doug barned - design for print and web - blog

Time for a change?

As mentioned in my last post, for some time now I’ve had a new design in mind for this site. It’s current state has been around since around September ‘08, so I’m itching for a change. The current design was devised in an attempt to create a stylish, professional looking frame for displaying my work. I was looking to better my career at the time and was determined to have a fully functional online portfolio in a finished state (for the first time since my university project, Design by BlueCow). The gradients were intended to draw the eye toward the content, whilst the grey colour scheme was to allow the coloured images of my work speak the loudest, helping the information hierarchy – and a bit of colour on a grey canvas always looks good and grabs attention.

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Many many months, a few haircuts, and a new job later, I’m back! Yes, I’ve been a busy boy… And what better day to start getting back into my blogging habit than the strangest day of 2010 – 110110, which has a lovely binary ring to it. Strangest until October 10^th anyway. (Not that I had built up much of a habit, but I was working on it )

I spent a lot of 2009 wishing to work for people I liked, creating work that I was proud of. I was searching for an opportunity to design, be creative, and develop my skill. I was lucky enough to get this opportunity! Since late September ‘09 I have been working as the principle print designer at Mac games publisher, Feral Interactive. In this role I am now responsible for the design and artworking of all printed items and the odd digital/web work. This includes corporate and consumer marketing pieces, e-newsletters, sales brochures, DVD labels, sleeves and boxes, disk icons, folder backgrounds and the occasional in-game graphic or screen. If you’re an owner of the recently released BioShock port, or are a fan of MacFormat, then you may have seen some of my work already. I’m thoroughly looking forward to the release of the first title I’ve been involved heavily with, Rome: Total War – it will be a real thrill to see a product I’ve worked on ‘in the wild’, so to speak.

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Whilst the sun has decided to shine on the UK at last, all it seems to have done for me is make me a little less comfortable in my chair at work, instilled a yearning to go outside, and made me a little more sleepy.

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As the tast of browser testing is something that plagues all web designers, I thought I’d put together a short run-down of the currently available solutions. However, there is no definitive answer.

First off, Microsoft’s new SuperPreview sounded good, but this restricts you to IE 6 and the browser you currently have installed, such as IE 7 or IE 8, but not all three at the same time. May be a good solution if future updates included more browser options and live usage of the site in question rather than simple screenshots.

If you can suffice with screenshots and don’t need to test usability and interaction, then services such as browsershots.org, netrenderer and the recently released Alkaline application from Litmus are well worth looking at.

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Sorry to any readers for the lack of new content! I’ve had a lot on recently and have let my blogging, tweeting and general web presence slip a bit…

I’m a day away from a week long break, after which I hope to achieve a long list of things. These include:

• Writing some posts about useful things I’ve found and learnt.
• Re-building my freelance site using WordPress for the back-end.
• Getting up-to-date with admin.
• Getting approval on an improved website (previously mentioned).
• Contacting existing clients.
• Following up leads.
• Investigate post-grad certificate.

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Although WordPress has peeked my interest lately, I wanted to mention another Open Source CMS that has proved invaluable to my services. Where Wordpress, Joomla or Drupal present an overly feature rich environment, this offering from Scratch Media fills the gap perfectly.

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I was recently privileged enough to attend the edgeofmyseat.com HTML and CSS training courses, offering me a chance to pick the brains of some of the webs ‘go-to guys’, Drew McLellan and Rachel Andrew.

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My business cards for my freelance design venture have been delivered, so I thought I would post a photo and some info here for posterity.

They are printed on 380gsm fsc accredited board, matt laminated, and die cut with spot UV varnish to the front logo.

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I’ve recently completed a new website for a skilled carpenter and general handyman based in Norwich, Trevor Waters.

The brief was to create a showcase for the craftsman’s work and allow clients to get in touch to request quotes and / or more information.

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So, I have finally given in and signed up to another social networking tool. Twitter.

After leaving my Myspace account to rot, and barely touching Facebook since registering, I feel I’m not really the social network entrepreneur’s target customer…

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