I was lucky enough to be asked by Ben MacGowan to design a new logo for CSSbake. This was great fun as the idea of combining cookery and code was very different from the work I usually do!

We posted the revisions of my logo designs on Dribbble to get feedback, as Dribbble users are likely to be typical CSSbake users. It was a great way to get feedback, particularly when we were exploring a colour palette.

Since WordPress has added brilliant content management systems, such as custom post type and custom taxonomy, we’ve needed icons to use to represent our new content in the WordPress admin. I started out by creating a few icons for a personal project but then started creating more icons for clients. These are a challenge as you have to represent so much in such a small space. I also wanted to keep them looking native to the WordPress admin, using a style that fitted in with the existing icons.

These illustrations are a series on server disasters, designed for an app that never came about. I created eighteen large vector illustrations with accompanying 100 pixel icons. It was good fun drawing silly situations like servers attacked by godzilla, zombies, held to ransom and struck by lightning but it was hard work drawing so many things I hadn’t drawn before!

The Power of One (or <11.11.11>) is a fantastic-looking conference in the unique venue of Battersea Power Station. I was really lucky to get the chance to design and development this site and a lot of freedom to do something less conventional and more up-to-date.

As attendees were likely to be using smart phones to view the site on the day, I wanted to make it responsive so it was easy (and enjoyable!) to read on as many devices as possible from smartphone up to large desktop. Although I didn’t design the Power of One logos, I did create the illustrations of the speakers for the site. We were aiming for a technological, underground and casual feel to the site so I made the style of the illustrations more like stencils.

This was the first big icon set I worked on. oneDrum is a great app that runs on both Windows and Mac so the icons needed to not look too much like either OS and the icons also needed to be flexible enough to work against a dark, light and coloured background.

Creating this set really taught me a lot about the restrictions when creating icons, particularly how hard it can be to convey detail in 16×16 pixels!

BathCamp is something that means a lot to me. It’s an awesome barcamp evening event held monthly in Bath, with a big weekend event every year. When I was still at university, the BathCamp people introduced me to the industry and the area. These people inspired me, mentored me, and made me confident that I really wanted to work on the web.

So of course, when I got the opportunity to do a redesign for the BathCamp site, I was more than happy to oblige. It was fairly easy to come up with ideas because I knew that I wanted to reflect the informal nature of the events, the friendliness and fun, and how everything is centred around ideas, technology and creativity.

My main design came after I drew little motifs to signify what BathCamp meant to me, I used these as a supporting pattern for the site and in the main image on the front page to try to give people an instant feel of what BathCamp is about.

This was a really fun project. Andy from StinkyInk came to me looking to turn a funny blog post on 10 Ways A Printer Can Ruin Your Day into a short comic strip.

I was inspired by the style of web comics such as The Oatmeal, and hand-drew all of the illustrations then scanned and auto-traced the drawings in Illustrator to give them a slightly cleaner look. The ideas for the evil printer were completely inspired by the words on John Sollars who wrote the fantastic original blog post about the bad experiences that everybody has had with printers at one time or another!

To see all five panels of this comic, make sure you visit 5 Ways A Printer Can Ruin Your Day on the StinkyInk website.

This logo took a while to get on to my site!

Simon Maddox had a really cool company name and wanted a logo to match. I was completely inspired by the name and instantly wanted to do something with a more traditional hand-drawn feel and spent ages drawing different style ducks. We got the business cards printed on a thick textured card which helped reinforce the traditional and sophisticated style whilst still being a bit of fun.

Richard wanted a clean, simple site to easily explain his accountancy services to potential new clients. I built it using WordPress so it was easy for Richard to change the content of his site in the future and new features can easily be added.

I made use of a lot of subtle CSS3 techniques in this design to give it more depth and a more polished appearance in the latest browsers. This meant I didn’t have to rely entirely on a lot of slow-loading images for a textured and detailed look.

The Big M is an awesome mobile developer conference coming in March next year. I was really lucky to be on board from the start, and work with some fantastic people which made this project really exciting and fun.

Having a good, working mobile design was very important so I used media queries as I didn’t want to send the mobile users to a different mobile web site. The mobile users get almost entirely the same content but delivered in a simpler format. For the wider desktop site I used jQuery to load more complicated content, such as Google Maps and tables, that wasn’t suitable for mobile devices.

The illustrations for the site were part of the brief, and I found them really fun. As I started out doing the phone illustrations, I went with a very clean and technical feel. This was hard to emulate for the portraits so I tried to inject a ‘technical drawing’ feel through using straight line fillings for the shadows.

