I have only recently found out how to fix this problem, and it is deceptively easy. When creating an unordered list, I always put each list item on a seperate line to avoid confusion and allow me to move/modify the items easily. It turns out that by putting the list elements on each line it causes this extra right margin to be added. A quick fix for this is to simply put all the navigation elements in the list side by side on the same line.

If, however, there is alot of information on the one line and you would really prefer to have the code on seperate lines, the same thing as above can be achieved by ‘commenting out’ the line break as can be seen below.

I can now set a percentage value width for each of the list tags and it will fit the width perfectly.

Initially I applied for a number of jobs in the web design industry, hoping to gain employment and start working. Unfortunately at this time there was not a great deal of job places available so I had to concentrate on doing something else. I did not want to go into a temporary job position where I would be doing a job that I did not want to do and would not enjoy doing. With this in mind, I started to look around for anywhere that I could gain some freelance employment.

The main place that I started with was on Gumtree, it is free to place an advertisement and allows prospective clients to find you without having to search and cold call yourself. This is how I got my first freelance position.

Another method that I found worked was simply to ask people that you know. A quick question to them asking if they know of anyone requiring the services can sometimes end up with a job, this can also work if or when they run into someone who is interested in having some design work done. Word of mouth and recommendations are free, and trusted, advertising.

I have been accepted to continue to the Masters course in University of Ulster and in doing so have decided to form a ‘design collective’ with other members of the Masters course. This will allow us to pitch for larger jobs, as there will be more of us available to work on them, and will also provided an area of support when working on larger and more daunting tasks. This may not be for everyone but it seems to make sense for the direction that I am going in at the moment.

I found this font for free on a website and instantly knew I had to do something with it. As there was no good reason to incorporate it into any of my designs I had a play with it instead.

According to Malcolm Gladwell it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert in something. As a 9-5 work day, that is 1250 days, 250 weeks or in an easier to comprehend unit, just under 5 years of working 40 hours a week. This means that for someone to become an expert, they need at the very least 5 years experience in their field.

The reason that some people in a field are seen as ‘talented’, the young designers that appear to be prodigys, is because these are the people who have reached their 10,000 hours mark early. The ones that instead of working 8 hours a day,  are working 14 hours a day, and the reason that they can work for 14 hours a day is because they are genuinely interested and fascinated by the field in which they work.

It therefore becomes obvious that the only way to become ‘talented’ in your chosen field of profession is to be almost obsessivly interested in it and want to do it every day to become better. This also seems to reinforce the saying “do what you love and success will follow”.

Created as part of my dissertation project for University, Eureka Tweet takes the idea that there are many designers on twitter who post interesting and inspirational links every day to web sites and images that I would usually never encounter. Some of these designers I follow, and therefore can find the links and the inspiration, but there are many designers out there that I have not had the chance to discover yet, and the inspirational links that they post are lost to me. Eureka Tweet searches the the public timeline for tweets that are relevent to some of the areas of design that I have chosen for section headers, these tweets are then filtered to only display those that contain links and are then displayed.

When creating this project I realised that I had the opportunity to really experiment with the design. This project was not for a client, so I could effectively ignore limitations such as bandwidth and really experiment into using multiple textures together to create an atmosphere on the site. Inspired by bar-room textures, I used a basic collection of only four textures to create the entire site. Apart from the runner bar at the top of the screen, all of the design elements on the site were created by hand using a combination of Illustrator and Photoshop. This project really let me try new things and develop my skills in these programs.

Recently I took a trip to the National Print Museum in Dublin and took a day course in letterpress printing. It is a course that is only run twice a year and is a dying art. Recently the art of letterpress has had somewhat of a resurgence, mostly with designers who want their business cards to stand out a little from the crowd.

I would recommend that any person who is in education in, or is currently working in, a field that is involved in digital design or digital art to spend some time thinking about the way that their particular discipline was plied before the computer came along.

Inkjet killed the letterpress star.

When working on a computer to create a design the “ctrl+z” is only a stretch of the fingers away, so there is an enormous amount of trial and error. It is so easy to type the copy into a program and try a number of different fonts in a program, experimenting with different styles to see what looks best.

On my trip to the print museum I was given the chance to experience how type was set before the computer came on the scene. It was an insight into a trade that went into decline about the same time as the first Apple Macintosh computers were making their ways into design studios.

Methods and Madness.

