27th
May 2010
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Yesterday we announced the twenty finalists in our Web Design Challenge in association with iStock Photo.
The competition was to design a site using BaseKit and Photos from iStock – the rules were to create a minimum two page site and just impress us – be imaginative, be original, show us good design, good use of imagery and good use of BaseKit.
We had a great response, but now we have narrowed down the field to the final twenty. You can see these finalists here.
We will be cutting this selection in half on the first of June to the final ten – all of whom will win a prize.
We’re really pleased with the quality and imagination on display in all of the sites and we wish all finalists the best of luck.
While we will be judging the competition in house (with some help from our friends) that doesn’t mean you can’t let us know your favourite! Hit the comments and tell us which one you think is best!
26th
May 2010
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It’s Wednesday! So we take a sidelong glance at the wider internet and bring you something a little more fun than usual… We’re back with five more single serving Tumblrs – sites on Microblogging platform Tumblr devoted to a single, obsucre subject
Originating from meme fatory 4CHAN, Dog Get Down From There shows us pictures of animals in unusual situations. Situations they are hopelessly unqualified for. It doesn’t really make much sense, but it makes us laugh.
Things My Date Really Said Last Night
The clue to the content of this blog is in the title, but it doesn’t reveal quite how ludicrous some of the quotes are. Some are misguided attempts to be romantic, some are just downright misguided. Dating Protip: don’t say anything you read on this site!
Passed Out On Public Transportation
Or POOPT for short. Just pictures of people sleeping on various buses, trains and trams. It’s a little voyeuristic, but also facinating to see how certain people can sleep anywhere and in any position…
For those without children, this is the ’strongest visual birth control on the market today’ – a warning against kids. For those with little ones of their own this is a place to vent and share the destruction wrought by your bundles of joy.
Graffiti is bad, OK. But when it’s god enough to be featured in this blog of great looking vandalism, maybe we’ll let it pass…
25th
May 2010
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Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few years – you’ve probably heard of the microblogging platform known a Twitter. No doubt one of your friends or colleagues has asked you if you we’re ‘on Twitter’ or ‘what your “at” is’
Well, if you’re a business, WHY AREN’T YOU ON TWITTER?
OK, actually, not so fast – some business shouldn’t be on Twitter. For example – your business supplies high end services and products to other businesses – your clients aren’t on Twitter and you have nothing to say about your product and business that would interest the average Joe in the street. Then you should probably not be on Twitter. B2B businesses can find Twitter useful for communicating to other businesses and finding new business and leads, but we’ll get to this later.
But if you are among the thousands of businesses who this does not apply to, get on Twitter – NOW!
But ‘why’, you may ask, ‘I don’t care about telling people what I had for my lunch and other such inane things.’
That’s fine. There are no rules about Twitter that say that you have to talk about lunch or, in fact be inane.
The first thing you should think about is what your business goals are. If you’re a new company you need to get your name out there and get some recognition. Especially if you are online only. If you have a fresh new BaseKit site for your business you need to get people to your site. You may have a special offer on your products – and you need to let people know. Twitter can help in all of these circumstances.
You can also talk about your lunch.
We’re going to take you through how to start and maintain a Twitter profile step by step.
In this one we show you how to set one up.
Step 1. Go to www.twitter.com
Step 2. Click on the big yellow “give it a try” button
Step 3. Fill in the form.
OK step three is a bit more than the other two. Here is some help.
In the FULL NAME box – do not put your full name. Put your business name. You’re only allowed 20 characters here so be sensible. If your business is called Alpha Computer Service And Repair – Shorten it to Alpha Computers – as long as you’re recognisable – you should be fine.
The USERNAME box is very important. This will be your actual username on Twitter – it will be what your Twitter URL will be – and you only get 15 Characters this time. So Alpha Computer Service And Repair would (in my mind) become AlphaComputers – You are far better off doing things in all one word rather than using underscores. Underscores are just confusing.
