One such company, whose name I will not mention, starts off by introducing their business and what they do by going into technical terms like “ASP.NET, AJAX, XML, XSLT, CSS”. They later go on to state that :

These technologies are combined to create vibrant site designs that are both user friendly and appealing to the eye but also highly functional for site users.

This is, in every respect, wrong. I have seen their work, and the sites they build do not fall into a “user-friendly” category nor are they “appealing to the eye”. While I don’t doubt the technical ability of this business, the fact that they try to trick their visitors into hiring them, with false claims of effectiveness, sickens me.

They divide their web design services into easily understandable packages. One for a basic website, another for an e-commerce type site, and finally one other for a real estate agent. To a prospective client, this sounds great, and I get that. But to me, what it sounds like is a 5 minute job for them, and a four figure sum for their client.

And it’s not just them. Web design, or to put it more correctly, good web design in Ireland for the most part,is missing. Web design is seen as an afterthought, something you look to get on the cheap, with no consideration for user behaviour, requirements, goals. And so you see a great deal of graphic design or print businesses tack on the fact that they do web design, made exclusively in Dreamweaver’s infamous “Design View” with the in-built “spry”‘s slowing your website down to a halt.

I’m not concluding that I would do much better than any of these businesses, but web design deserves to be thought about a bit more. Hiring a freelancer may take longer, but the benefits are great in the long run.  If the designer isn’t a total ass, he will be fair about pricing. You get a better site, more personalised, and more promising for your users. You’re in control of you’re own site, you can edit when and what content you want.

Ultimately, you can go down two paths when choosing someone to build your website. Someone cheap and fast, who will hand you the keys and never look back. Or someone who takes their time, charges that bit more, but presents you with a site that you absolutely adore. You cant have both, but you know which one is best.

And so far I have been doing quite well. I noticed this site was in need of  a refresh, so I set about realigning it. Hopefully by making this iteration brighter, more readable (line-height & a nice font really is the key), and outlining exactly what I do, I think it can improve my visitors/clients ratio, but I guess only time can tell in that regard. I dont know if it was a mistake on my part, but the last design got me very few job opportunities. Perhaps that was for the best as I have literally been neck deep in college work until now.

Overall, third year has been quite different than the others during my time at TI. I think because of the nature of some of the modules, Exhibition & Team Project, we were definitely given more freedom, and to be honest, being left to our own devices was pretty enjoyable. I’m not saying it wasn’t hard work (far from it), but it was definitely a enlightening experience doing those 2 modules.

The Team Project we chose to do was a location-based social media aggregator, which we aptly called Social Locality. This application, which works on both desktop browsers and mobile devices, was created in the space of 12 weeks and with about a zillion lines of code. It lists the latest news, weather , tweets, flickr images on a specific county in Ireland. The project results aren’t in just yet, but I think we did reasonably well, and we got a good reaction from the people we’ve showed this to so far! Some of the other projects included a children’s website to help teach kids math, and a desktop application to help sort your movie collection. Both are very interesting ideas, and I hope they do well too.

The exhibition was something I had talked about before, but when I posted about it, it was pre-event. The 2011 Pen & Pixel Exhibition went remarkably well for us. We had extremely talented students showcasing their work on the walls of the college, and loads of visitors admiring the work. It was a bit surreal seeing this event actually happening, and it was down to our hard work that it went as successful as it had done. What I was most impressed by though, was the amount of work done behind the scenes. I cant count how many times students stayed at that college until closing time just to make sure the exhibition went well.

It’s almost a shame that its over, because it really was perhaps the highlight of college so far. All I can say further is good luck to the ingoing 3rd years organizing next years event. Its going to be a tough act to follow.

The exhibition displays a range of media, such as photography, audio, video, animation, graphic design and text pieces. This year there have been some truly amazing submissions and I can’t wait to see them all displayed on the walls of our college on Thursday the 14th of April. If you’re nearby, we’d love if you could join us!

PRESS RELEASE

Tipperary Institute is holding its annual Digital Media Exhibition on its Clonmel campus. Renamed Pen & Pixel, the exhibition takes place on the 14th of April at 6.30pm and will run until May.

Each year the college hosts an exhibition showcasing the work of students on the Creative Multimedia course. The exhibition is organised by third year students.

This year the photography competition will be judged by Clonmel based photographer Wojciech Ryzinski. The exhibition will also showcase student work in mediums such as video, audio, animation and flash applications.

For more information you can check out the website –www.penandpixel.ie, or follow us on Twitter – @penandpixel2011. Looking forward to seeing you there!

