So, what is this ‘Hueco Mundo’ thing anyway? As of 10 minutes ago I will confess that I didn’t know either, someone mentioned the name in passing and I was intrigued enough to give it a google. Having never seen the anime Bleach I am still pretty much none the wiser but from what I can gather it is a beautiful alternate dimension. Really beautiful.

Again, I’m not updating this blog anywhere near as much as I should. Why is it so hard to type some ramblings onto a page that no one reads? v3 is coming along. slowly. I don’t yet have the final design but I have worked out the structure and have started coming up with imagery. Here’s a preview

The website was down for quite a few months and for that I apologise, It was very kindly hosted on the Cubicflow server by Matt Ellison but Matt had plans for the server and so I have had to transfer the site to pastures new. The site is now hosted on ionriver’s server space. Who are ionriver? Oh only the employers I have been working for for the past 6 months, did I not tell you? Yep, one of the reasons why the site has taken so long to transfer is because I have been extremely busy with a new job designerating at Bruton-based design company ionriver. Now I am fully settled in I am looking forward to being able to blog more and maybe even get some more projects underway. Ionriver recently relaunched their website, go check it out! http://www.ionriver.com.

As for the site itself, it is definitely beginning to look a bit dated. At some point, hopefully in the not too distant future, I will get around to refreshing the design as at the moment I don’t feel like it shows off my work as well as it could. Also, redesigning one’s portfolio website is fun! I feel like i don’t always appreciate this as much as I should, through all of the scratching of head and pulling of hair there is something very cathartic about the whole process of creating a portfolio site. Plus, there’s a bunch more work to put up and half a years worth of blog posts to catch up on!

I have come to realise that while some people dedicate their lives to a single cause, 1 activity that they are truly passionate about, that is not me. Well, it might be, but I have not yet found what that 1 activity is, and likely never will. And I’m okay with that, I enjoy being average at a lot of things rather than being awesome at a couple. In the past on this blog I have spoken about my interests be it FFVIII or latte art and I will continue to keep you updated with the current flavour of the week. At the moment it’s eSports, and more specifically Starcraft 2. Here’s a little video to whet your appetite

Working in a café all day doesn’t provide much scope to be creative. It’s all ‘take these drinks out’, ‘clean this table’, ‘take the till’, ‘wash the dishes’ etc. So any little chance I get I seize with both hands and in the next few days I’ll do an update showing what a creative barista gets up to.

In my experience a little bit of friendly competition really spurs you on and makes you go that extra mile. That was certainly the case when me and my friends came up with the concept of ‘come guy with my’. The idea was simple, we divided into pairs and made guys to be burned on guy fawkes night with each pair keeping their guy completely secret from all the other pairs. There were some excellent entries, we had Cleggeron, Juarez the crazy somerfield worker, odd pajama man and pictured above is mine and Dave Merritt’s entry. It was built from concept to final guy over the space of a few days just with stuff we had kicking about and a few odds and ends from charity shops. A top hat and pocket watch would have been nice but we didn’t want to go too overboard, we were going to burn him after all!

And to round off this little update I have been doing a little bit of illustration on the sly recently. I’ve come up with my concept for the next piece and will hopefully find time to do that soon. Here’s a little sneak preview of what I’ve been up to.

Slowly eking out the changes to the site. Today was the turn of the front page. Just jazzed up the text on the front page, accessibility is a bit of an issue now so I’ll try fix that soon but overall I think it looks a bit more snazzy. Also made a bunch of changes over the past few weeks that makes the whole site a lot slicker. Shadoxbox, sortable categories, fading animations, I am the javascript/jQuery king!

I’m actually pretty happy with the site at the moment, who knows how long that will last though? Hopefully I’ll do some more non-site-related updates soon.

ciao!

And let us not forget that gif!

Gizmodo just released an exclusive review with pictures of the new iPhone due to be released in the summer. The iPhone was ‘found’ and then given to Gizmodo after it was apparently lost by some hapless Apple employee. You’ve got to feel sorry for the employee who may well not have a job in the morning. Apple is notoriously secretive about it’s future products and this execs must be seething at this leak.

