As mentioned in a blog post from the beginning of this year, it’s been quite a while since I launched my blog and then my website, with my blog now over three years old and the rest of website marching towards it’s second anniversary!

That blog post outlined a few interesting things which had happened up until that point, and now with six months of professional experience working out in Madrid with the wonderful Erretres under my belt and various other projects ongoing or completed, I’ve decided to start actually devoting some time to the redesign of my website which was mentioned in that post from months gone by.

As the most visited part of my website, I have naturally started things off by evaluating my blog. The green on this section has now gone, and the grey background has been replaced by a purer, fully white design, with nothing but the very occasional subtle shadow to create depth and separation. The typeface for the main text within the post has had a facelift, with a wider, more modern font now in use, and a new feature menu makes better use of the screen space available on modern devices.

You’ll also (finally) be able to click on images to expand them for more detail, and there’s a few other hidden interactions that you’ll be able to make – and even further future ones which I’m toying with for the time being…

The new design will initially appear very familiar to those reading my blog on their desktops, and this is a consciencous decision – I am quite happy with most aspects of my current website and so want to keep the familiarity and simplicity as intact as I can, especially within the blog section. More major changes will be occurring within other areas of the site, one of which can be seen in the menu as “Portfolio” will become “Projects”, to allow for a wider scope of cool stuff that I want to get posted on here in the future.

If you’ve any feedback please be sure to drop me a comment on my Facebook Page, privately via email or even in person if you’re unlucky enough to see me in the flesh from time to time! Until then I’ll be working on more exciting updates ready to begin the construction of this behemoth change – I’m hoping for a launch before the end of the year but we’ll have to see how cruel HTML can be…

Just the other week me and Emily headed down to Leeds Print Workshop for a beginners bookbinding workshop led by a lecturer at the Leeds College of Art, a day which began sourly as I’d bought a steak bake from Greggs, which was then knocked onto the ground by someone not looking where they were going – and who had the cheek to expect an apology from me! Never. I shall not apologise for what was your malicious destruction of my beloved steak bake.

Even reeling in the agony of the loss of my steak bake, I still managed to have a really good day and had a wonderful time getting hands-on binding some mini notebooks and even designing my own stitch pattern (which you can see on the orange books above and below).

Outside of the fun we had making these mini books, in my typography module we headed out on a walk of the city to begin to spot typography and words out in the public space, which was a really fun exercise in thinking about typography and communication in a much more broader sense than ever before. I shan’t bore you with the images of the abstract ambient “words” that I found, but I shall share this picture of a pigeon that we befriended along the way…

In other uni events, I recently attended the Undergraduate Research & Leadership Scholarship Celebration Event, which was a lovely evening of talks, food, drinks and catching up with the fellow scholars. My group even ended up winning a prize for our video submission – an entirely unexpected but appreciated surprise!

And last buy certainly not least we move on to talk about my first design brief in this my final university year, one which will soon be on my portfolio, which was to re-imagine the design and service offered by a local radio station in the year 2026, a year in which for the sake of the brief we predicted that driving cars would be outlawed in favour of autonomous vehicles.

After research which investigated the threats and opportunities presented by this scenario in the year 2026, and as well as investigation into peoples’ motivations for tuning into local radio, I landed myself with the zany concept of developing a service which delivers a karaoke service to people on-the-go, in which they can sing solo, harmonise with friends remotely/with other passengers in the car, or even join a “Traffic Jam” and sing with the other people stuck in the gridlocked junctions of our roads.

I shall leave the full justification and explanation for the time when the project, called Autokara, is in my portfolio, but one of the outcomes I created was a video to advertise the service – a video in which me and my mum can be found singing our heart out to The Circle of Life from the Lion King! It has been a really great project to work on, albeit somewhat stressful (as is always the case) just before deadlines, however I shall spare myself and my mother the embarrassment of posting the video here, so I leave you with a screenshot which I love and think summarises the project quite well…

PS: I felt like I should let you know that my mum bought me a steak bake whilst I was at home, so the balance of peace in my world has been restored.