There was a lot of buzz and excitement after Apple unveiled their latest gadgets at the Special Event on September 1st, which unveiled a totally new line of iPods (excluding the iPod Classic), information about iOS, and Ping, Apple’s take on how music social network should act.

Ping is Apple’s first try of making a social network. To start using Ping, you must open and use it in Apple’s new (but not improved) iTunes 10. It emulates the Twitter follow/follower model with a few differences, namely you can decide if people can follow you or not. Your Ping profile is linked to your iTunes account, and you login using those credentials. This was obviously going to happen, as it gave the immediate access to over 160 million iTunes Store customers. Using Ping you can follow musicians, follow your friends, and you can like albums and songs. This all seems very good in theory, that is until you start using the platform.

When I first fired up iTunes 10, literally minutes after it finally was available to download, I logged into Ping straight away to test it. I then noticed a Facebook button, which was to add Friends that were on both platforms, so you can easily have all your Facebook friends, as friends on Ping. However the Facebook integration didnt work, and by the next morning it was gone. We have all become accustomed to  bad launches in the past month, notably Digg, but at least Digg is working on finding solutions. To add friends now on Ping, you must know their name, or their email address, making it incredibly difficult to find people. But again, that’s not half as bad as actually using it.

Another major gripe I have when using Ping is the fact that its requires using iTunes. While iTunes isnt as much of a resource hog as it once was, its still an extra application that needs to be run, and its still an extremely frustrating application to use. Sure, some might say that using a Twitter client is no different, but at least they work with the browser (at least Echofon does). As you know in iTunes there is no address bar and the back and forward buttons are cleverly hidden. You can copy links in iTunes, but its no match for a functional social network that work in the browser of your choice. The thing is though, Ping (and the iTunes store) is all browser based anyway, so it would not be too diffcult to enable browser-based access. This is another example of Apple’s control over us all. Whats next? The Apple store can only be accessed on iPads with 64gb storage and 3g??

Apple’s main reason for launcing Ping was obviously to drive sales in their own music store. Apple being Apple, they made a very conscious decision to force people to go back and forth through the iTunes Store and Ping. To like an album, you must be on the iTunes Store page of that album as is the case with songs. In a perfect world, that would not be the case, but Apple like money, and this is a fast way of making it.

Itunes 9 brought links to sharing on Twitter and Facebook, with hopes of integration with these social network to be better in iTunes 10. You can count on Apple to rule out any improvements in that area though, so sharing in iTunes is still as lame as ever.

In conclusion, Ping is a music social network for you and your friends – without the friends, a music social network to rate, like and share music – without the sharing, and a browser-based music social network, without the network..  or the browser. Something’s not right there, and I’m not the only one who thinks so …

Yep, finally got my new design online and the comments are functional! I still have one or two links to add on the homepage, but it is 99.9999% complete.

The overall design is far from my my comfort zone. Usually I go for pixel perfect, very clean web design. Although I have experimented with grungy designs before this is the only time I was really happy with the result.

Words cannot describe how much Dribbble has influenced me in creating this. Having a constant stream of tremendously talented designers displaying what they are working on at the moment really got me thinking of the subtle details I could add to make this site look more presentable. On the flip side, I have edited some things over 50 times just to get things right.

Bold statements

What I’ve done on the homepage even surprised myself. I have abandoned the portfolio images altogether, and I’ve kept writing to a minimum. This is all new to me, and I dont know if it will work well , but I may as well try it before I scrap it.

League Gothic

Yes, this font is used in abundance throughout this theme. Its probably one of my favorite free fonts to use in my projects and I’m using font-face to embed it on my site. I could have used a javascript method like Cufón or Typekit, but I’ve found that  fonts behave better when being used normally. Oh and the added bonus of this being free was nice too.

Portfolio

My portfolio page has gotten a drastic overhaul with larger images. This has been missing from my designs for much too long, so I’m pleased with the outcome. I have quite a few projects still to add to that section so thats not quite there either.

Articles

Starting this project, I had considered going entirely sidebar-less in order to get the user to focus on the content in the articles directly. But then realising that the rate of which I post is about once a month, I thought that the content of this “blog” wasn’t all that important.

Overall I’m happy with this new layout. And although I’m bound to have the exactly opposite opinion in a few months, I thinks its a fairly accurate representation of where I’m at as a web designer.

Sadly this is going to change mid-September, due to another refresh. I’m not happy with the comic feel to the website. It looks dated already, I ended up using lots of images. It doesnt portray exactly what I hope to achieve from it.

I’ve been extremely busy with college work and work work but I hope to get some time to do some stuff when I get my break at the end of August.

