nypo:creative:news

Professional Team Management Tips For Creative Folks - as featured on Smashing Magazine

2010-06-01T19:06:00.010+00:00

It has been some time now since I was commissioned to write an article on Team Management by Smashing Magazine and I thought I would post it up here also for anyone who may stumble upon it. Feel free to get in touch with any comments, feedback or advice on this subject and I will be looking to write a follow up to this on SM over the next few months inluding research on several project management

On the Job hunt

2010-05-26T15:23:00.015+00:00

As many people within Manchester have already heard Idaho Technology Ltd will cease to trade by the end of this week. It has been 6 years in total I have worked for the company and have worked through the ranks from a Graphic & Interactive Designer to project coordinator to General Manager over this time.Everyone will be sadly missed and I am hoping to find somewhere equally as rewarding to

A sneak peak of a design makes it onto the BBC

2010-01-21T10:47:00.002+00:00

I just did a quick freebie for a friend. Not a whole site just a header image. Apart from the fact it took 5 minutes it was simply to jazz up the site in case they wanted to show it on the telly.Today BBC tomorrow the world :)http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8470596.stmThe site is a goal tracking site called GoalHappy and is run by an ex colleague Paul Bibby. Visit http://www.goalhappy.com for

I have successfully completed the Accidental Managers course

2009-10-26T13:36:00.010+00:00

The course is now over. Having finished the 6 month course on Accidental Managers I now feel I am more of a Manager than an accidental one. The final day and presentations went well and it was interesting to see what everyone else had taken from the course as well as report back about ways in which I have used it to improve the team.As with many people in creative industries designers/developers

Wigan AWP is Live!

2009-10-01T14:42:00.002+00:00

Another one of our very successful 14-19 (AWP) Area Wide Prospectus sites has gone live. For more information on the product in general see the previous post about the Tameside AWP launch. This one is for Wigan and you will notice that the new crisp, clean style of the Tameside one resonates through this one with the addition of some nice banner graphics using the new Wigan Life logo. The clean,

Smashing Magazine article is now live!

2009-09-04T08:38:00.003+00:00

I am proud to announce that my first article for Smashing Magazine has now been published and can be found here:http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/09/03/professional-team-management-tips-for-creative-folks/Seems to have gone down well so far which is promising and I am already looking into what to write about next. Would appreciate it if people can comment - good or bad - below the article and

Soon to appear on Smashing Magazine

2009-08-17T08:39:00.004+00:00

I am proud to announce that Smashing Magazine will soon be publishing my first article. I contacted them regarding becoming an author for their design/development blog that currently has 142,000 thousand RSS followers and is often the first place to go on a Monday morning to see what new posts they have up there. After they vetted me - a process involving seeing who I was, what previous writing

Rochdale AWP is live!

2009-07-23T12:37:00.004+00:00

Our second 14-19 (AWP) Area Wide Prospectus has now gone live. For more information on the product in general see the previous post about the Tameside AWP launch. This one is for Rochdale and you will notice that the new crisp, clean style of the Tameside one resonates through this one. The clean, easy to use search functionality takes pride of place and all the fancy ajax and javascript

Tameside AWP is live!

2009-07-16T14:12:00.005+00:00

Our first prospectus site is now live. It is, in my opinion, the nicest looking, has the best functionality and is the easiest to use on the market for this type of product. Each area across the UK is required by the government to provide a searchable online database of learning provision available in an area. This site is, essentially, a user friendly, fully searchable directory of education and

Let's all be Geese

2009-06-24T18:35:00.009+00:00

I have completed the first two days of the new Accidental Managers course and don't know where to start in describing what we have covered. Not only did this course deliver some amazing managerial skills and insights it also, as strong as it sounds, potentially improved my whole way of life and how I interact with people.The course was expertly delivered by Greg Orme (Founder of Kirkbright) and

How to Spot Quality within Web Design: Examples & Tips by wefunction.com

2009-06-17T14:53:00.004+00:00

We all have certain RSS feeds we regularly keep on top of. I have certain ones pulled to my Google homepage that I like to check often like Smashing Magazine, Web Designer Wall etc etc. I have recently added a new one and found an interesting article on how to spot good web design.Below are a sample of points taken from their article to give you a taster. Make sure you get over there and check

I managed to get a place on the heavily sought after Accidental Managers course

2009-06-15T14:29:00.005+00:00

'Accidental Managers is a training and development programme to help the rising stars of the creative and digital industries in the Northwest'. The course is to be delivered by Kirkbright a specialist in creative industry management training. After visiting the launch party at the Tate, Liverpool only a few weeks ago I am to attend the first session later this month and believe I will take an

