miLienzo.com » Personal Thoughts and Musings

In search of Inspiration

Jason — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 13:43:35 +0000

In my online travels this week I have come across a site or two I wish to share with you. I was struggling with a site design and visited the usual CSS galleries we all know and love for some inspiration, but that was not where I found it. In my despair I started visiting random sites, in the hope of something setting off a spark and inspiring me. Then I came across two sites, each unique in there own way and I had my inspiration!

The first of these was Multiplayer Bingo

On first impressions its not a ’stunning’ site, but it was the colours that grabbed me. The bright pink’s and blue’s could be blinding, but the beige eases the eyes and in all they compliment each other well. Online Bingo is not my thing at all, but attention is drawn to the important areas of the site through the use of these colours and tempts you to give it a try and sign up. (although I didn’t, bingo is just not my thing!)

Another site which grabbed me was edubook.com

I love the colour scheme and layout on this site. Personally I think it looks awesome but then I have always been a fan of orange and black layouts! Every detail on this site has also been carefully planned. Articles are well layed out, you can easily get to a category you require such as SEO resources or the Internet marketing articles, and they are well presented.

Just from exploring random websites I was starting to notice that you can be experimental with colour schemes, go out on a whim and use bright colours but use them in an effective way. They have not been overused on either site, but they are dominant and do their job: draw your attention and inflame your curiosity of the site!

There are alot of great resources for finding colour scemes, wether it be css galleries, other sites or colour matchers etc. But why use those? Why not be experimental, splash some bright colours over a site but think about how effective they will be, and are they drawing attention to the correct areas?

Well, enough of me waffling on, i’m going to go experiment with colours!

Spill your thoughts below and if you find anything cool, share the love!

Jason

The road ahead

Jason — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 13:05:17 +0000

Well here it is. I have been trying to think what to write for a first post, I mean it’s all about first impressions isn’t it? If you read something for the first time and it grabs you, your more likely to come back and see whats going on next time right? If you go for a job interview and you look a mess and are not prepared, your less likely to get that job because of a bad first impression. It’s the same with web design.

But what do you do if you have a client with very specific needs, and your all out of ideas? What about all those times your struggling to come up with a design, and by the tenth attempt you still haven’t nailed it? I stop designing. Take a break. Take a walk. Then I come back to the computer and research. I get inspired.

There are hundreds of resources out there to inspire designers, but the problem is finding the right ones for any particular project. Im not saying if your stuck for a design idea to go and steal someone elses, but looking at well designed sites can inspire you to go the extra mile and create that fantastic design you have been chasing.

This is a daily routine for me, researching design and seeing what is out there, inspiring myself to go the extra mile with each new project. And every now and then you come across a gem of a site that gives you that inspiration you crave so much. Over the coming months I will be sharing my discoveries showing you the great sites, inspiring graphics and other great resources of inspiration. Who knows what may turn up!

Farewell until next time,

Jason

The end of an era

Aaron — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 10:01:07 +0000

Well, what can I say miLienzo.com readers? It’s been a while…

The last time I posted here was five months ago. Seriously, I consider that too lengthy a period of time to call this an ‘active’ blog. So what now for miLienzo.com?

Well, I have good news and sad news. The sad news is that my business and personal commitments mean that continuing to run this site isn’t an option. Already there are a few spots of mildew gathering in the corners of this site, so to prevent further neglect I have decided to step down from the helm.

The good news is that a keen and willing successor is in place to kick a new lease of life into the site. Jason Stone is a Graphic Designer within a web design and software development company from Essex UK. Jason is an experienced blogger and owns the popular Flash tutorial blog the-dude.co.uk. This is what Jason has to say:

“I am a long-term reader of Aaron’s blogs and I am very excited to be taking over milienzo.com, and breathing some life back into a great website.

Over the coming months you can expect to see a revived site, with new posts added weekly providing inspiration for designers and some ramblings on my day-to-day discoveries on the web, plus a few surprises – but you will have to wait and see!”

Jason will be taking full ownership of the site from 1st December but he is an author with immediate effect, so I’m sure you’ll be seeing more of him very soon.

