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…

Yes, it’s an old video, but somehow I missed this demonstration. Using cheap, off the shelf consumer electronics, Jonny Lee has managed to create some amazing new applications and devices. The guy is a genius! If you haven’t seen this demo of his before you’re in for a treat.

I can’t wait for this to drop. I remember watching the original at the cinema with wide eyed wonder when I was a wee boy.

The production design looks amazing – plus it will be in 3D which should look awesome given the video game graphic styling. And if the rumor is true that Daft Punk will be doing the music for the film, then that would be a massive cherry on top.

Long exposure film of bugs flying around a streetlight. Simple, mesmerising and Beautiful.

The online shop will be up and running fully once I’ve got time to upload new t-shirts and art. RedBubble will handle all the manufacturing, payment and delivery. You’ll be able to buy shirts, hoodies, cards, posters and framed artwork. Plans are afoot to get lots of gorgeous products up there so stay tuned.

I hope the new design works better. I’ve added tags so it’s easier to find articles of interest. New posts will be going up more regularly as I’ve been a bit slow recently. If you find any glitches with this new design, please drop me a comment below so I can fix it.

For this mixI wanted to get back to my soulful roots and put together a nice, deep house set. Lots of my all-time fav house tunes on this one. You can find more of my mixes on Letsmix member page: tenyo. Enjoy!

DeeperHouseSoul from tenyo at Letsmix.com.

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.