New Website Progress

09.01.17 — Leeds

Hello all and happy 2017! I come to you after what has been quite a quiet festive period, as I fell quite ill with a nasty viral infection which saw me in and out of various doctors’ offices over the holidays. I’m happy to report that I am well on the road to recovery now, however, and as such have been knuckling down to getting on with something productive – my new website.

As you may recall in this post from many weeks ago, I have slowly been chipping away at the challenge of re-designing, re-coding and re-launching my website for a while now, but with my early January self-imposed deadline looming and the burst of energy as I recover, I have been really pushing to get it near completion over these past few days.

After plenty of fiddling with different types of elements which form the basic toolkit of constituent blocks which I’ll use to build each page of the new site, I finally settled on a curated array which I have been busily coding away such that they all work on all eleven possible screen width settings for the new site – to give you an idea of how much work this involves, my current site only has three possible screen width profiles and it took the best part of a month’s work.

It’s proving to be a gruelling challenge, not made any easier by the knowledge that my least-favourite task is being saved to last – defining the margins (basically the spacing between two different elements). It might sound like an easy task but I am so fussy about how everything looks that I will have to specify every element’s interaction with every other element – and then do this eleven times for each different width profile. My current estimate is that this means I will have to define a grand total of about 4,400 individual values – and that’s probably a generously low estimate.

Anyway, as someone who’s been kind enough to come along to see this blog post and has made it this far into what is probably turning out to be an Ollie vs. HTML/CSS battle rant, I have decided to share with you the link to a beta copy of where I am with coding the various elements of the new site.

A little preview of part of the new look

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, a beta is a highly unpolished and nowhere near finished work-in-progress version of a website – so don’t be expecting anything beautiful. The page at the time of writing is basically a dummy page of all the different possible elements with horizontal lines between them – however if something seems to be showing up dramatically wrong then please drop me an email here and let me know – hopefully we can catch any bugs before I move on towards launching the site.

Anyway, if you fancy a little snoop you can do so at this link, which may occasionally go down as I make changes. Also don’t click on anything – even the buttons at the top of the page – the links are all dead. Well, here’s hoping I’m soon done so that you can explore my fancy new (working) website!

I Did Survive First Semester

22.12.16 — Leeds

I come to you to promise the above, that I have indeed made it through my first semester of my final year of university relatively unscathed. I apologise for the severe delay in blog posts, but a quick-fire set of deadlines after my first project and as I entered the second half of the semester meant that my free time has been very limited, and so when it does come along I’ve been spending it out of the house doing as much fun stuff as I can! But this all does indeed mean that I can share just a little bit of it with you guys now…

First up, as a post-deadline treat after my first project, I headed out with some friends to go and see the hilarious Trixie Mattel perform live in Leeds, and what a great night we had! Trixie was hilarious and the time I didn’t spend laughing at her act was spent admiring the sheer scale and rigidity of her wig…

At home, whilst not buried under a mountain of sketchbooks and pens working away on a YCN brief for uni, I made the time to crack out my box of tinsel and fairy lights and get my room looking a little more festive for the period. To do this I managed to wire the fairy lights into the existing wireless lighting system in my room, and cleared my little display of tidbits off the table below my window to create my own festive snow-scene display…

Although moving from my uni room and onto campus and back again in order to work becomes as laborious and boring as it is to read, the winter weather (when not biting our fingers off with the chill) has provided some beautiful scenes here in the city, including a gloriously colourful sunset on campus which rewarded us for working late one evening…

Also, as regular readers may have guessed, I also dedicated a chunk of my free time to eating, making a lovely trip back to Lupe’s Cantina, arguably the best Mexican food in Leeds, after which some fog rolled in and made Hyde Park look quite like the moody Yorkshire one might find on a postcard.

Over the past few weeks though, and as I am sure I have mentioned multiple times thus far, the overarching matter has been the job of getting my designs for my second project wrapped up, printed off and handed in. This project will soon land on my portfolio, so I shan’t divulge too many details just yet, but I can reveal that what I ended up making left my room in a flood of paper and other craft stuff…

Sooner or later though I had my final document handed in, then a proposal written for my independent project brief which will be completed next year, and finally it was time to relax. We all made our way straight to Belgrave to share some huge trays of chips and hand out our Secret Santa gifts, during which Rhea presented me with a huge bag full of hilarious goodies!

And so after that whirlwind overview of the past month or so, we hit today. Just this past week I’ve been suffering quite a bit from some kind of viral infection plus a wisdom tooth intent on causing me never-ending pain, so me and Izzy have been taking it easy and chilling in the house. I’m very much looking forward to Christmas but I don’t think the real excitement is going to hit properly until I land back in Burnley this weekend – leaving it late or what?!

Design Wheels In Motion

17.11.16 — Leeds

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 current state of the new blog design

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…

Binding Books & Singing Karaoke

07.11.16 — Leeds

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.

Design Manchester & Towneley Hall

23.10.16 — Manchester

True to form, I haven’t been staying in one place for too long, which began as last week me and the rest of my house (all designers) headed on the train to Manchester to check out the Design Manchester Festival which was in full swing. We landed in Manchester Piccadilly and immediately headed to the old Fire Station just around the back of the station, where there were some food trucks, the opportunity to get our portraits drawn, and a huge array of handmade products from local designers.

Sooner or later we’d stuffed our bags with as much stuff as we could afford, and wound up having some beautiful portraits drawn – italics for sarcasm – mine had a crown on it and I insisted upon it being labelled “Queen Briggs”. After these shenanigans we headed towards the centre where we hopped onto the Manchester Metropolitan University campus, where we had a bite to eat before heading to their ultra-modern art and design building for a talk by renowned letterpress designer Alan Kitching.

Before the talk we took a breather to snoop around the exhibition which had been laid out in the gallery space which spanned each floor of the building, and which provided a beautiful insight into the traditional hands-on approach to the process of designing and upsetting Kitching’s work.

We then headed into one of the university’s lecture theatres where Kitching presented a selection of his work and his thoughts on design, letterpress, and the process of arriving at his final designs. It was a wonderfully interesting insight into this manual process, and afterwards we all headed back into the city to find something to eat before we all headed off back home.

After stuffing our faces with Wagamama, it was time for everyone to head back to Leeds, except I, for I had arranged to visit Burnley for the weekend and meet up with a friend for some afternoon tea and a wander around one of the town’s most beautiful attractions – Towneley Hall.

Towneley Hall is named after the Towneley family who used to live in the lavish house and grounds, which are now form a museum and a lovely public park. We first stopped off at a café/restaurant housed in the old stables, where we enjoyed afternoon tea and scones, before we headed around the museum. The little galavant around was not only interesting from a historical point of view, but also reminded me of various trips I made to the hall whilst in primary school!

It was soon time to head back home after our day spent sleepwalking around the idyllic grounds, and so I headed off back home before heading back to Leeds the next morning. I currently write this back here in my university city, where I’ve had a clear out of my room and am feeling ready to take on the coming week of work – I think.