas come to life. The result is a cute little website that features a blog, an external online shop and some of Kates cool drawings.

Visit Cherry Cherry and maybe treat yourself to something nice!

A non-commercial and aesthetically rough website that I tinker with occasionally and use as a playground for ideas. The LS6BMX website acts as an online hub for the thriving BMX scene in Leeds. The functionality of the site has developed over time, all with the aim to make contribution and involvement accessible to a large group of, on the most part, technically illiterate people. The site features a Flickr feed, updatable by anybody simply by tagging their photos on Flickr with “LS6BMX”. A central newsfeed powered by the simple Google Blogger service, updatable to a large number of people who we’ve given accounts to. And last but not least, a ‘Dad Joke’ section, powered by twitter and updated directly from a BMXer’s dads phone via text message.

Visit the LS6BMX site and read some crap jokes.

This ones still a work in progress, and something I tinker with every time I get a few spare minutes at work. Synergy is the umbrella company for several projects and non-profit organisations all involved with different aspects of using social media in the education world. Its a simple WordPress site with a custom hand written CSS theme, it features a Twitter plugin that pulls the latest updates from various projects and key staff members. There’s still a lot of functionality to be added on this… Watch this space!

Visit the Synergy blog.

Here we are picking it up the final product from Belmont Press…

…and here we are dressed like idiots with Chloe from LCA at the awards ceremony…

Unfortunately we didn’t win, but there was more free champagne than you could shake a bow-tie at and Hugh Dennis of ‘Mock the Week’ fame hosted the whole thing and made me laugh lots.

In other news, the prospectus has also been shortlisted for this years Heist Awards, happening at the end of May, so we’re still in with a chance to win something shiny!

Here’s my submission, based on my hometown of Norwich. The text is actually something an estate agent told my friends parents when they first moved to Norwich!

Helen is printing the whole thing by hand at the moment and should be available in a few weeks. I’ll post some pics of the final thing once I get it, I should have a few copies to sell too so give me a shout if you fancy one!

A few months back I downloaded the Photoshop App for iPhone. I never really got round to trying it out, but on a recent trip to France I took a few snaps and with a lack of computer I thought I’d try it out. Obviously there is all sorts of limitations, just as there is with the actual cameras built into phones, but I have to say I was really impressed. The accessibility of technology has developed at such a rate: it’s now very easy to be able to take photos, edit them and them post them to a variety of social and photo sharing websites all from a telephone while sitting on top of a mountain. Thats pretty amazing if you ask me.