For me however, an era has come to an end. I learnt a lot with this site and got to know some great people too. If you haven’t already, do make sure you subscribe to the feed at my new site, or follow me on Twitter.

Thanks for the support that I’ve always been shown and thanks for the wealth of information and knowledge that you have all shared with me. Forgive me as I wipe back a tear or two. Goodbye miLienzo.com.

New web and graphic design blog is launched

Aaron — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 08:39:46 +0000

Wow, it seems ages ago that I first mentioned that I was thinking about launching a new site. It’s been almost three months since the idea popped in to my head, and about six weeks ago that I first started sketching ideas, but the day has finally come.

I’m delighted to announce my new blog, the purpose of which is to promote my freelance web design work, officially open.

The aim of my new site is certainly to better position myself for my freelance activities, hence the way the homepage has been used as a kind of shop window. However, I intend the blog element to provide a useful resource for web and graphic designers and I hope to to carry on much of the what this blog has been doing up until now.

My opening article is a list of 25 design and creativity blogs that have inspired me. This is a way of thanking all the bloggers I have interacted with and learnt from over the past 14 months. Please head over, have a read and subscribe to the new RSS feed. And you would be doing me a massive favour if you could Stumble or Digg the article?

What happens to miLienzo.com now?

I want miLienzo.com to stay. I’ve actually built up quite a successful little site here with decent traffic and subscriber numbers, so it would be a shame to let it go. However, the truth is running two blogs may be more than I can manage.

My intention is to use this site more for my personal ramblings – somewhere where I can let of steam and post links to weird and wonderful things I see around the Internet – somewhere where I don’t necessarily have to think too carefully about what I am saying. I like the idea of distinguishing between my professional freelance blog and my personal random ramblings.

For the next month that is how I will try and run things in which time I can assess how manageable running two blogs simultaneously is. If all goes well I will then redesign miLienzo.com and give it a fresh coat of paint for a new life.

Many thanks for all your support through this – I know my postings have been few and far between for some months now and I appreciate you sticking with me. Thank you!

Do you want to win an iPod touch?

Aaron — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 19:44:17 +0000

Of course you do because they are absolutely awesome! And luckily for you I want to raise awareness of a genuine competition where one is up for grabs. In fact, not just one is up for grabs but one every month!

I’ve just completed developing a Facebook application for IGM Investmore. The application is a trading game/competition where you are given £50,000 of virtual cash to spend on stocks and shares on the London Stock Exchange.

The game uses real data straight from the stock exchange so as the prices go up and down in real life, so do the prices of your virtual investments. The aim is obviously to make high returns off your investments – which is easier said than done.

The cool bit is that IGM Investmore are offering a free iPod touch to the most successful trader every month, and this is based on the highest percentage return which means anyone can win it any month – it doesn’t necessarily favour those that have been playing it for months on end.

There are other goodies up for grabs too so if you’ve got a Facebook account, why not head over to the Pinstripe Trader application now and start trading.

I’ll post again soon detailing how I found developing a Facebook app.

My personal goals and aims for a new year

Aaron — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 22:26:34 +0000

Hello…? … HELLO…? Cough, cough, please excuse me whilst I blow away some of these cobwebs and wipe the place down. Jeepers, it’s been a while hasn’t it?

First of all lets get the crap excuses out of the way: busy, Christmas, work, bla bla. And now the good excuse: I haven’t had a working Internet connection since 6th December. Good old BT have been buggering around with cables in the area and breaking a few thousand homes’ broadband connections. Mighty inconvenient for an Internet-addict such as myself, not to mention the web design projects which I’ve supposed to have been busy working on.

I won’t harp on about how utterly, utterly incompetent BT are, today is a day for rejoicing. At last I can log on to miLienzo.com again and make my first post of the year. And what a better way to start the year of blogging than to drop the bombshell that I’m going to stop! Well… not stop, but rather evolve.

I started this website almost a year ago and the reason was to network with other designers, learn from them, share what I was learning in college, and to try and establish myself in the industry. And I’ve done all that! I’ve learnt loads this past year and now I’ve got a great job, and I get enough freelance work to keep me out of trouble. The truth is miLienzo.com has lost a lot of its purpose so I need to give myself a new reason to commit to spending several hours a week running a blog.

