Goodbye blogger!

Hey everyone!

Thank you ALL for taking the time to read my blog!

I'm not going anywhere though, don't worry!

I'm simply moving homes. My blog is now accessible on my own personal website which you can find here.

Thanks for reading and I'll see you over at the other side!

http://www.samuelmarshall.com

KIACS Online - New Design

Here is the latest design for my website.

If you compare the new design with the current design, it's clear to see how much my design ideas and quality of design as developed in just under a year.

Originally, my logo had 4 different colours and the font wasn't very modern looking. I've decided to stay with the layout of the logo (the words under each other) but I've decided to use a clear, funky font and just the green because it looks more slick, more fun and less rough.

The logo on the far right is my official logo, the arrow with a blue circle underneath, reflects the cycle of design, development and deliverance. By crossing it over with an arrow, this connotates a different "direction" in my work, and reflects my approach to design being clear, simple and effective.

I've continued to use the green and blue as the main colours for the website, dropping the red and white as these offered too much variation and detracted from the website development as I was trying to work with too many colours.

In terms of content, the website will house my graphic and website design work I've created over the last 2 or 3 years. Not only will there be a portfolio section with live previews of my work, but the blog will serve the purpose that this blog currently does. This will all be backed up by my twitter page, where users will be able to access my latest tweets, straight into the website.

I will be using HTML, CSS, PHP, MySql and probably (hopefully) jQuery where I can.

Overall, this new website design is sleek, modern, clean and effective. It will serve its purpose to a great standard and will be a design I am happy to keep for years to come hopefully.

NTU Pride - Committee Interviews and Outtakes

For the NTU Pride website, I went out and filmed the committee members to get their feedback on the year so far.

I've spent a few hours editing the videos alone and with my fellow committee member, Mikey and we've finally finished and released the videos.

They will be going on the promotional DVDs ready for fresher's fayre in October.

NTU Pride Promotional Trailor - Sex and the City style!

I've been working for just a couple of hours on the promotional material I'm creating for the NTU Pride Freshers Fayre Promotional DVDs (try saying that again!) and so far I've managed to remake the Sex and the City 2 trailor!

Check out what we're got so far!

Beautiful Interior + Shit Food + Crap Knives = Zizzi

So me and my two friends thought we'd catch a bite to eat before we went to see comedian, Shappi Khorsandi and Jon Richardson at the Nottingham Playhouse.

Various places were tossed around but we settled on Zizzi's after I remember going while I was in London a few years back.

What a mistake that was!

Zizzi, if you've never been, looks nice and modern on the outside, very very beautiful inside and very comfortable too. The furnishings are clean, cream and bright with a very expensive twist (such as trees growing in the restaurant and various alcoves and, I counted, three seperate stair cases). The staff were very welcoming and inviting, maybe this was their downfall.

Now when I go out for a meal with my friends, I like to think I'll have a good time, so when the waitress asked if we would like bread or olives to begin with, I eagerly said yes. Having just placed my order for a refreshing lemonade.

Conversation flowed, innuendos galore, lots of gorping at the men... the waitress brought over the beginnings of our meal. This is where things went pairshaped.

My glass of lemonade was the size of a small mobile phone, the bread that came was fairly dry and bland, of which only had two of each type of bread, not much use for three of us. The olives came too, I promptly found out that my two other friends don't like olives, great! More for me!... Not so great when they tasted like they'd been sat in vinager all their lives and you had about 20 to eat before your main course.

After discarding the "starters", our main courses arrived fairly soon after!

Whilst ordering my Sophia pizza, I was asked if I wanted the thinner but slightly larger base, I said yes, thinking the price would probably be the same, considering they're using the same if not less dough...

Looking around at my friend's food options I thought I had a pretty good choice, their food came with rather small and bland looking salads, I thought my rather massive pizza would just be enough to fill a rather average sized appetite.

