Inspiring Places to Work

When you’re under the constant pressure to deliver, it’s crucially important to be happy and loose when you’re in your creative zone. »

A generic park bench; brought to you by monkeymyshkin under (cc)

For me, the beanie works it wonders, but for those who are more down to Earth, here’s a few good and some unknown places to feel comfortable when you’re working.

These only work, of course, if you have the gift of a laptop, but if that doesn’t meet your needs, a good old pencil and notepad combination makes your new workplace a great place to come up with new ideas and creative new fixes.

Local coffee shop

A timeless favourite for any worker or even student. Head down to your local Starbucks, or your mom and pop coffee shop, with your laptop and work away. The pros; the great atmosphere, excellent drinks and the smell of coffee. The only downsides I can find, this is from personal experience, is the strange looks you get from normal coffee shop visitors and the extortionate prices of WiFi in Starbucks. Getting power should be okay, just make sure its okay with the coffee shop owner.

Train station

Airports are a little dodgy for just coming in and sitting down, but especially in England, train stations are open access to the public, and there’s usually no-one stopping you from sitting down by the platform. Although power access is a little problem, and a lack of a table can be a downfall, watching trains and people go past can have a relaxing effect on the brain.

Unfortunately, you’re not allowed onto the platforms without a ticket in my town, but if you can find somewhere comfortable to sit, then there’s no harm getting to work there.

Parks

This is especially good with bigger parks, but find a park bench somewhere and get to work. You hit two birds with one stone, getting fresh air and getting work done at the same time.

This kind of place is more recommended for deeper thinking and hard-thought projects, the quiet can be a bonus. And you’re not tied down by the ’shhh..’ rules of the library.

City squares

Weather depending, a good place to do work can be in a city or town centre square. Take care in such a public place, so keep your possessions close. Extra points if you’re into the metropolitan-busy atmosphere.

On your porch / Garden

Gardens are usually neglected as part of your house. With myself, bike-less and car-less, one of my main issues is losing time actually getting things done, by getting to your other place. If you need a quick fix, get your charger through the door, and sit on your porch or in your garden and work away.

Places to avoid include airports, shopping centres and libraries.

The situation with security at the moment, and the amount of stress faced with air travelers at the moment, airports can be a depressing place to work. More so, if other peoples emotions rub off on you.

Shopping centres can be crowded and places to anchor down can be scarce. This might be just a local thing. Also, security guards have a “shop here or move” attitude towards things. This is unless you find yourself a nice coffee shop to work in.

As for libraries, the rule of “shut up or get out” can be a little off-putting to work with. Especially if you enjoy listening to music while working, or you appreciate a freer, the place can be a hell-hole. Kind of reminds you of the strict teacher at school, doesn’t it?

Linux for Designers: Part 1

I’ve been a Windows user since I was about 5, a Mac user for 5 days and a Linux user for 10 months. There’s being preachy about the whole Linux vs. Mac vs. Windows thing, or there’s actually discussing ways of getting things done. Case in point: graphic design. »

For the folks outside the loop, Linux, like Windows and Mac OS, is an “operating system”. This is the piece of software that is loaded with your computer, and runs the whole system; including your software and all the hardware bits too. What makes Linux different is, that it’s free, isn’t copyrighted, and comes in different flavours made by different people called “distributions.”

For graphic designers, Adobe Creative Suite software is only available for Mac and Windows users. Always has been this way. Lets face it, the majority of designers are Mac users, but there’s still a heck of a lot of Windows designers too.

For Linux, there doesn’t seem like there’s going to be a ported version anytime soon. So for now, we’ll have to make do with the alternatives out there. Plus, the market share of Linux is gradually increasing, so there may be some increase in graphic designers that adapt to the platform.

So here’s the scenario. You’ve never used Windows, you’ve ditched your Mac, and now you’re on a Linux OS. You’re a graphic designer but you still want to keep your job. What options do I have on a Linux box?

Here, I’ll show you and review the most effective alternatives for the Creative Suite set of applications, along with their pros and cons, of course. I didn’t realise how long this review was going to be, so I’ve decided to split it up a little to prevent choking.

How to build up a rough portfolio

One of my main problems is at the moment I’m in the twilight zone between starting up, getting proper design tuition and starting work. For me, the only education I get in the field is reading blogs and magazines for the know-how to get started. That’s until I start college. »

Workin’ on up: A Mac setup (cc) by bigbold

Showing off work at the moment is kinda hard. The big reason behind this, is that there’s no clients work to display. No business cards, no logos, no illustrations to tingle the senses of your audience. Getting around this is easy, and its all about coming up with reasons and situations to do something creative.