There’s an exciting new Magento theme framework coming from the guys at Meanbee. Having worked with Meanbee before, I was more than happy to work on another cool project with them. DIYMage is going to be an easy way for store owners, developers and designers to easily customise their Magento stores, and I can’t wait to be working more with Meanbee on this project in the future.

The concept of the branding is around the idea of the DIY shop. I wanted to create some icons to represent the store owners, developers and designers that were fun and colourful. Even though we’re using the DIY concept, I didn’t want to make it a cheesy theme, so I teamed these elements with clean, simple layout and typography.

The Bardowl mobile site is still a work in progress, but it’s been really exciting finally putting the principles I learnt on the W3C Mobile Best Practice course last year. It’s not a perfect mobile site, as it inherits all the heavy content issues associated with WordPress, but using media queries, I’ve managed to get the design to render reasonably well on a lot of mobile devices.

I used media queries for the mobile design as I didn’t want to send the mobile users to a different mobile web site. The mobile users get almost entirely the same content but delivered in a simpler format. This means that any links to different pages on the site will all work as expected whether you’re on the mobile or desktop version. I’m considering making the navigation vertical now too. As mobile devices can be really narrow, horizontal navigation can become hidden.

The organiser of Bathcamp, the wonderful Julian Cheal, asked me if I’d create a simple Thank You card for the Bathcamp 2010 sponsors.

We wanted to fit two cards to an A4 sheet, so I came up with the idea of making the card in the style of a certificate. I used simple patterns, shapes and fonts that suggested the styles of a certificate alongside the classic Bathcamp logo and colour scheme to make something I thought would be fun to receive.

Finally I get to reveal a little bit more about Bardowl! The Bardowl iPhone app project is one that I started working on around a year ago. In that time, a startup was created, which I am incredibly proud to be a part of.

This site was a reasonably quick job, aiming to let people know a little bit about Bardowl, and try to get some signups for our Beta programme. It was the first live project where I’ve used Gravity Forms along with WordPress. We used them for the Beta signups and contact form. I really couldn’t recommend Gravity Forms more for their easy-to-use and excellent forms.

The Mumspages.com logo and branding was a quick project focused around creating a logo that wasn’t too feminine and felt modern and clean.

The palette does have some pinks in it, but they’re balanced out by a more masculine green to make it more gender-neutral. It’s quite hard to come up with a palette for something that suggests babies and children but doesn’t look girly, but along with a subtle baby blue background, I think we managed to achieve it.

I was lucky to be asked to do a bit of design work for Sam Machin and Simon Maddox’s Push The Page iPhone app. The app had a really simple interface based on the Apple iPhone standards, so I just created the Push The Page icon, splash pages and website templates.

I tried to stick with clean, simple and easy-to-read elements for the website design. I wanted the pages to work as well on iPhone and iPad as they did on a desktop browser. This meant I took some advantage of CSS3 elements and kept the design in a one-column style so it was still easy to use on a small touch-screen device.

Even though I create a lot of WordPress themes, I haven’t created a blog-specific theme for a while so it was great fun to get to develop a theme that really works with the strengths of WordPress.

Hayley’s blog has a very strong girly theme so I created her a theme that suited her subject that heavily features shoes and tea! I wanted to keep the design clean and not too sickeningly pink or purple in a way that feels feminine and classy.

The header, footer and dividers form the basis of the design and were inspired by letterpress prints and fancy invitations. I incorporated little shoes, teacups, cocktail glasses and buttons to echo Hayley’s blogging content.

The Stockyoo was a quick logo project I worked on for Andy Warburton.

I posted my progress to Dribbble and Forrst as I went along, to get feedback from other designers and spread the word of Stockyoo ahead of its launch. Some of the most interesting drafts are my first logo draft, lens draft, pixelated image ideas and our options for choosing the type case.

Lesley’s site was previously run by a web hosting company. I moved her site over to WordPress to allow her to update her site whenever she wanted and at no extra cost.

The design of Lesley’s site was inspired by the garden design drawings that she made. A clean and traditional-style design with fresh colours really allows the photos of Lesley’s work to stand out and speak for themselves.

Stuart Clayton’s site was really good fun to work on. Working with a client who had a lot of interesting content to show off, and was keen to let me use newer CSS3 and web font techniques, meant I could be really creative and try things I’d not used much before.

I also had the opportunity to use the new features of WordPress 3.0, custom post types and custom taxonomies. These made it even easier to create a custom theme that Stuart can easily maintain.

