I’ve been continuing my travels around Australia and after my short stay in Sydney I made my way up to Cairns for some winter sunshine. It’s a bit tourist saturated for my liking but it makes a great base for adventures into the rain forest and the great barrier reef. I was trying to do some freelance work up there and really struggling to find WIFI or internet connection anywhere so I started hanging out at the local tattoo shop that a friend worked at. It was run by a guy called Crazy Adam, who was genuinely quite crazy, here he is…

Adam was cool and let me sit in his shop everyday and use his internet while telling me tales of traveling and tattooing around the world, people he’d met and numerous encounters with biker gangs. He mentioned he’d like a portfolio site for the tattoo shop so I whipped him up a quick WordPress site to show case the shops work. I took this as an opportunity to try out some new things… Firstly a Javascript image protection that dynamically place a blank GIF over all the image on the site, this doesn’t fully protect images from screengrabs or printing (or poking around with Firebug) but does stop the copying of images by dragging them off the page or with right click save-as. I also tested out Paul Irish’s infinite scroll plugin and a ‘back to the top’ slide animation along with some CSS3 scale transforms in the gallery. Check out the La Bomba Loca site.

As a way of saying thanks for the site they offered to give me a free tattoo and I ended up with this beauty on my calf. I quite like the idea of swapping work and trading skills with people, in this case everybody seemed to come away from the deal far more happy than when they spend money on things.

After heading back to Melbourne for a few weeks I then ended up in Geraldton, WA for a weeks work with Us & Them Studios. I was helping them finish off some installations for the city wide arts festival that was going on and also to help them move into their shiny new studio. I’ve got a few projects going on at the moment that are quite fun so will put some details of these up once they’re closer to completion.

I’m up in Sydney for a bit while visiting some friends… The guys at 2020 BMX Magazine have been nice enough to let me work from their studio, cheers!

Mutiny Bikes have been pushing BMX in the right direction for years, both with the quality of their video production and with their branding and art direction. Just spotted this little test edit up on their Vimeo page. They’ve got themselves a remote control helicopter and strapped a Canon 7D to it, looks amazing!

I’ve just started using a service called “If This Then That” also known as IFTTT…

It allows you to link up a large selection of web apps that don’t quite link up how you’d want them to, and also lets you manage all these things in a central place. I’ve set it up to do some basic things, for example: whenever I create a new post on this site it will automatically publish it to Facebook and Twitter. But you can also do more unexpected things like whenever sun is forecast for the nest day, it can send an email to your boss to tell him you’re feeling ill!

I really like the big bold and simple user interface and it also gives you quite a bit of control over how things are published which is always nice.

IFTTT is still in BETA testing currently but I’ve got some invites if anybody is interested!

I’ve been aware and a fan of Chris Polacks work for a few years now, I think perhaps through seeing his work published in Dig Magazine. It was a pleasant surprise to find out his studio was just round the corner from my house in Melbourne!

Anyway, I recently did a bit of work on Chris’s WordPress based site, which was origionally built by Miek Dunbar.

A tidy up of the main portfolio pages ‘thumbnail wall’, making it simpler to update for Chris and slightly clearer for users. It was put together with the help of the jQuery Masonry project which I had been looking for a reason to use for some time now!

Check out Chris Polacks new site!

All images are Copyright © Chris Polack.

A project I was working on with Melbourne based Godel Design has just gone live, for Yellowbird Cafe in Chapel Street, Prahan. It’s a simple but fun site, built on the Drupal CMS Platform that aims to convey the eclectic nature of the Cafe.

It’s features include: music album of the week, a menu specials area, a photo gallery of the restaurant, full food and drinks menu, a blog/newsfeed and last but in no way least, a favourite beer section!

Check out the Yellowbird Cafe site!

Hello hello!

After a couple of years of my old site design I really felt it was time to have a complete re-build. In the last year or so I’ve learned a lot about web design and front end development, and I really wanted a site that would reflect my current knowledge of my craft. So here we are!

Please have a nosey about, and let me know if you find any errors or odd looking things kicking about!

A project I worked on recently with the guys and girls over at Godel Design has just been featured on the Desktop Magazine website!

Findie is an online resource and community for aspiration script writers to share their work.

I’ll be posting some more info and images on this project soon.

When an old friend of mine, Donny, decided to ditch his life and job living in London, to spend most of his time locked away in a shed in Norwich making bicycles, I was really interest to see what he’d produce. I think it would be an understatement to say the quality of his craftsmanship is astonishing. Every frame he makes is different, with painstaking hand crafted details, all finished immaculately. It’s not hard to see why I was excited at the chance to build his website.

We decided that building the whole site on WordPress (a popular blogging platform / CMS) would be a good start, allowing Donny to have complete control over the content and update the site as and when he pleased. This was also a first step for myself into using PHP and creating a WordPress theme from scratch.

The design is fairly minimal, allowing the photos of the bicycles to take center stage. We also created a Jquery lightbox gallery to diplay the images full screen. The photos were taken by Edmund Aves, go check out his work!

And of course, don’t forget to checkout Donhou Bicycles!

Arrived in Melbourne yesterday! This is the start of my year’s working visa over here. Going to relax, enjoy myself for a few weeks, find somewhere to live and then hopefully find myself some work.

Seems great so far, looks like an amazing city!