Richard Stelmach - Web Design and Multimedia Portfolio

(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 :-/

I wouldn’t read TOO much into this picture. I did the heart and knife before, a litttleee bit expressionistic perhaps, but I wouldn’t worry about my sanity, I’m pretty much a certified sane person. Maybe I’m taking away any validity from this picture but more than anything I wanted to make something look good rather than make some amazing political statement, and the text fitted well rather than touch youth knife culture of Britain. :-/ Other text I considered - ‘abandon all hope’, ‘the children are our future’, ‘Do you feel anything’.

I like the knife and heart action but the picture isn’t quite there.

Maybe this picture would be better if I just kept my mouth shut. Atleast it draws attention away from my last post which was a bit below par.