Today I have yet again been faced with this:

Personally, I think something needs to change with regards to domain name registrations. Perhaps if a domain isn't put to good use within 6 months it should be put up for sale again?

At least the ordeal inspired me to make something!

Twitter has today launched a major new design of their apps across the board. Interestingly the announcement on http://fly.twitter.com came with a call to download the official mobile apps in order to get access to the new design on your computer, was this to reinforce a mobile first approach? Or perhaps it was just a ploy to get people back into using the official twitter app? Either way, I updated the iOS app & hey presto! The new web design appeared almost instantly.

I think one of the key things about the new design, for me, is that the design is now consistent across all the platforms. Personally, I always felt the official twitter iPhone app was quite seperate from the web version, not only in design but in certain aspects of functionality too (seeing which users had retweeted my tweets was something I could never find!).
The new design removes this inconsistency and brings the two experiences together through the newly defined areas: home, connect & discover.

Eee Gads! Two blog posts in one day? Surely not!

I've been hard at work finishing some designs off and thought I would post both today. Much like the Level Up design I posted earlier today, I think the following design would make a pretty cool poster:

I'd be surprised if the concept has not been explored before but nonetheless I decided to give it a whirl & create a more literal bowler hat!
I originally wanted to call it: "the bowler's hat" but "the bowler" tagline fit slightly better within the design; plus it sounds as though it could be the calling card of some bowling based super hero perhaps?

I seem to be going through somewhat of a bowler hat phase within my designs at the moment, perhaps I should start wearing one...

DrupalCon London is almost over, the sessions have all been wrapped up and all that remains tomorrow is the code sprints to try and put some of the awesome ideas from the week straight into action. This was actually my first ever DrupalCon, unfortunately I could only attend one of the days but even so; I learnt a lot from the sessions I attended, the entire atmosphere was great and I'll definitely be attending future conferences!

The web standardistas started the day off by delivering a rather interesting keynote on designing the sustainable web; in which they explored the concept of creating sites which are not only designed to be responsive across a variety of different devices and browser widths, but also how they can be designed in a way which looks great both today and in the future.

Detecting the width of a browser window can be very useful when designing a website, it allows you to create a more responsive design which is suited to the current browser dimensions.

Using the small chunk of jQuery below, you can easily detect the current width of a web browser & perform various actions when the width reaches a particular range of values. When redeveloping my site I opted to use this method to add a different body class to the site when the browser width reaches a below particular points: "smaller" when the width reaches below 960px but greater than 400px and "smallest" when the width is below "400px". The additional body classes then allowed me to alter the position/style of particular elements on the page.

A little design piece I've been working on today, it's called "fading chances".

I don't think it's quite there yet & perhaps needs something else but I thought I would post it anyway. I find it's quite good to just stop and take a step back, maybe get some feedback before I add something that perhaps might not be needed!

Like it? Hate it? Indifferent? Let me know in the comments below.

P.S. Don't smoke.

Last week I released the latest version of designedbythomas.co.uk. If you ever visited the old site then you will see there has been quite a drastic change to the overall theme and structure.

I decided the time had come to upgrade from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 and as part of the upgrade I took the opportunity to assess the site as a whole to see where improvements could be made. The major change I wanted to implement, and had wanted to implement for a while, was the header section. The header section of the old site (pictured below) was massively oversized and took up most of the space "above the fold" which meant that visitors to the site had to scroll down to see any meaningful content. Definitely not an ideal situation when you want people to be interested in the content of your site! As a result I completely changed the header section for the new site, reduced the size of the logo, placed the navigation links horizontally rather than vertically and replaced the massive site tagline with a more focused tagline below the navigation links (which is meant as a one line overview of the current section a person is currently viewing).

The only tools you'll need for a social media campaign:

You don't have to look too far to see that the major social networking sites are littered with these so called "campaigns".

If you are planning a social media campaign then please try to steer clear of these tools otherwise, you're not really planning a campaign: you're planning a competition.