Careerstube - The Largest Collection of Inspirational, Relevant and Real Careers Based Videos Online

2009-06-10T14:24:00.008+00:00

I just realised today that one of our products at work has never been featured on my site so I thought I would give it a bit of publicity. One real issue that education has is that learning paths and careers are getting more specialist and young people are increasingly disengaged from the way that information about their future is presented. Look at their consumption of online self published

The new Idaho Site is Live

2009-05-07T09:33:00.006+00:00

After much hard work and sweat the new Idaho site is live. It is a million miles from the old one and I have really enjoyed working on it. It reflects the product based company Idaho are and the subtle, minimalist colours allow the vibrant product branding to stand out.You will see many little fancy bits like a 3D flash carousel that uses XML to pull in images of each side of the box, a google

IE8 Compatibility

2009-04-27T10:55:00.002+00:00

As most know IE8 is now available to download. Yet another browser to test in. Think I'm up to 3 IE's, Firefox, and then Safari and Opera on the Mac. Life would be so much simpler if all browsers rendered the same but that will never happen.Just a little pointer to help you guys out. If you have it looking right in IE7 and want to force IE8 to render it properly you can simply add:(<)meta

Nypocreative in a design book

2008-11-14T13:15:00.000+00:00

I am pleased to say my portfolio site has appeared in a new design book by Patrick McNeil called Web Designers Idea Book. It is actually the old version of this site that you can access here. It appears in the Muted Colours section and I would like to thank Patrick for including my work in his very useful resource that you can buy here.

Pixel Perfect - an amazing tool

2008-10-22T08:57:00.001+00:00

I colleague recently told me about a firebug plugin called Pixel Perfect. I thought the idea sounded good so had a look - creating looks of concern from the surrounding developers who already think I pixel push too much already. I was amazed. This simple tool creates another tab in your Firebug extension and allows you to overlay a jpeg visual in the actual browser. This has two benefits: 1/From

BT Challenge Cup Site goes live

2008-07-31T15:42:00.002+00:00

BT run a competition called The BT Challenge Cup every year that rewards it staff for creating ideas that will improve the service in some way. It required a pop up site that would fit in seamlessly with the BT Intranet and provide the ability to register teams for the competition and update information about your team members, travelling details etc etc as the final was in Portugal.As this was

Smart City futures goes live

2008-07-31T15:26:00.001+00:00

The website for Smart City futures is now live. This was a great job to work on and I enjoyed the simplicity and cleanliness I applied to the visual treatment. It was nice to create a site with such nice imagery. The site is completely content managed down the the main pages in the navigation (only Home and Contact Us are set in the navigation structure). The site was built in .NET and couldn't

PRINCE2 Practitioner

2008-07-31T14:12:00.004+00:00

I am now a fully qualified PRINCE2 Practitioner. PRINCE2 (PRojects IN Controlled Environments) is a process-based method for effective project management. It is a de facto standard used extensively by the UK Government and is widely recognised and used in the private sector, both in the UK and internationally.As part of my Project Manager and Design Manager role I thought it might be useful to

North West Biodiversity goes live

2008-06-25T14:51:00.001+00:00

The new North West Biodiversity site is now live much to the appreciation and applaud of the client. This completely content managed site displays huge amounts of quite complicated data in a friendly, unobtrusive way.http://www.biodiversitynw.org.uk

My site is going to appear in the Design Meltdown Book

2008-06-18T19:12:00.001+00:00

The Nypocreative site appeared in the minimalist section of design trend and gallery site Design Meltdown over a year ago now and although the design of my site has changed since then I am still looking forward to seeing my work in print.Check it out here >

Tattoo design

2008-06-18T10:27:00.000+00:00

I was recently asked to design a tattoo for a colleague which I have enjoyed doing so far as it's not something I have done before. Luckily he is into the vector type stuff that I like and I used some vectors from vecteezy.com to create this. I also like it as a t-shirt design.

New site design

2008-05-27T16:40:00.001+00:00

[update - 04.06.08] - I have now implemented this new design across the entire site.As you can see the layout and design of the blog has changed dramatically over the past day. I have been working on a redesign for the whole Nypocreative site and thought I'd implement this on the blog before anything else. I have kept to my principles of simplicity is key and have basically gone for the opposite

Book cover design

2008-05-15T16:32:00.002+00:00

As well as being a Graphic & interactive Designer I am also a budding novelist and have completed my first, full length young adult fantasy fiction novel which I am currently revising. I created a cover to go with my book and although it is seen as not very professional to include your own artwork when submitting manuscripts I wanted to do one anyway for the fun of it.The original idea and design