Saild is a great app aimed at replacing the old-fashioned sailing log book with a handy paper-free app. I really didn’t know much about sailing before I started working on the app, so it was really interesting working with Duncan to create something that would be usable and appeal to the sailing audience.

It was the first time I’d worked on an app project of this size so it was a huge education. Learning how to work effectively with a continually-growing app and an impending beta was challenging but fun, especially working with an experienced and talented developer.

We wanted to avoid using sails in the logo design, so I opted for the equally-traditional compass. I created the logo in an icon style with four different sizes, all with different levels of detail so it would look good in as many environments as possible.

James Henry’s website was a totally new experience despite having made band websites before. The real challenge lay in trying to integrate all the various social networks and musicians’ services into WordPress.

The entire design was inspired by the photo used as the background to the pages. The colours of the city lights and shapes of the skyscraper windows meant the design came quite easily.

The Meanbee website was great fun. Working with two incredibly passionate developers made it easy. Their Meanbee logo and text branding were already so strong that I just had to come up with ideas to fit around them.

I love working with strong, bright colours and this site was the perfect opportunity for that. I feel like it really puts across the enthusiastic personalities of Tom and Nick.

Julian’s site was one of the most fun I’d ever had with a design. He really allowed me to be as creative as I liked and with his quirks (tweed!) and creativity, it was fairly easy to come up with a design that I felt reflected him as a person.

It took a while to develop the design as it required some tricky CSS in places, but this was my first experimentation using @font-face for non-standard font implementation and I’m really pleased with the results.

As Gavin is a developer, he didn’t need me to write the HTML and CSS for his site. This meant I could have fun just really concentrating on the design elements in Photoshop mockups.

We worked on a few different versions of this design with different woods and main colour themes to reflect different times of the day. The site isn’t up yet, but I’ll link to it as soon as it is!

The design of this site changed frequently over the space of a few months as the client struggled with his taste for creative and modern design and the audience’s desire for safe, old-school corporate design. This was the final result of the site as we worked on it together where we’d really worked it down into a clean, minimal layout.

The WordPress development of this site was tricky as it involved using a lot of jQuery for slideshows and sliding displays that I hadn’t used before but I learnt a lot and the implementation meant that the site was very easy to maintain.

Swift Capture is a really interesting mobile app by Richard Spence. Richard wanted to update the web administration for the Swift Capture app so I worked on a re-skin of his existing app. The challenge with this design was trying to work with the existing HTML to create a whole new look using CSS. This was fun and it was great to work on a project that was very different from anything else I’d be working on.

After finishing the app design, I reworked the templates into a simple site design to give potential users a tour of the app and its great features.

From August 2009, I was lucky enough to work with Joel Gascoigne and Oo Nwoye on their startup, OnePage. I started out helping these guys out with direction on their OnePage design, then I worked on the OnePage logo and then I started working on an overall redesign for the OnePage app.

Working with such passionate and ambitious guys was incredibly inspiring and we worked very well together. Unfortunately I had to stop working on OnePage as the freelance work started coming in thick and fast but they’re still doing great things, and I really recommend you check OnePage out..

Since Ursula first got together I’ve been asking Matt if I could make the band web site. With their first gig coming up they finally allowed me to get a site together for them. Matt (the guitarist) had already created a great band logo and they wanted all the standard features of a band web site such as biographies, audio, videos and photos.

I made the site using WordPress so it would be easy for the band to update and used as many external services, such as iLike, Twitter, Facebook, Soundcloud and Vimeo to host the content so the site wasn’t too expensive to run, would be easy to fill with good content, and quick to upload to all the social networks at the same time as the site.

Tim Perrett of XMPIE came to me looking for a last-minute design for their XMPIE Media Pro 09 promotion they’re running via Twitter. I was given the copy and the band silhouettes and told to do something creative for the design, so in a few hours I’d produced this and two other page designs and could tell the developer how to implement my design in HTML and CSS. It was fun to do a quick exercise like this under time pressure, and I’m pretty pleased with the results.

I’ve been a big fan of Bathcamp since I went to a few of the evening events in Bath when I was at university. The topics are always interesting and the people are so friendly and great company. So when the big Bathcamp 2009 event started being organised I volunteered straight away to do any web and design work needed.

This is just a simple site giving (properly microformatted!) information about the Bathcamp 2009 event, as well as sponsors and info on the past Bathcamp events. I tried to make it feel outdoorsy to suit the camping nature of this September’s Bathcamp, easy to find the important information and a bit fun.

I started chatting to Joel a few months ago on Twitter. He, Oo and Dan had been building this awesome app for keeping all your social network streams on OnePage, called (very aptly) OnePage. I started out just giving the guys some advice on where I think the design should be heading, then next thing I know I’m Lead Designer on the project!

