Get my Boss to North Cape

Visit Norway

Firefly

Harry Ford

Peter Nappi

I recently showed off some shots of an email template design I done that was never used and after a few people suggested it, I decided to give it a little clean up and post as a free download for everyone.

The download is in a Photoshop PSD format, it was created in CS3, so it shoudl work in all the newer versions of Photoshop too.

You are free to edit or use this design in any way, basically feel free to do whatever you wish with it, all I ask is that you don’t pass this off as your own and give it away as a freebie on your blog/website.

download the email template

Hope you have fun with this and let me know if you use it, it would be good to see it in action.

A few days ago I found that an article I contributed to on Android Design for Computer Arts, had gone live on their website. You can find the article here, with my parts being around half way down the article.

I would like to give a big shout out to Seth Warburton (@nternetinspired) who orginally put Computer Arts my way as he had seen some of my design work for Android.

How it Happened

There really isn’t much to it really, I was contacted via email and asked if I will willing to give up some of my time to answer some questions in relation to an new article they were putting together for Android Development and Design.

Of course I jumped at this chance, I have never been remotely close to having anything in a magazine, so this was a great opportunity for me.

The unfortunate thing about all this is that I gave up a few hours on my holiday in Florida to answer all these questions, upsetting my fiancee a little, but she understood the great opportunity it was for me to get my name out there.

So I would just like to thank Kerry and Computer Arts for featuring me in their article and hopefully I can get involved in some more stuff.

I was recently asked by a couple of people who are just starting out on how to get a job and how to get in work, as times are tough at this moment in time and a lot of companies just don’t want to take a chance on new talent due to the need for them to hit the ground running in the job.

Below I’m just going to go through a list of things I think any new designer should do to get them ahead of the game.

Portfolio

This is a must nowadays, it’s a great place to point possible employers to and it showcases your work to the best of your abilities as you have no client restraints on your design.

On your portfolio I can’t stress enough though that you don’t just show your work, pick your best work and showcase it. There is no point in showing 15 portfolio items if 11-12 of them don’t look that great in the end, pick your best work and show it off. Having a portfolio with 3-4-5 great designs will go a lot further than a portfolio with 15 items and only 3-4-5 good items within it.

HTML/CSS

This has always been a topic of discussion within the design industry as to whether web designers should know front-end code, but for me it’s a must. These 2 languages for the most part aren’t difficult to learn and there are plenty of tutorials out there for you to learn from.

My reasons for saying you should know this stuff is that it will help you improve your understanding of design, some stuff simply can’t be coded into a website as well as giving you an understanding of the layout of a website.
An extra thing for this is that will help you stand out from other designers and in today’s market a lot of small design firms, might not have the scope to hire 2 people when they can hire 1 to do the job, you could be that one.

Learn a CMS System

This isn’t necessarily a must for you, but again it will help you in the job market.

I didn’t know any CMS stuff when I started my first job back at BT, but within a couple of weeks I was churning out fully working websites on the Joomla CMS, that allowed all the clients to maintain and update their own content.
There are a few CMS systems out there to use, too many for you to consider trying to learn them all, but they do all work in a similar way, so if you pick one up you can transfer than knowledge and pick up another fairly quickly.

I now have experience of 4 content management systems, one I won’t even mention as it was a horrendous piece of kit, but the others are WordPress, Joomla and Umbraco. For those starting out I would recommend WordPress simply because the knowledge base out there is far superior to any other CMS and you should be able to fix any issue you have with just a quick Google. But other suggestions would be Joomla and Drupal.

One thing you will notice is that there will be people who knock each and every CMS but don’t let that phase you, use the system that suits your needs and you find the best to use, everyone has their own preference.

Getting Work

This ties in a little with your portfolio, getting work to display on the portfolio can be something that is hard to come by, having started out with freelance work recently I can testify to that fact.