Here I’ve rounded up a good list of things that could help you build up some work to show off. Because fictional clients just make you look lame.

Special Occasions

We’re talking the Christmas season, birthdays, anniversaries, whatever you want. They make a good excuse to design your own cards for the occasion and once your done, you can post them online for the world to see. Also, its great experience for your practical skills, like printing and collating. Print will never die, so it’s worth the practise.

Essays

If you’re still in school, college or university, you’ll probably be writing a lot of essays. Instead of keeping to the black ink on white paper standard, try mixing it up a little. Introduce a few illustrations, that kind of thing.

A few pieces of coursework I’ve done have called for a front cover, so it’s great for doing illustrations and the like. The inside is good for trying out publication layout and design, it relates to business reports and magazines which graphic designers are constantly looked to, to create.

Events

Whether they’re local or in your school, posters and flyers can do a heck of a lot to publicise the event. Ask around and see if you can get hooked up. Meet with the person in charge and ask them the typical design brief questions. Go away for a bit, and return with a poster and a set of flyers that can be handed out. Everyone wins; you get work, and they get the word out.

For yourself

If you haven’t already, make yourself a business card. You may not even have any reason to, but there’s a couple of good reasons. First; its good practise, and secondly, you can use it to share your contact details. There’s a lot of room for creativity that you can show off here, and the physical nature of business cards also lets you improve your printing and practical skills.

Ooh, and if you’re wondering about my portfolio, it’s kicking about on my Flickr page. Feel free to use the comments to share your ideas and views on these tips.

If you’re visiting from StumbleUpon, don’t forget to hit thumbs up..

Laters iPod

Update: Doesn’t matter anymore. Just needed to hook it up to Windows and iTunes to update the firmware and give it a repair. Thank god for that.

I think yesterday morning my iPod nano thought it was time to call it quits, and personally, I don’t blame it.

Over the last few months, I’ve been wiping it clean and using it for transferring 8GB files between computers. Mostly because sending them over the network is too slow, but I guess I should of seen this coming. It’s the third generation one, so its at least a year old.

The symptoms of a memory failure: nothing appears on your computer when you plug in, 0KB memory when you go to check, oh, and your settings reset themselves after an automatic reset.

I’m just gonna leave it to stand for a bit, see if it starts working again, but I guess the read-write cycles on the memory in the iPod has had its time. I imagine my memory sticks going that way too..

On the front of fixing it, I found some promising instructions on an iPod forum. I’ll let you know the results later for anyone who ever finds themselves in this mess.

It’s a shame, it was the only Apple product I ever owned. See you on the other side kido, it’s been real.

The lesson here, an iPod nano is a media player, not a portable hard drive. Just don’t do it. Unless you have the hard drive version. Then you’re fine.

7 Ways to Avoid Web Design Disaster

Once your past the stage of using GIFs everywhere and using tables over CSS for design, you start to run into problems with your l33t coding skills. I’ve gathered up 7 tips, some of which that I’m totally guilty of, that are horrible mistakes if you ever fall into them.

1) Validation

On the whole, validation covers all your bases. You end up with a website that is close to cross-browser compatible, and you make sure that your website is accessible to folks with disability-helping software, the stuff like screen readers.

Need to know if your site validates? Use the W3C validator .. its official, pain free and gives good results. Need to know how to make your site validate, stick to these basic rules:

• Keep <style> tags in the header.
• If you’re using XHTML, ensure that hr, br, and img tags self-closing. So its <hr /> <br /> and <img /> instead of <hr> <br> and <img>.
• Always give your images an alt=”" tag. Keep it blank if it doesn’t really need one.
• Make your code clean; always close tags in the right place.
• No capital tags, like <HEAD>, <BODY> and <DIV>.

2) Design Trends

Don’t even go there. Sure everyone’s doing it, but is it good for your site? A couple of years ago, the Web 2.0 style trend was all the rage, today we damn the sight of a reflective glow (unless we’re talking Apple),  it’s all about grunge. Only use a trend feature if it actually does help the website design, not just to keep your site up with the crowd.

Hit this article on Abduzeedo for the 2009 design trends.

3) Hit Counters, Guestbooks, The Weather

You know, the kind of tackiness needs to be left in the 90s. You remember when you first started using the Internet, and everything you ever clicked on was covered with hit counters, guestbooks and pointless streams of information.

