I took a long weekend off this week to visit the Squid himself, Stephen and his girlfriend Vicky in Withernsea. We had four days of sunshine, sea fret and homemade cheesecake, it was absolute bliss.

The next couple of weeks I’m off work, I’m taking my little girl to Butlins in Skegness which I’m really looking forward too, followed by a few days in london with my girlfriend and when we get back, we’ll be hitting the beach in Scarborough for the annual H20:Beached music festival.

I’ll take the camera!

As a designer I’m sometimes asked to design speculative concepts to accompany quotes and tenders. This is work we are simply pitching for so the design has to impress the potential client or else we simply won’t get the job. These jobs can be quite tricky because not only do they have to look good, you have to balance this with how much time you can spend on it, after all it’s unpaid work.

The client?

St Annes Community Services

St Anne’s was formed originally to work with people who were homeless and excluded. Our first service was shaped around what these people said they needed. This focus on service users being central to what we do and how we develop is core to what we do today.

We now provide a range of services for people who have experienced homelessness, mental health problems, problems with substance misuse or who have a learning disability throughout Yorkshire and the North East of England.

From our small beginning in 1971, the organisation has grown and developed to become a major provider with a turnover of some £30m and employing approximately 1200 staff.

Well it ok really. Sure it’s seen better days but all in all it’s not doing the charity any harm. They already have a logo which has to remain, their color scheme is blue and yellow which also can’t be changed and they have alot of copy and images I can play around with. Not bad to start with at all.

The design

I think this is one of the best looking ecommerce websites I’ve ever seen. It’s clean, modern, feels fresh and makes you want to buy Alfresia’s products because the user interface is so intuitive and easy to navigate. Each section is colour coded to help with ease of navigation and location within the website and the layout is structured in such a way that you hardly need to use the search tool to find what your looking for. The simple design and colour scheme simply compliments the products, allowing them to be prominent in the design and not the design itself.

A creative and strategic mix of ‘warehouse’ style and ‘up-market John Lewis esk’, this site ticks all the boxes and targets a wide spectrum of the market.

Alfresia have complete control over the website, illustrating that not all websites will be bastardised by the client, with the right control measures, a dedicated marketing team and a visionary client that knows their business, and customers, a successful website can be achieved, both visually and financially. With this new website, sales have rocketed, leaving this client requiring more hands on staff to handle the extra work load.

Alfresia, in my opinion, is the best website 9xb has ever produced. Don’t believe me! Well the sales tell me another story, lets hope their success continues…

Oh forgot to mentioned, this was my project, I designed and templated the whole website, with database help from the developers at 9xb. Sweet!

CWI (Cohen and Wilks) design, manufacture and supply clothing garments to some of the highstreets biggest retailers. They wanted a new website to replace their current one which is starting to show it’s age. I got to visit their headquarters in the heart of Leeds and got given a guided tour of their entire manufacturing process, from the initial designers studios (predominently young female designers for some reason), to the warehouse and the clothes inspection and sorting lines.

My first impressions of CWI were that they were a major player in the clothes retail market, with operations in the UK, Asia and Europe. They are also part of the Mutsui & Co., Ltd group whom own a large percentage of the company.

We were joined by the same photographer who we comissioned to photograph the Thackray Museum whom will be helping to capture some great shots for the new website.

Taking all these factors into account, this is what I came up with:

This week saw a few new clients websites enter our studio at 9xb. One in particular, Gmund cars was worth a mention I thought.

Gmund cars is a specialist Porsche dealership based in knaresborough, selling such cars as the 911, Carrera and the beautiful 996 GT3R. It’s also worth mentioning that they have a Koenigsegg CCR for sale at £350,000 if anyone fancies it.

The name Gmund is taken from the name of the town in Austria where Doctor Porsche and his family began to build cars after the Second World War, hence explaining where the name derives from.

Gmund came to us for a simple, professional looking website to showcase a new, limited edition car they were about to manufacture. This new car, named the Tygan Speedster, is based on the 1959 Porsche 356 and is reported to be limited to a run of just 20. The account manager Dan Martin even got to drive one which I’m most envious about because I think this is a stunning looking car plus with this new version, not only do you get the hot looks, you also get the luxury of driving a new car, with a new engine and all the other mod-conditions.

This is what I came up with:

Lets hope the client likes it, and I get to drive one of these beauty’s!

This is a quick related to my employer and day-job, Ebuyer.

They started using Subversion (SVN) for version control many moons ago, quickly found that it was lacking when it came to merging support. They then used SVK, or at least they did until today.

SVK is built on SVN but has better support for merging. I’m a bit light on details, but I gather that it does this by storing a stack of the merges that have been made on a branch in a local depot to make sure that they aren’t made again. This works well, but it means that after several years of use the local depots get large and the whole thing grinds halt.

You see, SVK, SVN and even Concurrent Versions System (CVS) are based on the same paradigm and neither is a revolutionary leap on its predecessor.

Enter the next generation  of VCS: Git, Mercurial and Bazaar (bzr).

These VCS systems offer new features such as fully decentralised version control – the idea of the central repository is gone. More importantly they use a completely different underlying architecture – a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG), here’s a good explanation of the DAG in relation to GIT if you’re interested.

Anyway, Ebuyer’s VCS guru evaluated all the options and decided that bzr (bazaar) was the best option. They spent an amount of time migrating the cleansing the old SVN data and migrated what was left to bzr.

Today was the big day, and it went really rather well. Everything Just Worked. The best thing for us is that it has a powerful plugin architecture so you can extend the default functionality really easily to customise it for your own setup. Add into that the various workflows supported and you’re laughing.

Once I’ve seen how it beds in I think that I will look at migrating the Floating Frog projects to it because even we’ve had various merge conflicts on our small projects which might be made better by bzr.

Over the years I’ve seen some seriously careless packaging of items I’ve bought on the internet and had delivered. Some have been opened, underpacked, soaking wet, ripped and squashed, resulting in fighting with customer services to take them back or refund me.

So it was to my surprise when I read an article on The Register of the company HP overpacking their products. Well it wasn’t until I read it that the truth really shocked me. They basically used 17 boxes to protect 32 A4 sheets of paper!

Want to read more? Click here to read the article

To follow on from my previous post about OpenStreetMap I have on the hunt for a digital camera. The idea being that I take snaps with the camera of street signs, post boxes, churches and other landmarks then marry the timestamps up with those from the tracer when I get back home so that I can label the map properly.

I didn’t want a brand new one because it’s going to take a bit of rough and tumble with me on the bike and stuff; Vicky’s is, well, just that – it’s Vicky’s, and if I break it then she’ll have my balls

So I went on an ebay hunt and got pipped at the post on a dubious purchases. I sulked on one of them as I took my eye off the ball.

Late on I decided to send a cheeky email to Hull Freecycle asking if anyone had an old one collecting dust somewhere.

And, do you know what? Two people replied. Curiously both from Driffield. I collected from one of them, who happens to work at Hull New Theatre this tea time – and he brought not one, but two. How kind is that?

So I am now the proud owner of a Trust PowerCam Optical Zoom 910Z and a Trust PowerCam Zoom LCD 730S.

Digital art staff portraits for 9xb, which collectively took circa 60 hours to complete.

View my Flickr 9xb page for full size versions.

Experiments with light and shade.