The rest of the info you can fill in yourself, – (we’re not going to tell you what to put in the email and password fields) and you’re away – you have a Twitter account.
Now you need to start making it your own!
Join us next week for how to customise your profile.
20th
May 2010
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For the newbie web designer the online community is a great thing. There is an abundance of tutorial sites and blogs that can help you build your skills as a designer. There are hundreds if not thousands of showcases of the best web designs and lists of designers you should follow on Twitter. You can learn a hell of a lot from these resources, however some of these sites can be crippling to the confidence of the newbie web designer.
I started my career in web design just under 2 years ago. I had been teaching myself web design as a hobby prior to this and had never designed or built a site for anybody other than myself. I landed a job in a small IT team providing desktop support and the day came when my company needed a new website. This was when design became much more than a hobby for me; that first web site led to many more and I was officially the web designer within the company, which then led to my freelancing.
It was at this point I began to notice the negative effect that the multitude of design related websites can have on a newbie designer. Between the day job and my freelance projects I was spending 18 hours a day as a designer, I’d spend hours every day scouring the web for inspiration and reading articles.
The problem I encountered was that I found myself comparing my own designs to those designs that featured in the “Best Of” type galleries. I would look through these lists of really great designs that had beautiful typography, great layouts, and fantastic graphics; they just had that “wow” factor about them. I felt massively inferior as a designer and began to look at my previous designs in a whole different light. The projects that I had once been so proud of now appeared “amateurish” to me and I began to question my own ability as a designer.
I became so obsessed with the notion that my previous designs were not as good as those designers who featured in these types of showcases and my future work suffered as a result. Every time I opened Photoshop to start a new layout design, a little voice in the back of my mind would tell me to give it up and that my designs suck. I would spend hours designing a PSD layout only to decide that I hated the design and start over from scratch which would ultimately lead to me hating the new design and the vicious circle would start again. I became my own biggest critic, but not in a good way. My self-criticism wasn’t constructive or useful; it was becoming destructive. I love everything about web design and what I do but at this point I didn’t enjoy my work at all, mostly because of this ill conceived idea that I was no good at it and that I would never be as good as some of the awesome designers featured on the web.
The turning point came when I was asked by my company to design a full page print advertisement for the magazine of a local business networking event they were attending and that the deadline for the submission of the artwork was that afternoon. I had no time to research, no time to search for ideas or inspiration. I opened up Illustrator, got to work and we submitted the artwork before the deadline. The next day I learned from our Company Director that the magazine publisher had asked if we had used a professional marketing agency to design our full page advert as it looked as though it had been professionally done. This was when I realised that I wasn’t as bad at this design gig as I thought I was. I had done no research or visited my usual web haunts for inspiration before starting this project – I designed what I thought would be best for the job in hand and it turns out that it was good.
I had the missed the point of these online sources of inspiration – these showcases of best designs. They weren’t telling me how good design should be, they were telling me how good design could be. I opened up my folder of past projects and began looking though my old designs. This time instead of seeing all of my previous hard work as design failures, I noticed progression. Each design was “better” in some way than the previous; I was improving as a designer and my work was getting better with each design. I had only been in the web design industry a very short time, I was still learning and it was foolish of me to compare my own designs with those of designers who had been in the job a very long time.
I guess the point of this post is a word of caution to newbie designers. There are many many great designers out there, some have really amazing portfolios of work and it can be too easy to feel intimidated by how good their work is and how your own work will never be as good. This was the mistake that I made and it could have very easily ended my design career before it even began. I am still my own biggest critic and I think that’s important, I won’t tell myself that my designs look great if I don’t truly believe it, but I also won’t beat myself up about it. I guess it all comes down to your own confidence in your work along with the desire to continue learning and improving to become the type of designer that you want to be.
This post was written by Lee Harding of Lee Harding Web Design – creating modern beautiful and usable websites. Want to write for the BaseKit Blog – get in touch!
