Richard Stelmach - Web Design and Multimedia Portfolio

Probably one of the nicest accolades I’ve had:

“My main area of focus is web design and I think that for 2010 we’re going to see more personalization in design. I think this will include seeing more hand drawn and collage elements and copywriting from a 1st person perspective. All things that will make the reader feel more of a personal connection to the face of the site. I base this on the number sites tending toward this trend and the response they have been getting. Some visual examples to support my theory Dan Whittaker Creative and Creative Binge.”

Taken from http://www.littleboxofideas.com/blog/features/designers-predict-design-trends-for-2010-part-i

It’s nice to be used as an example of design trends for next year, especially as I designed this site a year or two ago.

Though I’m not sure the whole illustrative / textured / personalised site will be a big ‘trend’ next year. I reckon it will be probably remain as a design style and fairly uncommon, making it all the much nicer when someone does it. There are obviously many different styles, and the websites that pop up in design galleries will hopefully remain diverse. My only prediction is that the whole minamalist, simple stylee with big text and featured image trend will continue for a while. It is a good stylee but only really works on small scale sites.

As the national express east line got taken over by the government’s ‘East Coast’ they launched with a new logo and colour scheme but why does it look like something out of mid 20th century soviet Russia?

Part of my daily Photoshop for Web Design tips.

So you have your website design all ready to ‘cut up’ while you’re doing the html/css and think “what is the best way of exporting the different parts of this design, I wish someone would tell me, please I just want to know?”. Luckily for you I’m writing this incredibly comprehensive blog post of the bestest technique, honed to perfection over many many years.

Okay, it seems like such a simple task but in reality there’s no definitive way of doing it, some people crop, some people slice (if they’re stupid), and I’m sure there must be 1000s of different techniques. In fact google says there are 246,000 “photoshop save for web techniques” and google never lies.

My process is:

1. CTRL + SHIFT + E (merge layers)
2. M (marquee tool)
3. Select the area you want as an image, this is easier if you use guides
4. CTRL + C (copy)
5. CTRL + N (new document - it automatically creates the document at the same size as what you copied)
6. CTRL + V (paste)
7. CTRL + SHIFT + ALT + S - save for web

badaboom - just set it at your preferred optimised setting and click okay, jobs-a-good-en.

I have finally succomb to Twitter, almost like the moment I finally realised a mobile phone could be useful in the year 2000.

But what do I twitter, pointless sh*t or useful pearls of wisdom from my years of web design experience and learnding.

Atleast temporarily choose the latter and bestow unto you my knowledge…..that’s if you follow me, currently I have 1 genuine follower and random weirdo. The 1 genuine follower is a programmer so i’m thinking may not enjoy my tweets too much!

So for the next 4 weeks starting today I’m going to chirp 1 tip per day. They may not be ground breaking, my favourite short cut, my favourite web gallery, but hopefully they will be of interest.

How will I get more followers, I don’t know, perhaps I could try begging?? Not to appear desperate for attention but…

please follow me!

It’s only taken me a year and a half to get round to adding these but here they are:

Christmas flash games

The ski and particularly the snowball game were quite tricky to create but I was really happy with the results at the time. The idea was to help entice customers onto the christmas special area and spend spend spend! My programming friends also allowed people to enter a prize draw if they submitted they’re score.

Beneath the evil marketings ideas I also enjoyed making the games! And I hope you like them too, despite their unseasonal timing.

I like it when I get on sites, it makes me feel warm inside, I then like to tell people about it, hence this post. Soon I will think of something better to write about, until then, all you have are my selfish, ego-feeding lists of sites that the binge has featured on.

This showcase is about the hand drawn, web design style:

http://www.myinkblog.com/2009/05/16/a-showcase-of-popular-web-design-trends/

I agree that is useful sometimes to give a site a personal touch. While a site may often need to appeal to a wide audience, you can still strike a balance between fully personal and expressionistic design, and wide-appealing, user friendly design. This is especially useful in a personal site such as mine which I believe should contain some individualism as it is ultimately, about me.

I managed to appear on this post about breaking design rules. I don’t really see myself as the biggest of rebels, though there is no denying, the Maverick(from Top Gun) - esque connotations are appealing.

http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/06/10-web-design-rules-that-you-can-break/

It is definitely true that if you do something original it will stand out, and sometimes breaking the trend or ‘design rules’ is a way of doing this. Also it highlights the old addage that there is always an exception to the rule.

And another illustrative showcase:

http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/60-beautiful-hand-drawn-web-design/

Illustration isn’t as common in websites for one reason or another, so I guess it’s no surprise that the illustrative header on this site has helped it stand out.