Feel free to share any awesome social media campaigns in the comments below!

I've been playing about with the idea of a design involving the outline of a person, much like the style of the Mad Men opening titles, however I have been a bit too busy lately to actually design anything!

I managed to play around with some of the ideas today and I came up with the following:

I'm thinking of putting together a series of posters along the same style but for now I hope you enjoy this design, feel free to let me know any thoughts you have in the comments below.

Recently, I was lucky enough to receive a Forrst invite from Jim Ramsden of designfridge.co.uk and over the past couple of months I have been actively contributing to the site whenever I get chance.

For those of you who aren't familiar with Forrst: it is an online community aimed specifically at designers & developers. In fact, the whole community is invite only in a bid to regulate the members and ensure the community is only used by actual designers/developers and not filled to the brim with recruiters for example. The 'closed' aspect to Forrst actually strengthens the content within the site and allows for more relevant discussions, comments and critiques from people who are more familiar with the designing & development processes.

A few months back I discovered the brilliant fontstache/typestache poster which seems to show the personality of each font used through the style of the curly bracket.

Inspired by this I had a bit of fun putting together some "apostrophaces" - by using the apostrophe of a font I wanted to see if a certain personality came through when put in the context of a face.

Have a look at the result below & let me know what you think! Alternatively, have a go at creating some apostrophaces of your own & post a link in the comments!

P.S: The faces were created using each fonts quotation marks but "Apostrophace" just seems to roll off the tongue ;)

The CSS3 property: box-shadow allows you to create simple drop-shadows on block level elements within a webpage. The box below shows this effect in action:

.selector{
box-shadow: 
x-direction
y-direction
blur-amount colour;
} 

The box-shadow property also allows you to place the shadow within the element using the inset value, this allows you to create some pretty cool effects including: photo vignettes.

Take this photo for example:

A pretty photo I am sure you will agree, but let us see what it's like when we add a vignette!

There we go! Now, how about a slightly different colour?

A few weeks ago I decided my website content pages needed a bit of a spruce up, less of a 'redesign' more of a 'refactoring' really.

Whilst designing the new content pages I also decided to make some changes to the backend too; moving away from the ZEN base theme to a completely custom theme contstructed from scratch.

I am in the process of writing up the changes I've made in slightly more detail, there are some pretty cool changes I made to the Drupal side of the site which I wan't to share.

For the moment however, there are some additional changes needing to be made for phase 2!

Take a look around at the changes made in phase 1, hopefully they make the site slightly nicer to use & read from. If you have any feedback then please let me know via the contact page or in the comments below.

Enjoy!

Whenever an "enter password" message box pops up on my iPhone I immediately enter my iTunes password, it's pretty much a an immediate action and I don't tend to look at what the message is saying once I see the word: "Password" I just zone out and enter it.

So when the familiar message box below popped up I proceeded to enter my iTunes password as per usual!

The main problem here was that it wasn't asking me for my iTunes password but in actual fact it was asking for my GMail password for the push Email notifications I receive from my account.

By entering my iTunes password obviously this was wrong and the message box kept reappearing, after a couple of incorrect attempts I suddenly realised I needed to enter my GMail password! So I did.

Over the past couple of months I've been busy working on my final year project & dissertation and as a result the blog has suffered slightly!

Fear not my faithful reader(s), I am back!

As an initial post I would like to showcase my new business card designs I had printed recently as part of the new brand design and the designedbythomas.co.uk URL change.

In the process of designing the cards I had a number of different ideas however these all seemed to contain too much "stuff" on them so in the end I ditched everything but the minimum and I'm really happy with the results!

I used the online printing service: moo.com for the first time and was very impressed by the quality and efficiency at which the cards were produced, it really is a top-notch service!

I think we all need a bit of inspiration once in a while, regardless of the field you work in! It is always useful to find a consistent source of inspiration which you can admire whenever a creative block forms over your head.

