Generative computer art has been fascinating me during the last few weeks. After seeing the sublime beauty of German artist Holger Lippmann’s painterly pieces I was inspired to have a go myself. I’m learning the ropes still, and a long way off from creating work as dense and beautiful as Andy Gilmore’s.

My first attempt at my own style I have called ‘Complexity Arises’ because thats exactly what happens when you start playing around with simple geometry and repeat the patterns over and over again in a mathematical way. I’m intrigued at the forms that arise from simple shapes. Art imitating life again maybe?

Canadian digital artist, james White, runs a studio and blog called SignalNoise. I’m a fan of his retro inspired artwork. He’s been featured in design mags and gives lectures on digital art.

James recently ran a competition giving his readers the chance to design and enter a retro inspired poster. I took part for the fun of it, and because i haven’t created for a personal project for a little while. Their was no big prize or exposure, just a fun and open brief to make something cool and old school. I really enjoyed creating this concept 80′s synthesizer advertising poster. I could imagine this running in New York subways and obscure electronic music magazines circa 1984.

The competition received over 130 entries, so winning was going to be tough. The winning design can be seen over at the SignalNoise blog.

Martijn van Dam is a Dutch graphic designer at Momkai, an independent, interactive agency based in Amsterdam. In his free time he creates music related graphic designs and illustrations for flyers, posters and record sleeves. I love his clean, slightly cartoony rendering style.

His series of covers for Drum & Bass compilation ‘Champion Sound’ all feature his trademark futuristic space craft, They remind me of 80′s Manga video covers crossed with marker and pencil product design renderings.

Check out his website SuperSilo for more futuristic goodness.

More cool designs will come online as I create them. I want to stock a range of styles to reflect my passions and interests, so there will be type based designs, lots of vector illustrations, and eventually posters and wall art!

Feedback is welcomed and if anyone has any ideas they’d like to see on a Tee or Hoodie, then let me know.

Enjoy…

Working with a mouse, as a designer, is not the most fluid and creative way to input to your computer. I used the Wacom Intuos tablet a few years ago when I worked in an Ad agency, and really missed the feeling of drawing and navigating with a pen. It was so much more like using a sketchbook rather than the dull point and click experience you get with a mouse. Mice are great for quick repetitive tasks such as data and text input, but quickly become bothersome when trying to retouch photo’s or draw organic shapes.

I really wanted to buy the new Wacom Intuos tablet, but the hefty price tag put me off. A recent trawl around my local Curry’s looking for printer ink introduced me to a brand new offering from Wacom at a third of the price. Tablets have come a long way since I last used one. The Wacom Bamboo Pen and Touch is the same spec as my old Wacom Intuos, but now comes with touch sensitive tablet. This means you can also use your fingers on the surface of the tablet just as you would on a laptop touch pad. Multi touch input means it acts just like the new generation MacBook Pro’s. If you have an iPhone you’ll like this; as you can rotate, pinch zoom, 2 finger scroll and much more. You obviously also get the pen for drawing, retouching and handwriting recognition. If you set it up properly you’d actually never need to use your keyboard for text input – simply write with the pen.

I’m loving having a tablet again. It took me a few days to get used to it again. The addition of the touch interface is what sets it apart from other tablets. It isn’t as feature rich, or powerful as the new Intuos 4, but if you’re on a budget but still need a good all round performer, you can’t go wrong.

The new site has been completely redesigned from the ground up to run on WordPress. My old site was static xhtml, and while it ran well and did what it was supposed to, I found updating content tedious and time consuming. The new system greatly streamlines my workflow and allows me to edit copy and update my work with the click of a few buttons.

I based the whole backbone on the Hybrid theme framework. This reduced development time by providing a solid skeleton and browser tested CSS rules.

New CSS3 effects are used throughout the site to round all my buttons and text input fields. This degrades gracefully for people who still use backward browsers like Internet Explorer. CSS3 will be cropping up a lot and new effects are being added that will make styling sites much easier.

Headline font substitution was handled by the WP-Cufon plugin. Cufon is a new way of rendering custom fonts in a web page without using Flash or clunky image replacement techniques.

The homepage features a Jquery image slideshow with links to my work sections. Thanks to the developer of vSlider plugin for this great little plugin.

My work galleries are still powered by SmoothGallery, although now the backend allows me to set up new galleries, sort the order, add captions and auto thumbnail my images. NextGen SmoothGallery is the plugin which makes this all possible. Other plugins allow me to link my twitter and pixelounge feeds into the footer section.