This logo is supposed to be reflective of printed page and look like it’s made from just one sheet of paper. There’s a lot of colours in the OnePage design, to show the logos of all the services and allow the user to customise their OnePage, so I thought a white logo would be least likely to clash with any other aspect of the design.

Filmstacks is the main product of A Big Important Company. Whilst working for them, I designed the Filmstacks identity to fit in with the rest of the A Big Important Company branding that I did.

This project started out as freelance work for A Big Important Company where I worked on the branding and web site design. Later on, I completed the site development using WordPress as my first full time project working for the company as an employee.

With the initial branding, I couldn’t decide between the two colour schemes of cream/beige and dark blue so we decided to go for different night and day styles depending on the time the user visited the web site so we could use both schemes.

I tried to make the most of the idea that the company was “big, bad and corporate” in a retro comic book way. I wanted to achieve a balance between this fun, creative idea without making the site overly themed and gimmicky.

You can read more about my design decisions and process on this piece of work by reading the post I wrote, “Designing A Big Important Company” on A Big Important Company’s blog.

This was self-directed brief as part of my degree. I wanted to explore more print-based inspiration on the web. Magazines online barely replicate those in print, and a lot of parameters have meant that they have lost the quality and subtlety of magazine design in favour of cramming content into web sites.

The content for this site was inspired by the Oxford Dictionary campaign, Save The Words. I created the site collaboratively, using photography by Kim Hunter.

As part of this design, I also designed a WordCamp UK logo for this event. This heraldic-style design was created to be very British, as well as encompassing the WordCamp identity typeface.

I could afford to play about with more alternative and unusual interface designs as it was never intended to be a public-facing site. I still made the site standards-compliant, but chose to abandon more conventional navigation in favour of a dashboard-style front page.

It seems I made a more creative design through not worrying about conventional usability on the site. As this design was never going to be public, I used it to inspire the design for this web site, interpreting it in a more usable way.

The Opportunities Board was a student fellow project designed to advertise the many professional opportunities for students in the college. I developed the first version of the site, which was designed by another student for the Graphics department.

Then the board was re-launched for the whole college, where I re-designed the site to be more creative, representational of the college, and make the content easier to find.

The 10by10 web site was part of my work as a student fellow at university. Two of my coursemates created a home page design concept and I then applied the design to the site as a whole and developed the site using WordPress. The biggest challenge of building the web site was organising the huge amount of content, it really was an exercise in information design.

I developed the site using WordPress as a content management system. This stretched a lot of the limitations of WordPress, and in hindsight, a custom content management system may have been a better solution.

Paul’s web site was a complex design as I tried to make it creative and unique to suit his personality. We tried to get away from music web site clichés. I developed Paul’s site using WordPress as a content management system and bbPress for the forum. As Paul wanted to add and edit his own content, these were the perfect solution.

The development was stretching but I learnt loads about WordPress, PHPBB3, bbPress, HTML e-mail and my own capabilities in the process.

This page was a quick design to be shown locally on a couple of machines at our end of year show for Digital Design. All it needed was links to each student’s professional web projects and their personal web sites.

We had these gorgeous 20-inch iMacs so I made the page fill the majority of the screen so you could see as many names as possible at one time. The design was mostly based on a DVD menu that Scott Coello created.

As part of my student fellowship, I was required to design and make a one-page web site, much like the Digital Design page above, to show the personal web sites of the graduating Graphic Communication students. I had to make the site as similar as possible to the newspaper-style showcase magazine the students gave out at their show.

This page was a relatively quick job as it only required HTML and CSS. The biggest issue was creating the graphics so they matched the degree show newspaper but still loaded at a reasonable speed.

The Creative Writing MA students at Bath Spa needed two web sites to be online versions of their anthologies. This site was for the Spectrum anthology. I based the minimalist structure around the book design by Matt Robertson. I used WordPress for the sites to allow the authors to edit their excerpts themselves. This was a project for my student fellowship.

The Creative Writing MA students at Bath Spa needed two web sites to be online versions of their anthologies. This site was for the Splash! creative writing for young people.

I based the minimalist structure around the book design by Matt Robertson. I used WordPress for the sites to allow the authors to edit their excerpts themselves. This was a project for my student fellowship.

The Change Design Symposium was held in February 2008. I designed the site around the logos the Graphic Communication students had created.

I used WordPress for the back-end of the site so I could easily upload more information when it was needed. This was a project for my student fellowship.