My first thoughts on the design was ‘eek what happened to the sleek curves??’ but after seeing a few more pictures I’m starting to like it. When compared to the old design it’s thinner and looks a lot more sturdy which will make it feel much more like an executive product than the plasticy feel of the current iPhone. The back is made of a panel of black plastic/glass which is almost certainly a form/function playoff. I’m sure Jonathan Ive would love to make it the same at the iPad, full aluminium and seriously sexy but as the iPad has shown it can badly limit the wireless signal. The screen looks gorgeous, edge to edge and from reports it sounds extremely high resolution, what this means for current apps that use a fixed res I’m not sure. The flagship feature will probably be the front facing camera that many people have been calling for for a while. It should allow proper video calls, hopefully at a reasonable price, then things will really be like a sci-fi film.

My main reservation with the new design are the seems. Apple has always had a less-is-more philosophy with it’s design, everything either has a functional or technical reason for it’s existence. So what’s with the seems around the edge? Surely not purely an aesthetic choice on Apple’s part, I fully expect the final design released in the summer to sort them out. Overall this looks like a very nice update to the iPhone indeed. Apple has made a habit of making improvements to it’s designs that you never would have thought of but once you are used to them you wonder how you ever lived without.

Whilst the iPad is almost perfection in Ram’s gospel of good design *drools* the iPhone’s update certainly makes it into a tasty beast and with its camera and portability it’s more functional too.

• fixed links – Mainly on the front ‘splash’ page, reworked the flash a little bit and now the links should work from both wilf.cubicflow.com and wilfswann.co.uk, happy days!

• favicon – Actually I did this a while ago. Wait, did I blog about it already? I forget. Anyway, I might change the green dot to a pink one, what do people think? It’ll only work on real browsers so all you Internet Explorer people will have to grow up, sorry!

• lightbox loading image – I made a little image that displays whilst lightbox is loading the picture/vid/whatever. I noticed the gallery on the print page was taking an age to load so now you can watch some mesmerising moving squares whilst it does so

• design tweaks – I’m still not really happy with some of the design but I’m not sure I ever will be. I’ve tweaked a few things here and there. There are some major changes that I would like to make some day, but today isn’t that day. Neither is tomorrow…

here’s that loading gif so you can stare and wonder at it for hours.

Oh also, I got After Effects to work so time to start working on that showreel!

Reading Festival have unveiled their new website, as they do every year just before tickets go on sale. As a designer I think that I am now allowed to deconstruct their design, so here goes. I’ve never been much of a fan of the red/yellow colour combination but they have used it ever since my first foray at the festival in 2006 and probably before. The last website did a good job of disguising the clash, only using the colour to extenuate areas in a mostly black and grey design but the new one fully embraces the combo which can be a little overwhelming.

There are some nice touches to the site though, the tabs on the side are an interesting way of including links to specific actions without cluttering up the already laden menu bar or complicating the content area. They also satisfyingly pop out from the side when you hover over them. The news section for the front page is interesting. There is a summary for the latest news entry but for the other most recent entries it just displays a picture, then when you hover over said picture you are provided with the headline and summary. This is an inventive way of saving space when you have a lot of information to get across, I can see problems with user friendliness though. Twitter gets centre stage which marks a remarkable year for it, You’d be hard pressed to find even a mention of it on last year’s site which demonstrates it’s meteoric rise. Before I bore you all to death I’ll mention the navigation. My first thought was ‘why is this big arrow following my cursor’ but actually the way it’s been done is quite clever. Usually when you are designing navigation you need a state for each link that shows you are hovering over and a state that shows that you are on that page which can sometimes add unneeded complexity. What happens when you hover over the page you are already on?! The reading navigation removes the complexity with an arrow highlighting a link when you hover over it, but then when you move your cursor away from the navigation the arrow will move to point at the page you are currently on. This gives you all the information in an obvious way without having to decode what different highlight colours mean. Another thing to mention about it is that, whilst on first glance it looks like it has been made in flash (this can be problematic for navigations and search bots can have a hard time reading them) the navigation has actually been made with javascript and ajax, this is a trend I’ve seen increasing recently and it’s exciting to see what developers can do with these powerful tools.

I’m sorry for waffling on like that. I’ve been playing Final Fantasy XIII recently, it’s absolutely beautiful.