It was a steep learning curve, bending WordPress to my will. Some of the mods required patience to work out, but I got there in the end. What this experience showed me is how far WordPress can be moulded into virtually any type of site, while still keeping it’s ease of use. I’ll definitely be taking what I’ve learned and applying it to my client’s design work.

If you experience any problems with colourform, please leave a comment or contact me via the site. Any feedback would be much appreciated.

The ease of use was important for non-techy types. Creating and editing galleries is as easy as creating a gallery, uploading your photo’s and copy pasting in a shortcode. You can tag your photo’s add captions, resize images and embed slideshows in the sidebars if you wish.

After researching other photography themes, I came to the conclusion that the photo’s should be the star, not the site graphics. I’ve kept things minimal and clean so the photography really stands out. I will be using this theme to re-design an existing clients site and hopefully other photographers will be interested in using it to show off their work and generate new business.

View the Demo

Roger’s recent books are a series of historical crime novels set in St Petersburg and featuring Porfiry Petrovich, the detective from Dostoevsky’s great novel Crime and Punishment. He wanted to evoke something of the dark, harsh times in which the novels are set. He also wanted to be able to write his blog and have it as part of the site. It was really nice to have an open brief from a fellow creative, so I set about designing a custom WordPress site that would showcase his writing and allow him to blog.

Rogernmorris is the outcome of my labour. The custom WorkBase child theme I had designed a few months ago served as the backbone. I was able to create a site that fitted in with the themes in Roger’s books, while being easily updated and maintained by Roger himself. I walked him through the admin side, and in no time he was up and running.

I’d like to thank Roger for being such an easy going client and wish him the best of luck in his writing. You can find out more about his books on the website and buy them from Amazon.

Thanks also Rog for biggin me up to your publisher Faber. One of their new writers, Alex Preston, contacted me shortly after Roger’s site went live to ask me if I could do a similar job for him. His new book, “This Bleeding City” will be published by Faber early next year. I also designed his website and blog which you can visit here.

During my research I found some truly awesome writers sites, although these tended to be ‘big money’ authors who have already sold millions of books. I did struggled to find decent, well designed sites for lessor known writers though. It is a shame that people so talented with words and language seem to have to settle for sub standard visual design for their online presence, which has become such an important part of bringing their work to a larger audience.

Six Revisions states that the trend has recently been revived by designer Tim Van Damme. It has spawned some lovely studies in UI design, most of them using smooth, eyecatching jQuery effects. It got me thinking to an old project I had on the backburner for a long time. My first website was setup way back in 2003, I’ve been using it as a bit of a testing ground, and I never really got a proper homepage up I was happy with. This was the exact thing I needed to put up there.

Since colourform is my main site now, things have moved on, but people do still end up at my old domain. This way I can direct them to my latest projects, social networks and have another point of contact besides colourform. The simple, minimal design would therefore serve as a hub to my web presence.

I did my research, learned a bit about jQuery, and came up with a nice simple metallic theme. I’m pleased with how it turned out and had fun designing the icons and skin. The contact icons are actually from my NetBats font which is available as a free download from this site. Here’s the finished design:

Visit antoneycalvert.com to see it in action.

I myself had no idea what a ‘child theme’ was until I found an interesting article over at op111. I wanted to create a WordPress theme that appealed to creatives, individuals and small businesses (or even large ones), that was simple and easy on the eye. Instead of reinventing the wheel I figured I’d find an existing theme I liked and customise it.

Graph Paper Press had the exact theme I was after. It’s called Workaholic. So I signed up and downloaded the theme and got down to creating my own version. The result is a child theme – so called because it’s based on a parent theme (Workaholic in this case), which I’ve called WorkBase.

As you can see it’s really clean and well laid out and even has Twitter integration. I changed the colour scheme, graphics and some core functionality of the original theme to make it, well, much better in my opinion. By far the best change I made was integrating SmoothGallery into the theme. This replaces the rather clunky image gallery that was included. SmoothGallery is a Flash-like image slideshow viewer. Using a plugin to integrate it into the theme meant I now had a fully user editable slideshow. I also improved some of the graphic elements and gave the whole theme a classy sheen.

To find out more about WorkBase, how to get the files, installation instructions and how I can design and install a custom version of the theme for your website, simply click the button below:

UPDATE: I’m in the process of updating WorkBase. As such it won’t be available to download until I know it’s solid. Click the button above to check out the demo.