Measurements: 140cm x 80cm
High gloss lacquer w/ a solid MDF top
Hidden wires
Electrically adjustable height

Made for Mac

Any Mac would look right at home here, all thats missing is a built in doc for your iPhone or iTouch or iWhatever you have

Go Fishing

Here fishy, fishy, fishy.  Feng Shui eat your heart out

Lids

What a genius idea, store it, hide it, out of sight and out of mind.  One of my biggest beefs is clutter on my desk, which this brilliant idea you can store what you like in your desk rather than on your desk.

The Man himself – Soren Rose of Holmris Hansen

Soren Rose is a Scandinavian Furniture designer.

He is an Artist, designer, merchant, entrepreneur with a highly developed sense of quality and craftsmanship.

Well as a first addition I introduce the Mac Mini’s missing piece!

“Introducing: All-new STAND BY MI V2, a perfect stand for Mac Mini with side access 4-port USB2.0 hub.  With a design to bend in with your Mac Mini and the rest of other Apple accessories on your desktop, the new STAND BY MI V2 inherits same solid material and finish as all of our other quality stands:  heavy steel provide sturdy support, aluminum color powder coated, non-skid footing.  The USB2.0 hub can work with or without provided wall adapter.”

I think this may move from my wishlist to on my desk!

I also have two new projects in the pipeline which should be complete by the end of the month, the first a redesign for Blue Teapot Theatre Company, Blue Teapot produces professional theatre with people with learning disabilties, built on wordpress the site hosts a custom productions section, Next Gen gallery, and heavily modified template to address all their requirements.

The second project for a well known Photography shop in Dublin, John Gunn.  Up until now John Gunn has had a DIY homepage image but this was not fulfilling their web presence requirements.  While they are not currently ready to sell online there was a key requirement to build the site with this as a future requirement.  For now the site showcases their product lists, lab and services they offer.

Watch this space as I will update my portfolio once they launch.

As ever Please fell free to let me know what you think.

The site has some really nice features such as an Availability form where both Shay and potential clients can see his availability really easily.  The site also includes a fully customised gallery allowing Shay to easy maintain his portfolio.

This is not the first ad Twinings have brought out that has really impressed me, bringing Mr Stephen Fry in to add a comedic value to their Ads and while this didn’t add a huge amount of artistic flare the following videos show the direction Twinings have been going in.

I’d be interested to find out what company were involved in these ads as I would love to see some of their other work as it is huge inspiration to me from a artistic and design perspective.

Your comments are very welcome, have you seen any Ads that have impressed you, what do you think of the Twinings Ad?

New Years Resolutions

1. Post more on my Blog
2. Start a monthly or fourth monthly (probably more realistic) Newsletter
2. Take some time out for me
3. Start Mountain biking and Rock Climbing

Peter and Ed had found that they have had a significant increase in requests for workshops and decided they needed to provide an online resource for budding photographers to find out when the workshops were on and get a bit more information about them

So I modified a number of backend templates and built some new forms and transitions to allow Peter or indeed Ed to easily add new workshops and associated pages to Explorelight.com. Both Peter and Ed were very happy with the final outcome

Neils requirements were simple

1) Keep it simple, greys, blues nothing too jazzy
2) A place to show what games he was currently playing and a section for reviews
3) Links
4) The Blog

I had a fair idea straight off how I was going to achieve point 2, I thought it would be nice to show a percentage bar showing the status of the game playing and an area to archive off games recently played and have a category just for reviews kept separate from the blog.

I built the reviews and little sidebar widget with a mix of wordpress custom fields, JQuery and timthumb and I have to say it turned out very well – infact it was the area Neil remarked on from draft 1 to 5

The blog is fairly straight forward, just using some nice CSS styling for navigation, custom styling for Neil’s comments and some tweaking to keep the reviews to themselves – oh and i decided to give the search its own prominent space on the site – the reason I did this was because of something Neil had said to me in passing previously that he searches for everything these days.

The links is just using wordpress’ blogroll and descriptions

First iteration

While Neil liked the first iteration it was a little too flashy

Second iteration

After a bit more tweaking I came up with this iteration which Neil found too dark so a rethink was in order so back to photoshop I went and decided ok lets drop the background image and just use a nice easy on the eye grey and polish off some of the buttons in an attempt to make the site jump out at you but at the same time not jump out at you while still keeping things simple

Final

And bingo Neiltendo was born and once I get the old database this will be hitting monitors all round the work – mmm the interweb!