My suggestion is get in touch with some local companies, charities etc, give them discounted rates or in some cases do the websites for free, just to boost your portfolio. My one word of caution on this is that if you’re doing a website for free, don’t let them have the world, give them the basics, you don’t want to take on a free project and then spend a huge amount of your free time doing work for nothing, do simple 4-5 page brochure websites, that will hone your skills and benefit both parties.

Also, don’t be put off by rejection, the worst people can say is no to you, but always stick to your guns on pricing, when I first started out I priced a small 4 pages website to my dentist for £150 and he tried to get me down in price, looking at it now, he was getting a hell of a deal at £150 without me reducing it more.

Twitter

Get yourself on Twitter, I have found this to be invaluable in recent times, you will find the design community are some of the most helpful people around.

It’s also great for networking, I can count maybe 30-50 designers who are great to talk to online, be it random chat or design work and on top of that I have been offered work from several of them over time too.

Summary

I hope I haven’t rabbled on too much, but I wanted to put across some advice to new people joining the industry that I wish I had when I started out. I learned more in 3 months at my first job than I did in 3 years in higher education and I do worry that the skills they are teaching at University and Colleges are not really what’s needed for those starting out.

This got me thinking about how we consume so much information from all sorts of media and how we all take it on board.

We as designers should be taking inspiration from everywhere and not just the flowing trends we see on the likes of Dribbble and Forrst or what the top designers say we should be doing.

I have always been a huge admirer of video, so much so that when I was younger I actually wanted to be a film director, time, money etc meant that one never panned out though.

But I love taking inspiration from that media outlet, I think TV Shows like Mad Men show you the amount of thought that goes into the design aspect of these shows and you can see on the likes of Dribbble how Mad Men has inspired designs.

I’m a huge Linkin Park fan and I loved the video for Waiting for the End and wanted to try and incorporate some of the things I seen in the video into a web design, I just think it would be awesome fun to do.

What’s your inspirations?  Where do you get them from?

Recently there has been a lot of hoopla about how Dribbble works, with a fair few people sharing their views on the subject. Blog posts from the likes of John O’Nolan, Kyee & Rachel Shillcock have really stimluated conversation on how the site works and although I wanted to try and keep my views to myself I have decided, what the hell, why not share mine too.

The Pro’s

Firstly I want to get across I love Dribbble, the inspiration that can be gained from the site alone is worth every penny I paid for  a Pro Account on the site, that along with the stats, I’m a sucker for stats.

Along with great inspiration, Dribbble seems to be a great pace for people to get found by employers and clients for design work, with the likes of Callum Chapman, James McDonald and Matt Bailey just some of the people I know to be contacted due to their work on the website. As of yet, I’m yet to have such luck, but it inspires me to continue to work hard and produce the best I can.

The Con’s

There isn’t a huge community feel to Dribbble, very few people leave comments on your work, even when feedback is asked. Now I know not everyone will leave a comment, but I think people should get involved, if you like something tell the person what you like or if you dislike it, again, say why, but be constructive.

This is one thing that I feel Forrst has over Dribbble, people on Forrst just seem more open to giving their views on your work, although the standard of design work on Dribbble is far higher than that of Forrst.

I think their could be a few factors for this, firstly with Dribbble bringing out the Prospect and Spectator accounts for people, these people feel that if they critisise work, it limits their chances of snagging an invite later down the line from these people. Personally for me, I’m more than likely to give any invites I do get to someone I interact with, than someone I have never spoke to. Maybe I’m the only one that thinks like that, but I don’t think I am.

My 2nd gripe is the clique that seems to have started on Dribbble, not through the people who would be viewed to be within this clique, but by the people who follow them and the way that Dribbble seems to have managed the way it hands out invites.

People who produce great work, rightly have a high amount of followers, just check out Soft Facade, their work is out of this world.

My point is more that as people want invites they like anything these people produce. Recently I seen one of the Dribbble ‘Superstars’ post up nothing more than a button, a flat button on a white background, yet this person received something in the region of 50 likes on their work.