Not long ago I came across designfridge - a brilliant collection of various different websites and website designers all packaged into a cool clean site.

Design fridge now showcases more than 3,000 inspirational designs from various different designers as well as providing interesting articles and useful tips. The site really does do a lot to inspire and motivate you once you see the designs in there.

I got in touch with the creator of design fridge: Jim Ramsden (@ramsden) to see if he would consider putting my own website design in the fridge: to my delight I made it in!

I am very pleased to announce a brand new website design project: andyhudsonmusic.com has just gone live!

The website is part of a complete redesign & rebranding project which aims to increase Andys online presence as well as giving him a more professional and refined brand image to operate under. As well as a new design the new website also comes with increased functionality which gives Andy the ability to easily upload his music tracks to the website himself.

I built the site using Drupal 6. The site style is a completely custom theme I designed as part of the overall rebrand project, personally I think the overall style works really well and the new logo design I wrote about; works well with the overall aesthetics of the site.

When people think of design as a creative field, chances are they immediately think of mainstream design fields such as graphic designers, interior designers or fashion designers for example. There is one area however, which I feel is often overlooked by most: game design.

Now, by game design I am talking about the aesthetics within games and not the design of the overall game structure which deals more with aspects such as the rules of the game for example.

I have put together 3 examples of games which, for me, showcase brilliant aesthetics.

Fallout 3

Fallout 3 is set in a post-apocalyptic Washington DC now known as: The Capital Wasteland. The whole style of the game is as you would expect from a post-apocalyptic world: crumbled buildings, irradiated water, remnants of a world which once was.

Amidst the destroyed landscape of the capital wasteland there is a heavy throwback to the 1950's - the time at which nuclear war was predicted and the mass of fallout shelters were built. The 1950's design is present even before you set foot in the game - the opening menu and loading screens consist of dated, bedraggled & sometimes missing slides from an old survival guide.

I recently came across the site: behance.net - the site showcases creative portfolios and work from various people all over the world.

At the moment you cannot simply signup to the site, I am not sure whether or not this will change in the future but at the moment you can register interest in the site then be invited to join it. I registered my interest in the site and within a few hours was invited to join so it was quite a quick process.

Once invited I could build up a portfolio of my recent work, for the less tech-savvy creatives out there I can see behance.net being an excellent medium for getting their work noticed as opposed to trying to create a website for themselves. For me I am particularly interested in the way behance can help me to grow as a designer and developer, the site offers the options to request feedback on work, creative tips for design & development from other users and a whole gallery full of inspiring designs.

I am currently in the process of creating my portfolio for use on the site, if you are on there then why not send me message or get in touch! My profile is: behance.net/thomasdavis.

For those of you who follow me on twitter - you may have read that I recently became the owner of an Apple iPhone. I must admit that it was quite a hard decision, the lack of a camera above 3 megapixels being the main reason I didn't really want to join the Apple masses. Nevertheless, I now have the device and must admit: I love it!

One of the first things I did with my new iPhone was to check out my site to see how it looks and feels, to be honest I think the theme could do with some tweaks to make it more mobile device friendly, but at the moment I am concentrating more on other projects so it is sitting on the back burner!

In the meantime, I added my site to the iPhone home screen to see what sort of icon came up for the bookmark - I thought it may take the favicon already in place and use that for the bookmark icon but it didn't. So I did some searching online and found that it is ridiculously simple to add a custom bookmark icon for your own website for use with the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Here is how it's done:

1. Create your custom icon.

Apple provide some official guidelines for creating a custom bookmark:

After months of speculation and a plethora of "is this the new Apple Tablet?" images, Apple finally revealed to the world: The iPad.

The anticipation behind the iPad release was monumental, something which is now common place with all Apple announcements; day after day there was another blog post about what the tablet would do, what it would look like and what it would be called. Inevitably however, with such a huge amount of speculation there are bound to be split decisions upon the actual device upon its release - the iPad is no different.

