Richard Stelmach - Web Design and Multimedia Portfolio

In response to a recent tweet by Elliot Jay and discussion with Craig Burgess, I felt I needed to air my views on what skills a web designer should possess.

I think it goes without saying that a web designer first and foremost, should be able to design! This encompasses a wide variety of skills - creativity, knowledge of usability, accessibility, technical restraints, good communication, to name a few. A good web designer should be able to create a design that fulfills its objective.

A good portfolio seems to be usually the most important aspect when going for a job. Your work should speak for itself. But from a technical point of view, what should a web designer know?

Elliot Jay made a slightly controversial statement that all web designers should be able to code their site ( i presume he means HTML/CSS opposed to php, asp.net etc).

All the web design jobs i’ve seen have HTML/CSS as a requirement, it’s classed as ‘front end’, which the designer generally deals with.

But should designers be writing html/css and do they need to know it to be a good designer?

Certainly, design is a creative industry and most designers come from artistic backgrounds. Given that HTML/CSS is not artistic or creative, should designers be doing it and is it detrimental to their design skill?

Personally I believe that HTML/CSS is not to the advanced, technical level of programming languages such as PHP or C#, so isn’t hard for a designer to pick up. They’re not complex or mathematical and the amount of time taken to learn them shouldn’t be so intense that it takes away from all the things that enhance a designer’s skill.

Also I believe that knowing how a page is constructed, the possibilities and restraints of the web medium benefit the designer’s ability to create something suitable. And the best way of understanding this is to use html/css yourself and create websites.

In short, i don’t think there’s any harm in it!

Maybe if the process of having a guy doing the designs and guy doing the html/css was faster, but I don’t see that making much of a difference.

Print designer, web designer or ‘designer’?

It comes down to experience. I may offend a few people here but many web designers i’ve met who’ve come from a print background aren’t as good at web design as they are print. Then again with practise, there’s no doubt that their web skills would become just as good. There’s no reason you can’t be both or just specialise in one area.

Designer + programming hybrid?

I may shoot myself in the foot here as I do know a bit of php, asp.net, c#, sql, javascript and often refer to myself as a hybrid! Hey, I just love the name. But if a company wants the best programming and best design, hire a programmer and a designer. My design doesn’t suffer from programming but there’s no way I have time to get as good at programming as people who’ve been doing it for years.

Alas, I think I have aired all my views. In short, I think a web designer should know html/css as well as design.

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?

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’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:

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.

No, I haven’t lost the ability to logically structure a set of words, also known as a sentance, this really is the top, top collections of top 10 lists! What’s better than the hundreds of top list posts that swamp sites such as digg.com? A post of the top 10 lists? Hey that’s getting pretty good, but NO, a list of the list of the list….awesome, now that’s good.

1. Top 10 Stupidest Lists - You’re right, they are pretty stupid, but that’s why we love them, ever thought about what to do with a newspaper, you may say read it, no retard, there’s about 10 more awesome things you can do with it than that - find out here, it will change your life.
2. The Top 10 of Top 10s - GOD I love top 10 lists, they provide INCREDIBLE information in bite size chunks. If you’re unable to read anything that’s not in a list, you will treasure this ‘article’, including literary greats such as Top 10 Crazy Science Things You Didn’t Know, it sounds absolutely mental.
3. The Ten Best Top-Ten Lists - We are blessed by so many great top 10 lists sometimes its handy to break them down further. The Ten Best is quite a statement, top ten lists are always incredible so the ten best must be something special. Yes they are, the ten most looked up words in 2007, something I have always wanted to know, almost as much as the meaning of life, and the word is ‘integrity’… I feel complete.
4. Most Popular Top 10’s of 2008 - 1000s of lists have likely been compiled this year to enrich our lives, what could be the most popular? Top 10 Obscure Google Search Tricks, sorry to swear, but I f*cking love searching on Google and with this list I could likely search all day until I collapse in a mess of drool and excitment induced perspiration.
5. Sun Sport’s Top 10s List - With top 10 lists probably being the highlight of all written word in the universe produced this year, you would wonder why they don’t get published in newspapers and the like, but they do! The Sun, pioneers of literary greatness have jumped at the chance. It cleverly has discussion links because that’s another reason I love top ten lists, they cause debate… “who’s the best Star Wars character?”, “It’s Luke of course, he is very skilled with the light saber etc”, “No it’s Chewbacca, he’s huge and has lots of hair, your Star Wars knowledge is horrendous”…. and so on, I love it.
6. Top 6 List of Programming Top 10 Lists - You may be thinking his article would have been better as a top 10 and I would have to agree, it has to be 10. Can you make room for hilarity, handy tips and sheer crazyness in just a list of 6?! Of course not, maybe the mundaness of reading top 10 lists got to him and he just couldn’t make it to the end…..arggg, have to keep going…
7. Top10lists.com - Being a top 10 list, I thought this post would not only be the best article I’ve ever written but maybe also change the world, but then I found this. An entire site dedicated to the dream that is top 10 lists. A dream born from an insane moment of inspiration and revelation perhaps?
8. Top 10 Lists from Brain of Brian - Brian’s brain must be an absolutely mental place to be, he’s a head case! Not only does he have a page which lists what top 10 lists he’s got but doesn’t actually lead to any of the lists, just to something called ‘Funny Boards’, he has Silly Postcards, Funny Philosophies. I wish I had Brian’s brain.
9. Interesting Top 10 Lists - debatable, personally I find all top 10 lists interesting and fulfilling but maybe these are particularly interesting, when viewing I found myself pondering in intrigue, a whole new top 10 experience.
10. Top 10 Weirdest Top 10 List - If I like a top 10 list, then a weird top 10 list is even better. ‘Top 10 Odd College Courses’, now that is weird, I am so freaked out right now I love it!

Complete, a sense of satisfaction, why have I wasted my time for so long with none-list posts when I could be producing material like this. I feel tarnished like I have sinned but it feels soooo good, adrenalin, excitement pumping through me, knowing that I will improve people’s lives with this sh*t.

And if you don’t get the sarcasm, I deeply apologise
If you hate top 10 lists as much as I do, please use the links below!

You don’t have to look far nowadays to see what’s becoming a typical feature on many sites, the horizontal javascript slider. Either through mootools, jquery or some other javascript framework, they make it easy to achieve effective results through little code.

The slide serves many purposes but I guess it’s a great way of getting extra information into a compact space. Intuitive controls such as forward and back arrows or numbering also make sliders easy to use and can offer handy functionality to users.

I’ve just developed my own slider using jquery for mach4cs.co.uk. Originally I developed a form for users to fill out so that mach4cs.co.uk could design a bespoke computer using the information provided by the customer. However, the form was quite long so the slider was a perfect way of simpliflying the process. Although the content is the same, splitting the form up into 5 bite size chunks makes it less daunting and easier to read.

You are welcome to use the javascript found here: http://mach4cs.co.uk/js/slider.js.

You will also need to download jquery.

You will also need to look at the html and css used on the page: mach4cs.co.uk. The relevant CSS starts at 272 and ends on line 342.

Probably should have displayed all the relevant code here, but hey, I’m lazy!

Let me know if you find the slider useful!

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.