Richard Stelmach - Web Design and Multimedia Portfolio

I recently created a poster for The Novl Cuisine Challenge, an experimental project by Craig Burgess and Dave Pannell, where they have designed a poster a day for 365 days. Crazy crazy. I tried to do a slightly modernist illustration, using few colours and basic composition. I added texture via Photoshop brushes. I used Dinner Deals as the theme as it a topic I do a lot of commercial work on, so taking another angle like this was refreshing for me.

I like these 365 day challenges people do, they’re great practise, really pushing creativity as you are (obviously) doing something everyday and forced to think of original concepts.

I have thought about doing something similar - maybe not for a whole year, perhaps a month. An illustration a day - that sums up the main event of the day, or feeling.

Another couple of projects I would like to do are a set of ten illustration based on The Brothers Grimm fairy tales, or short stories + illustrations of famous battles for children.

Both of which I will probably not get round to doing - damn my motivational levels!!!

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.

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!

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/

(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!

If you’ve read my two previous posts you may get the feeling I’m liking illustration of late.

I often go through design phases which to some extent I don’t like as I believe I shouldn’t be constrained to a certain style but at the same time I think it’s unavoidable for any designer.

As well as experiment I’ve also been looking at sites such as grainedit that has awesome daily posts on vintage illustration and design. I’ve always been interested in vintage design which you may be able to see in these: halloween, summer sale, kitchen and jack la lanne. But illustration is another step forward.

I recently had a nice subject matter of a rail offer and I found myself using flat shapes and along with my love for giving texture to designs, it seemed a great combo.

If you can’t see a train running along with smoke coming out, you probably haven’t got flash player installed! Either that or banners aren’t as good as I thought they were!

The banners provided an extra challenge of having a side and front on view. I gave texture by creating a transparent png in Photoshop and placing it on the top layer in the flash movie.

It’s hard to measure the impact of interesting or good design opposed to an in your face super mega tack approach but I would like to think the originality of the banners would attract people to possibly read them or give them a click.

[sorry for this horrendously large white space, but the banner is so high, i’m sorry!]

Today I’ve continued to try and improve my illustration by choosing an illustrative style for a design. The theme was ‘added extras’ so I wanted to create an illustrative montage, quite a common technique, I imagine originating from pop art. This was my initial illustration.

However, I found that the black and white didn’t quite work with the design so I needed to add colour. Also as the design needed a heading and strap line with it the text on the illustration made it too busy.

The illustration progressed to this:

I again enjoyed bringing it into Photoshop to add texture and a watercolour feel. I like how it has a nice friendly feel to it so was fairly pleased with the result.

I followed the style throughout the page by creating the following illustrations representing various things.

I love Photoshop brushes and now I love illustration so I really enjoy combining the two. Finally I couldn’t resist over stylising the main illustration as an experiment.

I’m still planning on doing some artwork around the chav/knife theme. Also I want to buy some ‘how to draw characters’ books to try and improve my character drawing skills.

Of late I have more and more been wanting to get good at illustration. Illustration is very handy in design and although I can do illustrations I have definitely not mastered it.

There are a few things that attract me to illustration. Firstly the expressionistic aspect. I imagine you can just put pen to paper and let your ideas and emotions flow, without need to even have something in front of you to base your drawing on. Secondly I’m a big fan of manga and anime which often inspires me to try it out myself.

This confuses me a little. I did A-Level Art and I think I’m pretty good at drawing real life stuff, especially with the pen. But I’ve never been good drawing off the top of my head. This is not to say I don’t have a good imagination. I can design and have always had a creative imagination, sometimes a bad thing when I watch horror films or Ghost Hunters International! If it is the case that illustrators have such a vivid imagination that helps them draw, I definitely envy them!

On the other hand it could also be practise, much like the BBC programme the other night “The Making of Me: Vanessa-Mae”. It explored the nurture or nature debate and settled on 50/50 which I think I’d agree with.

So there could be hope for me yet! I’ve been thinking on getting some ‘how to illustrate’ books. I’ve always liked drawing so it could be fun even if I’m just recreating characters in the books etc. One things for sure, i really need a small scanner!!! Last time I desperately photographed some drawings, what a crap idea that was…

I have been yearning for a creative project of late so illustrating could feed my hunger. I’ve already had some ideas to do some drawings about chavs and knife crime along with some depressing strap lines, so I’m really pining to do that. Hopefully i’ll have something up here soon.

Earlier I had to do a banner of the 02 arena, I saw a good excuse to use illustration opposed to photographic. Later I stylised it more. I love the combination of bringing it into Photoshop to add texture, giving it an authentic feel. I also experimented with lighting effects (filters > render > lighting).

Here are some nice links for illustrations i’ve noticed lately:

• 58 Wonderfully Cute Illustrated Monster Characters
• Will Murai

I saw some others but can’t remember where now Sorry for the crap list!

O and one last thing, I did manage to get top for Pontefract Web Design! Woo, a small victory, atleast for my ego. Though I didn’t get top for Web Design Pontefract, how bizarre.

As some will know I am from Pontefract, the home of sweets, liquorice and many a happy memory.

The allure of Pontefract, is, lets say, quite subtle, an acquired taste. Perhaps it’s the bald lobster men (as ponte-folk have been described) drinking on a summer’s day with bloated stomachs that have been finely developed with many a pie or the dilapidated castle, a reminder of our former glory that puts people off. Ironically, it was the wise Ponte-folk that knocked it down themselves, sick of all the fighting it attracted. An important part of their lives, this peaceful chasm would need to be filled with drunken brawls erupting from the fine array of drink pits that Pontefract prides itself on. (pictured right: the unhappy flag is perhaps meant to detract people’s eyes from the ‘castle’)

“Bloody Pomfret”, Shakespeare said, a more apt name than recently described on the Pontefract Liquorice Trust site:

“…this gem is almost hidden from the rest of the world.”

Almost hidden, unfortunately not quite.

Yet it does have many a redeeming feature. Historic buildings, cobbled streets and green fields. I can’t help but love it.

Not famous for it’s abundance of web designers, perhaps in a moment of self importance, only a moment, I thought I may have good google rankings for Ponte related web design. Yet in moment of terror I realised I don’t even get on the list for Pontefract. Most disappointing. I realised I didn’t have any meta action, which seems to have become important again.

With my legendary victory over Ed Stelmach many eons ago, I thought my battles were over. But once again I must tussle the unforgiving realms of SEO to claim my deserved place at the top of “Pontefract Web Design” google rankings. I will let you know if I am successful.

Until then you will have to gaze at my latest website, mach4cs.co.uk, he really does do beasty (as in powerful) cheap computers. This and some other recent additions has left my first portfolio page looking its bestest ever. I’ll just have to make sure I don’t put something crap on now to spoil it.