The first WordPress theme is now available on the downloads page of Digital Spaceboy! Dark Orange is a simple, dark, widget ready theme that’s easily customisable.

See the live demo | Dowload zipped folder

It’s been way too long since I last posted - but it’s for good reasons, as I’ve been so busy lately I can barely remember my firstborn’s name!

My final project for uni and a very dear project of mine is now live, although I am still working on making it better. It’s build in Expression Engine and there will be much more content to come and I plan to introduce new features soon, including commenting on the articles and book reviews to allow true user participation and community feel.

Visit ASD Families

After a few years of part time freelancing while studying, the dreaded step into being a full time grown up is at hand. But what to do? Despite the freedom of working from home, I find myself longing for a respectable day job where I get to leave the house and meet people I don’t share the toothpaste with. A lot of people ask me why. Here’s my answer:

1. I want to learn more.

Obviously, I try to learn something new every day. Being self taught in web design, I’m no stranger to finding out new ways of doing things all on my lonesome. But I feel that in an agency environment, I could learn so much more - from the people. Working alongside experienced, inspired individuals is more rewarding and infinitely more enjoyable than trawling through online tutorials day after day. Also, having worked on my own since I started out, my social muscles could use the excercise. Team work is such an important part of being a good designer, and a good designer is what I want to be.

2. I want to do more work

I don’t spend my days twiddling my thumbs now, either, but being a new kid on the block, projects don’t fall into my lap at such a rate that I could feel I’m stretching myself to the fullest. There are days when I get to concentrate fully on my own projects, but unfortunately I can’t afford to pay myself. Ha ha. Being a one man band, I also spend more time on administrative tasks than should be legal. I’m fully aware that no job is 100% designer geekery, but working for an agency, I’d hope the scope of projects to work on would make it more than worth the change.

3. I want the security

Let’s face it, freelancing can be feast of famine. I have no problem with the feast, but the famine is a no-no. To be honest, I could do with shedding a few pounds, but the little nipper might have issues with living on porridge. As would the missus… So a regular salary is Our Official Idea Of Heaven. I wouldn’t say no to private healthcare either, but that might be getting greedy.

On the whole, I think that a full time job would just suit me better. After all, it’s ultimately about what’s right for you. I long for a team to realise visions with and bounce ideas off. I still wouldn’t turn away freelance work. But a nice desk with my name on it is somewhere in London. Now we just need to find each other!

A little drive-by entry again!

I’ve been working on my first ExpressionEngine site, and I am totally and utterly in love. As someone who is a designer first and foremost, the way you build sites with EE is amazingly easy, and the ease of use for the client is great. I also love their URL structure, which I had heard some criticism about. A designer I spoke to said it was a bad idea for the URL to reflect the template system as the back end should be hidden from the user - but I thought that it’s brilliant exactly because of that: you can name your template groups and templates to describe the content, making it extremely user-friendly and semantic.

I was originally apprehensive about the browser interface, being used to hand coding in Dreamweaver and uploading my files, but after a short period of getting used to it, I find it ok now. I would still prefer to be able to use keyboard shortcuts when editing my HTML and CSS, but writing the code in Dreamweaver before moving it to EE takes away a large amount of the hassle.

There is sooo much more I could say about ExpressionEngine, but I’ll have to get back to it when I’m not up to my eyeballs in work! Being busy is good, but I’m looking forward to getting some time to just catch up on my favourite blogs and write some more for my own as well

The EE site, which is aimed at families in the UK who have children with Autistic Spectrum Disorders, will be going live soon. And I’ll definitely be working with EE in the future as well!

Hypocrisy alert: I hate it when people start a blog and then give up after a few posts. It’s deflating, when you keep checking back and nothing happens, and then you stop checking back. And even if they do continue posting at some point it’s too bad, because you’re long gone. And here I am with a blog of two posts and then nothingness.

So anyway, after a week of whimpering at the bottom of my bed with pain and a fever, I am now back to blogging duties. To start it off, here’s a quickie to boast about the new Web Designer Magazine, out now, which features a showcase of graduate talent in the UK this year - with yours truly adorning the London page!

Both as a web designer and as someone completely and utterly hooked on the beautiful things you can find on teh interwebz, I love finding websites, blogs and portfolios of work that inspire me again and again and again… The following is a list of the 5 websites which are making me dribble most at the moment:

GoMedia Portfolio and GoMediaZine
Now these guys Rock. With a capital R. The thing that strikes me about Go Media is that they design as if they weren’t even getting paid for it - as if the pure joy of creating these stunning images was all the fire they need to keep their pencils and tablets smoking. Their portfolio is inspirational on its own, but the really great thing is their blog, where you can find amazing tutorials, showcases and invaluable insight into the world of design.

Abduzeedo
Even though I loved this design blog before its recent redesign, I’ve warmed up to the new look, and the quality of entries remains right up there with GoMedia’s, but with even more frequent updates. A nice mix of inspiration, tutorials and interviews, this blog can keep you up all night if you happen to stumble upon it for the first time at 1am when you’re on your “just 5 more minutes” before bed.

PostSecret
A blog for people’s secrets, written, drawn and etched onto postcards and sent in anonymously - this may not be an obvious choice to look for inspiration, but I find it extremely inspiring for two very different reasons. Firstly, the secrets cover a whole spectrum of human emotion, from happy to sad, angry to apathetic, playful to vengeful… I can’t think of many things more inspiring than true, raw emotion conveyed on a little piece of board. Which brings me to the second reason; people who are not designers by trade, who may never have had creative inclinations at all, can produce these sometimes strikingly beautiful or thought-provoking cards with pictures, newspaper cuttings, pieces of string and other everyday items. Even the ones that you wouldn’t class as beautiful designs can convey the emotion of the message in a way that words alone couldn’t - isn’t that the goal of all design, ultimately?

ModBlog Warning: some graphic images
This is a blog for tattoos, piercings and other body modifications. I’ve always been fascinated with the various ways in which you can modify your body, and tattoos are now widely recognised as a form of art. Obviously the mods showcased in this blog vary from the brilliant to the shite, but as with PostSecret, the stories behind these tattoos (whether told or left to the imagination) are inspiring, as are many of the beautiful designs and some of their more unusual placement decisions.

Flickr HDR Photo Pool
HDR photos are all the craze. The Next Big Thing. So fashionable it hurts. But despite all that, they are extremely beautiful photos when done right. This photo pool has thousands of images to browse through, and you can always find a subject matter among them that interests you - or a new one you didn’t know you were interested in. Someone told me they felt HDR was cheating, like putting new paint on an old car. But I see nothing wrong with some visual embellishment. Finding beauty in all sorts of unlikely places, along with the painfully likely ones, is a good thing. I like beautiful things.

Between getting lost in the sites listed above and actually writing about them, I’ve just spent two hours on this post… I hope you find some inspiration in these, or that they inspire you to go forth and compile your own top 5!

I actually toyed with the idea of leaving the default WordPress “Hello World” post up, just to be rebellious. But then no one would have realised the genius in my stupidity, assuming simply er.. stupidity, so I decided against it.

But to the point! This here’s my brand spanking new blog, in which I’ll pour out Things I Really Want To Tell You about my work, my inspirations and everything I find interesting about web trends/design/development, or anything that may have a (sometimes small but distinct) connection with what web designers do. Like global warming.

Speaking of which, here’s a picture of our pet hippo Henry soaking up the sun at Brighton Beach. I was going to put up a picture of myself, but he’s much cuter than me, and I’m trying to make a good impression.

So - welcome to Digital Spaceboy!