Having an 18 month old boy opens up a whole new world of TV, books and music. I watch In The Night Garden nearly everyday (it's a 2010 version of The Teletubbies). What's amazing to see is how it grabs my boy's attention more than any other programme. It dawned on me one day that all the noises in the show, all the colours used, will all have been thought out by some background team. Why not use their hard work in a future webpage?! Picking colours out of screen-grabs shows some quite interest... [More]

Not all of us come from a type setting, graphic design or artistic background. I certainly don't. But there's plenty we can learn from people that do. Today I diced up the layout used by Marketing Magazine (part of Brand Republic)... both very good by the way. After scaling everything to 1020px width, using advanced trigonometry and all the fingers on my hands, I was able to work out that the magazine layout uses 5x172px columns with 20px gutters. I've assumed 2 gutter-widths either side of th... [More]

Didn't get a pay rise this year? Well, guess what, we've only just managed to crawl out of recession so you aren't getting one this year either. Why wait to be given pay rise though? Why not just take one? That's why everyone should be freelancing. There are hundreds of opportunities waiting for you, just just have to find them. That's the only real problem to getting started — finding the work. On the flip-side of that, there are small businesses out there that are pretty sure they wan... [More]

Blogging has been around for years. You wouldn’t think so after looking at an averages SME’s website: The Home Page; About Us; Our Products; Contact Us. It’s all a bit stale. If your company doesn’t have a blog, it's well past time you got one. Prepare a little talk and brush your teeth, because you might just get a pat on the head from this. What’s in it for me? If you an in-house developer/designer, and don’t have plans on retiring at your current compan... [More]