Hit counters are like showing your bank balance on the street to look cool. That kinda stat is irrelevant and is only useful when you actually own the website. It just clutters and has no real use to the user, no point.

Guestbooks: sure, they add a human touch to your website, but they don’t attach to anything. On the other hand, allowing comments on articles and posts let visitors give relevant opinion on something that actually exists, instead of “OH HAI LUV. NICE SYT. xx”. And by the way, no-one goes to your website to read the news. That’s why we have CNN and the BBC. Stick to reporting news that is relevant to what you do.

4) Golden Ratio / Rule of Thirds

These little rules of design help you size up the layout of your site according to age-old theories of natural beauty. Yes, I know it sounds like something a hippie would say, but they seem to give your site a beautiful flow that keeps the visitors coming.

The Golden Ratio theory allows you to have the main content and the sidebar in a site layout be proportional to each other in a way that is apparently visually attractive. Of course, unless your Einstein or a robot, you probably can’t work with this ratio without a calculator, so tools such as the Golden Ratio calculator can give you a hand there.

If you got a little less time on your hands, the rule of thirds is a quick-easy way to start off your layout when planning. Just take your entire page, and split it three times across and three times down, equally. Then you can use this grid to place your components.

5) “Made by” links

They just add clutter to your footer and make for a tacky impression. Seriously though, you don’t get paid to stick a link to your company on their website. Stay away from the “Made by whoever” links. That’s what portfolio pagest are for aren’t they?

6) Excessive JavaScript

Sure with Scriptaculous, jQuery, MooTools etc you can have all the animated bells and whistles you want without the burden of Flash, but seriously, do you really need them? Having fading in images everywhere is cool, but think about the people on slow connections to download all that extra code, and the folks who have slower computers that need to render the fading.

Only animate if it has any use. For example, lets have a look at a confirmation message. It’s nice to know that somethings done, but you want to get on as soon as you know. Sure, you can make it fade out. That’s animation that makes sense.

Right-click blockers are useless by the way.

7) Wonky Gradients

Gradients look great when on small components, but it’s hard to pull of when used as a background. Make sure that you use smooth, soft and gradual gradients, instead of a drop from one colour to another. Make the colour change subtle too to take strain off the eyes.

Solid colour backgrounds (even white) are easier to pull off, so unless you know what you’re doing, stick to them. Patterns are really classy, and photography is sweet when done correctly. Use gradients to compliment photography too.

Quick Fix: Mix up your border widths

Here’s a little tip that I found quite useful to quickly get a bit of flavour (or flavor – whatever floats your boat) to an illustration. Typically, most software will keep to a single width setting when your working with the pen tool. When this happens, it can make the illustration look a bit clunky and unrefined, which kinda messes up what could be an awesome illustration.

Here’s two vectors that I want to show you the difference with. The vector on the bottom has some sort of fetish with the default line width, the other one has a variable line width on different objects.

Hopefully this creates an effect that makes different features stand out to make a better flow in the artwork. For example, the corners of the building are faintly marked out to show that there is some depth there, but the outline of the entire building uses a thick mark to make it stand out from the background.

Give it a go, and post links to the results in the comments!

Graphic Design on a Netbook

Today I gave using a netbook for designing and drawing a shot. I’ve never really had a laptop or anything to do stuff on the road like this, so it was something kinda new to me.

For the folks out of the circle, netbooks are really just shrink-rayed laptops. The one I got my grubby mits on is the Aspire One from that company called Acer. Not a bad device considering its price, just a bit of a problem getting it configured with Ubuntu, but apart from that, it’s all sweet.

In all honesty, I feel pretty comfortable with the whole thing. I’ve got a Bluetooth mouse attached so it doesn’t give the strain of having to fiddle with the touchpad. There’s not much typing to be done, but writing this post wasn’t too much of a pain. The speakers were pretty fine to listen to as you work along. As for the screen, its pretty decent to work with. The colours vibrant, but the only issue here is the screen size. But what do you expect, it’s only a baby!

I’m working on this illustration of Bowes Museum which is near where us lot are, for my photography scrapbook, so I’ll upload that for folks to rip apart as soon as I’ve got it done.

Peace out!

Freelancers: The Most Important Tip EVER

The biggest tip I could ever give an aspiring freelancer is to WORK WITH WHOEVER IS AT THE TOP. I’m sorry for the caps, but that’s seriously how I want the point to come across to the folks in Internet land.

More after the picture..

