Microsoft has finally released Internet Explorer 9 to the word today, hopefully instigating a final push to banish its despicable older brother, Internet Explorer 6, forever (China – 34.5% of you still using IE6? Get with the program!)
A word of advice to those using jQuery 1.5 though, upgrade to to 1.5.1 for some timely IE9 specific bug fixes.
One of the most beautiful-looking websites of recent times, Web Designer Wall, has been redesigned. Sad to the see the old design go – when I first stumbled across the site a couple of years back it really opened my eyes as to what was possible with web design and inspired me in a number of my early designs. For my money, Web Designer Wall was the best of the handcrafted/watercolour/sketchy-looking sites that were so ubiquitious a few years ago as designers reacted against the shiny/reflected aesthetic of web 2.0.
Like I said, sad to see it go, but the new design retains the spirit of the original whilst incorporting some modern web tech including HTML5 , media queries and CSS3. Check it out!
My website for the uber-cool clothing company Brat & Suzie has been featured in Designrfix’s 50 well designed ecommerce sites.
The website was built using the open source ecommerce platform Magento.
I have been extremely slack updating this blog since I wound down the freelance stuff and started working full time a few months ago, so imagine my surprise when I logged in today and found I had 365 comments awaiting moderation – most of them spam. Why would the spam bots be bothering with little old me? My intrigue roused, I checked Google Analytics to discover this site had been included in a Smashing Magazine article!! – Ultimate Guide to Using WordPress as a Portfolio . Thank you Smashing – I am officially chuffed (if drowning in spam).
PS. I was also pleased to find another of my sites, Brat and Suzie has been included on Vandaley Design’s blog. Cheers guys.
I was recently approached by a local band who wanted me to come up with a sleeve design for their first EP. Their music is a mixture of blues and country and the band wanted this reflected in a “western look” for the artwork.
I started off thinking along the lines of a faded, old-west style “wanted” poster but this quickly evolved into a much darker, monotone design inspired by the title cards of silent movies.
Seeing as most of my design work to date has been web-based it made a nice change to have a crack at designing for print, although working at such a high resolution took some getting used to. For instance, I found putting together the background took a lot longer than creating a website background as it meant stiching together lots of different paper textures and masking the joins.
Still, as a first foray into print design I’m quite pleased with the results. Let me know what you think.
Here’s the front cover…
And here’s the back:
Just a quick post to say lawrencenaman.com is being featured on CSS Mania. Check it out and if you are so inclined, rate the site.
Hello there! Welcome to the lawrencenaman.com 1.1 – now based on WordPress. I’ve spent the last few days knee-deep in WordPress templates creating this theme which I have catchily named “Slighty Rusted, Scratchy Metal With a Big Blue Bar Running Across the Top”.
I’ve used the as-American-as-obesity colours: red white and blue in a faded and distressed design to evoke my disappointment in the negative US election campaigns run by Obama and McCain and to reflect the USA’s status as a fading Superpower. In fact, none of that is true – like an inverse Nicky Hambleton-Jones, I just enjoy making things look old. I was actually inspired by this.
Anyway, this is my new e-home and I’ll be mostly using it as a showcase for my web work and for posting hard-hitting, thought-provoking and challenging blogs, such as: “Why Chevy Chase was funnier than Bill Murray”, “Who would win in a fight between The Thing and The Hulk?” and “Peace in the Middle East – Achievable in Our Lifetime? No.” Enjoy!