I always like to show people work I’m proud of, maybe to ego trip or for an innocent pat on the back, I’m not sure. Lately I haven’t been able to share much I have done either as I’ve had to be secret or the sites haven’t gone live yet, hence the stagnated blog :-/

But anyway, I should explain the reasoning behind the ‘yay!’.

I’ve had 2 morale boosters which is always good.

(1) Recently I did a post on ‘top 10′ type lists overwhleming digg.com. Well I’ve kind of come to the conclusion that I usually tend to dislike them unless I appear on them!

http://sixrevisions.com/web_design/30-creative-examples-of-illustrations-in-web-design/

It’s pretty cool that I managed to get on this as I’m trying to further my illustration skills and it’s nice to know this site is still getting some attention even though I designed it over a year ago. + extra morale booster for appearing in the same list as a bunch of design agencies and famous designer Andy Clarke.

(2) Second morale booster is that mach4cs.co.uk, a site I did for Pontefract based, computer repair company got on a design gallery site, generating a few hundred visits, which is bound to help the site’s SEO:

http://www.cssdrive.com/index.php/main/galleryitem/mach4_computer_services/

I’ve decided to start offering this service again. In the past I’ve designed about 5 band websites (including pre-signed pigeon detectives!) and I quite enjoy them as they allow for creativity and also they have pose the challenge of matching the design to the style of music. I usually just do this by listening to the music and getting a feel for an appropriate style.

Not sure how will advertise this but I’ve started by posting on the Leeds Music Scene website, for what I think is a pretty damn cheap price of 450 quid.

Having done band sites before I’ve developed a decent CMS, created in PHP, that amongst other things allows bands to upload their own photos which automatically get resized and optimised. I’m also interested in taking on logo designs which I enjoy as they purely focus on concepts and design rather than any techincal lark.

Click on the thumbnail below to see a design of a site I recently did for a friend:

(creative/design/skills wise)

I need to improve my skillz somehow I reckon. “How? They’re already so good?” I hear you say. My design skills seem to naturally progress aslong as I keep myself busy but I’d like to improve some aspect of my skills further to gain the satisfaction or stop any niggling doubt in my own ability.

Last year I guess I mainly moved forward by learning javascript and now I’m glad that I’m pretty good with jquery and mootools, able to write pretty handy stuff, including AJAX, that is a necessary skill nowadays with javascript able to create very useful features. I’ve also learned Illustrator and improved my illustration skills.

Anyway, as probably most people do, I have a large abundance of ideas that i’d like to do but from either lazyness, procrastination or busyness I probably won’t: fill my new moleskine with amazing drawings, become an amazing ASP.NET programmer, redesign my portfolio and get on all the gallery sites again, be as good at graphic design as I am web design. But hey ho, hopefully I’ll achieve something.

This year I got on design galleries for 2 websites and created a popular photoshop brush set, I need to atleast match that or is that showing some kind of obsessive, masochistic behaviour, I’m not sure.

Atleast I am going to be playing the drums in a band again, this should definitely feed my creative hunger (forgive connotations, I’ve been reading vampire books lately), and now I am wiser, the music could even be good!

Now and again (i try not to be too obsessive about it) I peruse my google analytics. Perhaps this is through boredom or self gratification, I’m not sure but one of the highlights of this experience for me is looking at the weird keywords people have found my site with:

• ‘e-motivator’ - okay this probably isn’t that strange as I do have probably the best e-motivator device around, I hope the people who found it were motivated.
• ‘crap design for multimedia’ - it’s unfortunate my site comes up first when you search for this
• ‘best multimedia portfolio websites 2008′ - luckily this one cancels out the last one and I think this one is definitely more applicable!
• ‘can whales breath out of water’ - simple answer, no they can’t….or can they, actually I’m not sure but my blog doesn’t provide the answer for this anyway, it does tell you about liquefaction.
• ‘gay handshake’ - if you have ever shook my hand, you will know this is a ridiculous search term to find my site with seen as though it was created by me, who has an incredibly powerful manly handshake. I even did a picture about a ‘firm’, yes ‘firm’, un-gay handshake here.
• ‘high tack graphics pontefract’ - I’d like to think I’m not the source of any tacky graphics found in Pontefract but it seems someone must have been enraged by the low level of graphic design in Pontefract perhaps!?
• ‘john bunnell dick’ - he is a bit of dick but also an undeliberate comedy legend - find out why here.
• ‘what will i look like as an old person’ - unfortunately I don’t know. Because of the success of my facebook picture, I have vast amount of facebook and age related search queries. Check it out here if you want, but don’t expect it to have any kind of prophetic abilities.

I guess the moral of the story is that Google rankings don’t necessarily correspond with the truth, such as searching for what is the meaning of life, Google tells me it is “the fourth studio album from German thrash metal band Tankard”…. I’m pretty sure I won’t find the answer there :-/