- Almanac Archive -

Its taken *roughly* around 2 years, 24 months, 720 days, 17,280 hours, 1,036,800 minutes and 62,208,000 seconds in the making – as well as the last 10 extra minutes to work that post padding arithmetic out – but I finally have my site alive and breathing once again. I wish I could say that every minute of every day, (prior to now), has been filled with amazing things that have stopped me completing this most urgent of projects, but the sombre truth I’m afraid is, I haven’t.

As anyone who i’ve worked with will testament to, I tend to fuss over the tiniest of details. This, coupled with a sharp loathing I have for everything i’ve been creating for more than a week (always because i’ve come up with a better solution to the one i originally devised), were definitely contributing factors, but I don’t believe in all honesty I could say these were defining reasons why this site has taken me so long.

The fact that my weekday evenings are taken up with all manner of sports, band practices and quality time with Rach and the doggles could equally be considered perfectly reasonable reasons why this endeavor has taken longer than Billy Connolly does getting to a punch line. I’d wager I could even partly blame some time lost on the seemingly never ending number of times we’ve moved house in the last 2 years, but once again – not the reason.

The crux of the matter is simply I did not believe the efforts I were designing were good enough to be shown to my peers. This site, as it stands is (and for how long that is, is anyone’s guess) version 27c in a long line of failed and pathetic attempts at trying to put something that was, in equal parts, reflective, clear, logical and captivating onto the www’s. Although I am as happy as I think it is possible for me to be, judging my own work, I can already see improvements that need to be undertaken. For me, the drive to try and keep pace with the best our industry has to offer finally caused me to put up, shut up and flick the switch to ‘on’.

The nuts and bolts of it

For those that are interested, this site took me around a week to design from top to bottom. I had got to a stage with my iterating where I felt a self imposed deadline would click into gear the skills I had developed in my professional career. This definitely caused more pressure, although ultimately it has created a finished end product. The key goals for this site were to host links and feeds from all my professional social networks – I deliberately keep some separate. It had to host a blog, portfolio and be able to adequately market me and my services.

The design style was based around films and sci-fi illustrations, both of which had a huge impact on me when i was growing up. The type is largely set in League Gothic and Cantarel with Georgia for body copy. Once the site was all rolled up together nicely, my good friend @danielvanc used he big code brain and integrated it with Wordpress – my cms of choice. I considered ExpressionEngine, but i felt the community around wordpress, plugins and sites i’ve dealt with in the pass were best for me in this instance. I may even release a WP theme based on this very site – possibly.

Muchos Appreciendos

The continuing standard of work the fantastic people in our industry keep pumping onto the interwebs will always be an inspiration to me – and with twitter, it’s allot easier to show my gratitude. Some you may know, and those ones you don’t – i’d strongly urge you to check out. So thankyou, in no particular order, @TrentWalton, @espiekermann, @gruber, @27bslash6, @imjustcreative, @jessebc, @bradcolbow, @WeAreAirside , @carsonified, @clearleft, @WolffOlins, @pentagramdesign, @tyler_thompson, @erskinedesign, @ISO50, @squaredeye, @rogieking, @Coudal,@brendandawes, @jonburgerman, @cameronmoll, @jontangerine, @Malarkey, @markboulton, @jasonsantamaria, @simplebits, @zeldman, @Hicksdesign, @maxvoltar, @simoncollison, @elliotjaystocks and @jina. You all rock, and not in a ninja or rockstar way. In a proper, oxford dictionary accepted way of saying I look up to all of you.

So thats post 1 at an end. I hope to post a couple times a month at least, maybe even things you might find useful. Topics that may find themselves on here could include; Design/dev web tips, CSS3, typography, graphic design history, travel, films and music. Things my Colophon won’t tell you include; I’m not a morning person, I love cider and ale, Non web terms for web people make my cringe gland act up – eg ninja and/or rockstar, I hate being late, I dislike rude/arogant people, my favorite film is Jaws, my favorite TV series are Father Ted/Alan Partridge and Black Books, my favorite color is cyan, it annoys me when people refer to dpi when they mean ppi, I’m an inch under 6ft, I almost weigh 13 stone, I’m a size 11 shoe, I consider myself ‘just below’ fit enough, I love traveling, my xbox gamertag is BadgerMcGavin and I love poker.

Any comments on the site in general, or this post? Do please leave them below, and if you feel so inclined – please do send some link love my way. Twitter is my favorite.

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