A lot of people in the online world are complaining about the iPad, claiming its nothing new, nothing but a bigger iPhone and somewhat of a letdown. Perhaps these views come from the vertigo suffered from placing the iPad on such a high pedestal? Honestly, I think that for some people: no matter what the device did, it would always be a letdown.

A major aspect of website design & development is cross-browser support: making sure your website looks and feels 'roughly' the same in different web browsers running on different operating systems.

At the moment there are 7 main browsers in popular use: Internet Explorer versions 6, 7 & 8; Firefox; Chrome; Safari and Opera - all of which have slightly different ways of interpreting web pages. Without a doubt the largest thorn in any website developers side is Internet Explorer 6 - initially released in 2001 IE6 now lacks the support of current web standards making it increasingly difficult for website designers so much so that some designers/developers now choose to provide no support for IE6.

The problem is; IE6 IS still being used (according to the w3schools.com browser usage statistics: IE6 accounted for around 10 to 18% in 2009.) yet regardless of whether or not website designers choose to ignore IE6, they should still accommodate for users visiting a site from the different, more up-to-date browsers.

OK, now you may look at the title of this post and think that I have lost it but keep with me!

I am infact talking about this little critter:

He is the afore mentioned Nabaztag and is a very cool little device created by Violet. The Nabaztag is Wi-Fi enabled and connects to the internet via your wireless network, once connected the Nabaztag can perform a whole host of internet tasks such as: reading out a news or RSS feed, notifying you when you have a new email or even wiggling it's ears when someone visits your site (not advised for high traffic sites!).

Along with the Nabaztag, there is the mir:ror & the nano:ztag -

(the mir:ror is the white disc shaped object and the little rabbits are the nano:ztags)

Google have just released a video of their real-time search function.

So what does this mean? Well, if someone was searching for an article on the new realtime search function in Google at around 8pm on the 7th of December 2009 then my blog post and all the related blog posts will show within the real-time results.

Basically, it gives users access to up-to-the-minute results from a wide variety of sources and from the video it seems twitter will play a big role in the real-time searches.

Check out the video below for the preview:

Just a quick announcement: I recently changed the base URL for my blog from "blogs" to "blog" - this shouldn't really affect anything too much but if you have come across a page not found error when trying to reach the blog from an external link then this is why.

For those of you who don't know what Google Wave is - check out this guide to google wave from Mashable.com.

At approximately 8am on the 30th October 2009, I received an invite to Google Wave!

I had been informed that an invite was heading my way from a twitter contact (@BruceElrick), but the invite process is not instant and for me it was 3 days from being put in the invite queue to getting my invite!

ADVICE: If you have been invited to try google wave by someone but not received the link then just be patient, it will come through soon! I'm not sure why the invite process isn't instant, my guess is that Google were slightly overwhelmed by the amount of users signing up and so to limit growth they are restraining the invite process.

Yes I have now increased my portfolio section to include my previous graphic design work.

This section will contain all graphics work (not website design) and will be updated very soon with all my previous work.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy checking out the: awesome new graphic design portfolio

(and remember if you need any graphic design work doing then contact me)

As a freelancer I am currently not fixed in any one location for work.

For the past 3 years I have been primarily working in Lancaster as I worked towards my degree.
(I recently received my results for the third year and was very very pleased to have acheived a 1st!)

In the academic year 2009/10 I will be completing what will probably be my final year at Lancaster University, hopefully graduating with an MSci in I.T. & Media Communications.

So for about half of the year I am based in Lancaster, moving back to Manchester out of term time.

After I graduate I am looking to stay in the Manchester area perhaps looking at Salford and the soon to be built/finished Media City in Salford Quays.

The beauty of online work is that it can be done pretty much everywhere! So it really doesn't matter where I am based to do my work as I am free to travel to any client which may require my online services

Anyway, I hope that clears up any confusion regarding my location!