From the first few minutes I became instantly aware at how much time was taken with planning out the designs. We were given a stack of blank business cards and a pen and told to think about some layouts that we would like to try out. As a designer who is used to doing a quick sketch on paper then opening Illustrator and experimenting, this was a little frustrating, as I just want to get started. We were told to seriously consider what fonts, and what font sizes, we would like to use for each item on the cards. Normally when doing designs I have a rough idea of what font I am going to use but this could change and be experimented with, with the click of a mouse.

When we finally got around to setting the type it became clear very quickly why so much planning was required before getting stuck in. Setting type by hand is a very precise and time consuming activity, and if the wrong size of font is chosen and it doesn’t fit into the available space, the type needs to be removed, replaced in the case boxes and reset using a smaller font size. This took up to 30 minutes for each line of text, so after messing up one line of text, you made sure it didn’t happen again.

Even with planning everything out correctly, things were bound to go wrong and at one point I knocked over two lines of type that I had spent quite a while putting together, meaning the type had to be sorted through and the type reset.

Sense of Achievement.

Even though the setting of the type took a lot of thought, precision and hard work, when the type was finally set properly and securely held in a frame there is something very satisfying about hand printing and seeing the instant outcome with the ink still wet on the cards.

At the end of the day, with ink on our skin and sweat on our back it felt good to get away from the glow of the monitor and do something that really changes your perspective on how design has progressed. Since the workshop I have spent far more time planning than I ever did before, and I think that due to this my designs have improved. I would recommend days like this to everyone.

All of the pictures that I took on this day can be seen at my flickr.

In every other area of creativity, artists have a personal ’style’ which distinguishes them from others. Musicians work is categorised into certain genres and writers tend to write only for one genre. Illustrators and painters tend to have a little more of a broader spectrum and their work can often be seen to have influences from a number of genres, but it is then pigeonholed into a genre of its own.

With this in mind, would it make sense for a designer to have a genre? It is often seen in portfolio sites that the designers create ‘clean and beautiful’ designs, but what does this really mean? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder so what may be beautiful for one person may not be to the taste of another. This line is there to try and let a prospective client know that the designer is good at their job, that they create sites that are not so much ‘clean and beautiful’, but more often than not they create sites that are ‘usable and useful’ and this is really no bad thing. I believe that any site should be designed to be usable and useful before the aesthetics are even thought about. In this case, as long as the content can be read, found and understood it does not really matter what genre the site is being created for.

Sometimes designers feel more comfortable designing in a style that is more familiar to them, because the designer has an interest in football, they would spend a lot of time on sites containing information on football and would therefore become more influenced by that style of design than a designer more interested in metal music. Experience and influence will have an impact on what style is more identifiable for each designer.

It would be interesting to find then, if designers do believe that they have a style or genre, would they then pass on work that they feel they are less suited to work on because they truly feel that a designer with a more applicable ’style’ would do a better job for the client? Or would they keep the job and do their best, producing a design that could have been better?

That is not quite right, there is much to be learned from grid designs and they are very useful to all forms of layout design, it gives a structure on which to build a great layout, but after this is learned it can be greatly beneficial to break the grid that has been formed.

Breaking the grid allows for certain elements of your design to stand out and become more influential than other areas.

Structuring a design properly is extremely important and gives a sense of purpose to the content. The point of breaking the grid is to create interest in a particular element and make it stand out to the user. One area where this has proven very popular is its use in navigation elements, with the elements that have been selected, or the current page, being slightly of set from the others around it.

There is a current small trend in designing more ‘organically’ laid out sites, and the majority of these are also using a more ‘magazine’ style for the concept of the sites. Some noticeable designers using this style are Jason Santa Maria and more recently Paddy Donelly, who have spent the time to individually design each of their blog posts. This style will not be applicable for every design and is perhaps an extreme example of the idea, but the idea can be used to provide a way to accentuate certain features of more traditional designs.

There are a number of simple and subtle ways to do this. A proportional offset of the logo, or the navigational elements can be used to attract the users attention and guide them to that area of the site. Large images can be used as background images to provide a sense of a flow to the design and even the footers can be offset to indicate that they are separate from the main content and an area of interest.

Obviously these techniques should be used sparingly but can be greatly effective when used properly. When done incorrectly the offset element can become an eyesore and break the flow of the rest of the site., when done correctly, the offset element can assist in both the flow of the overall design and in the usability of the site as a whole.