I recognise nice work and it was clean, but I have seen shots receive far less likes and blow this shot out of the water. But it’s the people desperate for a invite that like this, in the hope they will be invited by them.

This is fundamentaly what is wrong with the invite system currently in place, it seems that only the people with the large amount of followers and large likes on their shots, that actually get the invites. This in turn creates the a cycle again of average work getting high recognition, not for the work, but for the hope of invites.

I would really love to see how the system that hands out invites works. As it only seems to be the big people on Dribbble who get the invites month after month.

In Summation

This may look like a rant about not getting invites and not receiving high amount of likes on my work, but it’s not, I love Dribbble, I love showcasing my work on it and I love getting inspiration from some of the fantastic designers out there.

But I think the creators really need to address the issues that the site has as they could start to drive users away from the site.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

When working on a client website recently I had the need to use the display:inline-block CSS code on a menu to get the items to display in a certain way.

I do my coding in Firefox and everything seemed well on my design, everything looked the way it should and I was happy. Obviously at this stage you go to browser testing and as usual (well for me anyway) I left IE to the end, low and behold, it didn’t work.

My initial thoughts were f*$% you IE, to hell with you, but on closer inspection it didn’t work on IE9, which of course causes an issue for clients.

After a while of playing around with all sorts of code to get it working, I eventually stumbled across a ‘fix’ for it. By simply adding the CCS code of float:left to the list item all in the world was returned to normal working condition.

On closer inspection I actually came to notice another quirk with inline-block, for some reason on certain browsers the padding/margin seemed to be out, again I couldn’t find a fix for this, so much so that it came to point I gave up.

But once I used the above code to fix my menu in IE, it also corrected the issue with the padding/margin in the other browsers.

It seems like it’s just one of those little quirks that you get with inline-block, has anyone else came across this? Or any other little quirk for that matter.

Moovents

This site looks great, but it’s actually visiting this site that inspires you, they have used their name to great effect with some great Javascript effects when you navigate your mouse around the screen.

1000 WordPress Themes

A website by Envato were they got together with 2 of the biggest icon designing companies around and produced a free icon give-away. The great design work is actually for me below the ‘fold’ were the icons take centre stage.

Matchball – The Outdoor Guru

Just looking at the snap shot below is blatantly obvious why I chose this site, but along with the great illustration the Javascript slider effects make this website so unique.

Firstbase

I actually picked this website due to the quirky nature that was adopted in the design, using the instruction manuals for the likes of IKEA goods as the inspiration.

After some experimentation I discovered that there was a way to fix this in a very simple way. To follow I will show you that way, as well as a new method that I have been using lately. The newer method is probably best practice now though I suppose, as many things in this field, best practice that could be argued. Why not make the choice yourself?

Initially, you have a containing div, with 3 divs inside all floated either left or right. Below is the HTML and CSS code for this as it is, without any clearing methods applied.

HTML

CSS

Method 1

This first method will probably be common knowledge to those who hand-code their websites on a regular basis. Basically what you do is add a 4th div within your container, this will be empty and have no content, but with one line of CSS it cures any issues you have.

HTML

CSS

Method 2

This is a new method I’ve learned recently. It’s even more simple than the previous method. With just one line of CSS code added to your container div you can solve the issue. This method can also be a lot more responsive if you have a website where the layout is changing on a regular basis.

HTML

CSS

Let me know your thoughts on both methods. I for one am always interested in finding out new ways to do things, so if anything can be improved on, don’t be shy and let me know.

Simple Desktops

This website actually caught my attention more for it’s content than it’s design. With a whole array of minimalistic wallpaper designs to choose from on this site, they really drive the site to the point where the design is secondary and that’s where the minimal design of the site works so well.

Stampaxx

Again it was more the content that caught my attention on this design, with a great set of social media icons for everyone to download. The design is still a simple and elegant design though and really works well.