Picture by artnoose

I’m the guy who’s in that sticky position at the moment. Barely any cash, and wanting to start off. I’ve done the odd job over the last year. It had to be the second odd job I’ve done for people I know or people who have gotten into contact with me through people I know.

My case in point was a website I did for a local company. Not going to name names out of politeness, but we got into contact through various associations with certain people I know. Haha. I’m not telling.

The Story

I was working with a lady who was in cahoots with the main guy of the company. I met her for the first and only time in their place of work; you can’t really call it an office. We spoke about the website and what needed to be done. After that point, throwing ideas and direction to each other was all done under emails.

The next few weeks was the usual spiel. I was a little gobbled by coding side so I was working and learning at the same time. I managed to get the website up in time. I had the problem of  “feature creep”, where your client continually requests more features when you’ve seemingly finished doing your work. But that’s for another day to discuss.

Communications broke down between us two. In all honesty, I was expecting a bit of pay when the website was done. Weeks starting to draw past with the website being finished and the feature creep being accounted for. I sent a couple of emails periodically to try and build some thrust behind the client, but it ultimately just started to fizzle down.

What Went Wrong

So here’s the deal: apparently the lady I was working with for the website had “broken up” with the owner of the company I was doing the work for. Personally, I took a while to decide whether it was a professional or romantic relationship, but I settled on the googly-eyed one.

The most likely reason is that the lady (who I guess was younger than the owner) was more computer literate, so was the person who I was in cahoots with to make the website was herself. I don’t really see myself working with the manager, he seemed like the kinda bloke who was more interested in the business itself instead of doing the little bits on the side.

I let it stay idle for a couple more weeks, hoping that there would be some progress made. None. In the end, I ended up pulling the website from the hosting they hooked me up with. I was a little hesitant, but who really wants their hard work unrecognised and taken for nothing.

Naturally, I was a little disappointed, but at the same time, the blame can be displayed between myself and the client. On my part, I didn’t really make sure that the relationship between the company and me was totally solid and professional. You know, the kinda thing where you’re focused on getting the job done. On their part, it was their fault of letting personal relationships get in the way of actually getting this job done.

Getting out of the pickle

So how would you avoid this? Here’s some of my ideas:

• Try your best to communicate with the person at the top. Then if any communication breaks down, its the bosses fault. He or she is going to be the person who is in charge of everything their company does, so that’s what keeps them honest. If you’re lucky enough to score a bigger company, it might be a little harder, so you might need to try and get as high as possible.
• Be more wary of small or family run companies. They’re more based on relationships that can break down, which can be a problem when you’re working for them. Especially for the kinda boyfriend-girlfriend relationship, can sometimes end in tears ya’know.
• Don’t be afraid to lay down the law. Even though you’re just starting out, if you do a good job, you have the right to be given something in return for your work. Don’t be afraid to develop a contract for your work that you both sign. Getting legal advice is good here too, but its understandable if your just starting out.

So at the end of all this, it’s best to start being professional from day one, instead of waiting til your begininning to become established. I learnt it the hard way.

I got some French coursework to catch-up on, because sadly, the holidays don’t last forever.

OH HAI 2009!

Hey there!

I just would like to wish everyone that has come by a great 2009! I’ve made it my New Years’ resolution to try to blog a bit more regularly, a few things going on with my life have been holding me back from finding the time to write the usual stuff.

Hope you like the new logo. It’s just this weird sketched cartoonish beanie-wearing splitting image of me to bring arousal to the ladies. I’ll put it into something useful one day.

For this year, stick around for good ideas, tips and commentary on the general world, the tech world and graphic design. And of course, the stupid random blog posts with words like bazillion, steroid and porn.

On a personal note, I’m looking forward to starting college and seeing how things progress in science and tech in 2009. I’ve had enough black holes for one year.

I hope to see you around this year and hopefully for many years to come! Feel free to email me at ian_hutchinson@msn.com (you can also add me to Windows Live Messenger, just let me know who you are).

Have an awesome 2009 everyone!

(I got a corker of a post about a time I got swindled out of some money doing a website coming to you tommorow. Stay tuned.)

Look what they did…

I’m gonna cut it with the political crap for a while, but the numbers which have cropped up from last nights presidential election in the United States are worthy of wetting yourself over. I guess they just speak for themselves.

I did the bad thing of staying up to 3am, on the night before a test to watch the results come in on the BBC. Props to them for the excellent coverage and the audacity of the presenters for the morning.

There’s not much worth saying about the subject, but I’m looking forward to saying President Obama for the next 8 years.

Peace out.