5 minutes later and I'm still sawing away at my pizza with the worlds bluntest knife. My two friends are happily gobbling away at their lasagne and calzone... I'm still here, sawing into my pizza. Eventually, my calzone friend had finished and I was no further into ingesting my pizza, I signaled for the waitress to come over. Still in fairly high spirits (mainly due to the dehydration and good conversation) I asked the waitress for a new knife, but in doing so, in fact said "Do you have another knife? Something like a steak knife, because this knife is crap." A slip of the tounge, but none the less, completely acurate! To kick my mood down several pegs, she said "No sorry" and smiled a concerning smile. I had already gone around my friends and tried their knives, so once she brought back a knife of the same cutting ability, I was less than impressed.
I proceeded to tear off the cold, tasteless pizza with my teeth to try and ingest some of the money I had paid to get this pizza.

Finished my "meal" and asked for the bill. £41.50 for three people. Fair enough. But once I totalled my meal's price it came to £20! What on!?
Well, the pizza on it's own was £9.50, plus another £1.50 for the extra thin, slightly wider pizza. My drink was £2.00, £3.00 for the bread and a staggering £4.00 for the olives!

Dissheartened at the terrible meal, I was in too lower spirits to give Zizzi's more than a hard pushed 5 / 10, and maybe the interior helped push it towards a 6, but half those points are probably made up from the conversation we had and the fairly average talent available across the other few tables.

Think I'll stick to at food Trent Kebabs or Food Factory for a good night out!

I've Won an Award!

During my time on the NTU Pride committee as publicity officer, I've been given the opportunity to rebrand the society and create their new website.

Incredibly, my efforts have been recognised and I have been awarded with "Best Website" from the Societies awards.

This has been an incredible acheivement for me and I couldn't be happier!

Tribe Scuba - Photoshop Mock Up

My first and second computer mock up design. More to come!

Tribe Scuba - Initial Designs

These are my first few initial designs for the layout and colour schemes for the new Scuba Diving website. I've also created a mind-map to get some of my ideas down on paper before going about implementing any sort of initial design, either drawn or photoshopped.

PRIDE: Tweeks and alterations

The NTU Pride website has been playing on my mind a bit recently due to some little flaws in design and it not being graphically professional enough for my perfective nature!

So, I decided to do a bit of editing!

I've changed, on every page, the navigation menu from individual pictures to a simple text navigation, which has cut back on LOADS and LOADS of code but looks identical. The sub-menus still need converting, but it's starting to come together.

To make the NTU Pride brand more accessible, I decided to create the "badges" branding concept. This is where there are individual "badges" or "tiles" which indicate each sexuality or each different minority. These are refelected through the NTU Pride logo and pick up on each individual colour. This has also enabled me to create continuity throughout the website and printed media, especially as next year's fresher's fayre flyers encorporate this design.

In the realm of cleaning up code, I've also made the background image MUCH smaller and just repeated it on the Y axis, so that it loads much more quickly and can be repeated, meaning that text no longer over runs the end of the website, an issue I've been meaning to change for quite some time.

The auto-image changer has also been on my mind due it the images being quite old and dated, I've decided to remove those images and replace them with the "badges" idea to maintain continuity and it also gives the space to promote that NTU Pride is now officially sponsored by Propaganda.

To come: redesign of the committee section and ideas to cut down text.

LUCY: Website tweeks and development

I have gone through and tweeked various things throughout Lucy's website and added in a more secure login system to prevent hacking of the blog and gig updates etc.

Fixed various design flaws - including too much inconsistancy between headings and colours etc. Things are a lot more structured and userfriendly now, including headings, possitioning and other TINY little things in the code that usually wouldn't go noticed, but make a massive difference to the professional quality such as padding etc.

I've also made the add, edit and delete forms for the blog and gigs MUCH more user friendly by changing the text boxes to drop down menus.

You can now upload photos up the 3MB and the system will automatically downsize it to fit within the constraints of the website WITHOUT distortion, however the file size will remain the same.

The login procedure is now MUCH more secure. People can't edit the blog or gigs by accessing the individual pages, they MUST log in. (Which was previously a flaw in the last log in design)

I've added in a random image selecter on the home page so that it will randomly choose an image to display which is a photo of Lucy and a comment that someone has said about her. (Refresh the home page to see this working)

The alignment of the text is now justified so that it spreads evenly accross the page. (Small minor change, big difference!)

And finally, the MP3 player begins playing the first track when you load up each page.

I'm handing in my work on Thursday and doing my presentation on Friday... I think we're almost finished!!

I've talked to my brother about getting the website online at Lucy's own domain, and I hope to get that online by the end of March. Fingers crossed!