You can follow what I’m doing on Dribbble (whenever I’m up to posting)

Things I hope to rectify with the new design

• Comments (I totally forgot to add this)
• Smarter, sharper look (I’m about 60% pleased with what I have so far)
• Focus on my services and promote myself better
• My Tumblr (Its already in the menu but I hope to integrate it better with the site in the future)
• An About Page (about time)

I was also given the opportunity to be in the new Web Designer Magazine, but I missed the deadline for submission. So I think I’ll hold off until the new site is up and functional before I submit it again.

Anyways, these are my links for April 12th through April 14th:

• “Foursquare Cops” Web Show Catches Checkin Cheaters in the Act [VIDEO] – “Foursquare Cops” Web Show Catches Checkin Cheaters in the Act http://bit.ly/cB54oh – hilarious
• 40+ Very Handy iPhone Apps for Mobile Designers | tripwire magazine – 40+ Very Handy iPhone Apps for Mobile Designers http://bit.ly/az2rhB
• First legit check-in to the North Pole, by 15-year-old Parker… on Twitpic – RT @foursquare: First @foursquare badge awarded at the North Pole, to 15-year-old Parker Liautaud! http://4sq.com/b93Ktd http://twitpic. …
• 8 useful code snippets to get started with WordPress 3.0 – 8 useful code snippets to get started with WordPress 3.0 – http://mrlz.biz/t

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Simplicity is Key

The designs you make between becoming relatively familiar with Photoshop and learning to create a worthwhile design, are often the worst. Because as you start learning different techniques in Photoshop, you naturally want to exhibit them through your work. But more often than not it just adds to the clutter of web designs people start out with. Watching Jon Ive talk about Apple products helped me understand the importance of simplicity and how to avoid it. And I have definitely made this mistake on more than one occasion.

For example, gradients are nice when used properly, but subtlety is key.  Using gradients that have similar colors, and that are perhaps only a few shades apart adds depth, without it looking overworked and cheap.

Familiarity is also important. When making a search form, people usually use a magnifying glass icon, because that image association is embedded our brains. It’s the same with colour. Green is for positive actions, red for warnings or excitement. These little things make seem unimportant but they really can make the difference between an alright site and a great site.

Work on your brand first

Its important to make a strong first impression when trying to find potential clients. That’s why your personal place on the web should encompass all your skills, all your ideas of what web design should be, and perhaps where you think it’s going. Don’t follow trends, set them.

If you are not able to make yourself look hire-able, how can you expect to create a site for clients who want to be. Some essential things to include on a personal site might be :

• Portfolio – Make sure this is updated as often as possible
• Services – Outline your services clearly and make sure you can do them all
• Testimonials – Ask clients for their opinion – it gives your site a bit of personality
• Contact Info – Pretty self-explanatory

Some of these sound pretty obvious, but it is surprising how many people forget the important things, especially when they are focused on making something look good, but without thinking about the end user, your missing the point of having a site in the first place.

Stay Frequent & Social

Things like Twitter and Facebook are great because they’ve brought blogging to the average Joe. They’re simple, fun and you can gain alot from it with only a few minutes of use a day. I dont have time to blog daily (or weekly for that matter), so when I have an idea, thought, or something to share, I tweet, or Share on Facebook. And the more I am active on these, more people come to my site. My SEO is fine, but I get a lot of referrals directly from Twitter and Facebook primarily because of my frequent postings on these services

Designing frequently is also important. Web Design isn’t a static career. Trends come and go, practices and frameworks are introduced weekly. Keeping up to date can set you apart from everyone else. Break the mould, and try to create a design as different as you can from the last. If you don’t have any clients right now, create something anyway, and hone your skills.

It’s not about what you want or even what the client wants

Its about what their end-user needs. A lot of clients seem to think that a 2 hour tutorial on Powerpoint gives them a creative advantage over you, but the fact is, they hired you to solve something for their users, not them. Yes, clients know more about their business, but they hired you for your expertise and you have to find a way to let them remember that. It’s alright to say no to clients, as long as you have reason to. Whether its regarding payment or a design suggestion, if they are wrong, and you know it, be straight and tell them (nicely though).They’ll thank you for your honesty.

Just remember that with every design you make,  its an opportunity to better yourself. Try to create something different. Every time that you open Photoshop is a chance to improve, to do something entirely different, to experiment, because you’ll never learn otherwise. Stop when you have to, or if you think your ruining something, and do something else. Have fun with web design, it’s not meant to be serious but to grab attention and excite people.

This is my ultimate career, and I can believe I’m doing it right now. Of course I have off days, and get sick of it from time-to-time, but I play around with colours and images all day – whats not to love?

This is what else I’ve been reading this week.

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Video

My favourite Super Bowl advert this year