I really want to push the freelance work this year so I have decided to build up my online portfolio and attach a blog to it. This will sit on myÂ aaronrussell.co.ukÂ domain (currently hosting my vastly out of date portfolio site) and I will aim to write more focused and relevant articles to my industry.

This idea is very much modelled on the success of fellow design-bloggers and country-folkÂ David AireyÂ andÂ Mark Boulton.Â I don’t want to blabber on too much about self promotion and personal branding and all that Internet jazz-talk, but I’m not sure miLienzo.com as a ‘brand’ can achieve what I want it to. It’s clear to me that this site has served a purpose and it’s time for me to realign my aims slightly.

So that’s that really. I still haven’t decided what I’m going to do with this site: whether to move all the content to my new site, or to just kill it and start from scratch, or even to try and flog it? I’d be interested to hear what you think I should do?

Over the next 4-6 weeks I’ll be pretty busy setting up the new site and creating a new design but I’ll continue to write updates on this site. I’m also busy working on another personal little project – a web app which I hope to launch this year and try and make a few bucks from. So there’s a few things in the pipeline keeping me occupied.

So 2008 looks like an exciting year. I hope you’ll stick around with me

A very merry Christmas to all!

Aaron — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 19:58:57 +0000

It’s been almost a month since I last posted on miLienzo.com and warned you that, well, I wouldn’t be posting much whilst I was going through a busy period of work. It seems some blog-readers prefer not to read apologies and excuses from bloggers who are not blogging… bah bloody humbug to them!

Now it is important for me to take five minutes over Christmas to let you know that I’m still alive and well and continuing to read your blogs as and when I can. But more importantly I want to wish all of my subscribers a very merry Christmas and thank you for the support that everyone has shown over the last ten months since I began blogging.

During the last couple of weeks of my blogging down-time I have been musing over what to do with this blog and even whether I should continue it. One thing that is certain is that the last ten months blogging has proven to be a really rewarding experience and not one that I want to give up. I do however have some big changes in mind.

I’ll save the details of my plans for a new post. For now there is only one thing that’s important: it involves lots of food and drink, family and loved ones, and dodgy knitted sweaters! Merry Christmas everyone – I hope you all have a great few days.

Are you feeling abandoned and neglected?

Aaron — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 21:34:17 +0000

OK, a bit of a melodramatic headline, but what’s going on? Eight days without a post? Only six posts throughout all of November?

Well, the good news is that I haven’t fallen off the edge of a cliff or been run over by a hippopotamus. I am alive and well. The bad news is that this pattern of irregular and infrequent posting is set to continue.

Ironically, November has been an amazing month for this blog. A few stumbles early in the month led to staggering levels of traffic and a significant increase in subscriber numbers. If you are one of these new subscribers I am really sorry – I feel like you’re a guest at my party and that I’ve been ignoring you. I’m not normally like this, honest!

A few potential blogging days were wasted earlier this week after I broke my brand new Mac at the weekend. Well, I didn’t break it, but when you give a new toy to an eager chap like me and mix it with a very limited knowledge of UNIX code, bad things can happen. And they did.

So a few days were spent reinstalling everything and moving all my data from my PC… again! In addition to this I’ve been trying to sell a few things – eBay really can be a time-consuming business – and of course, Christmas present buying is at the front of my mind, or more accurately, should be at the front of my mind – I haven’t bought one thing yet!

On top of all this, today I was offered a pretty big freelance contract which is going to keep me occupied most evenings and weekends for the next seven weeks. Who said Christmas was for partying and getting merry? I can’t moan because it means 2008 is going to start with a bumper pay slip, but it does mean blogging is slipping further down my list of priorities than I’d like it to.

Of course I will reserve some of my time for miLienzo.com – in fact I’ve got a great article coming up on how to set up a web server in Mac OS-X without bricking the computer! However, in an ideal world I’d post three or four times a week – this just isn’t going to happen for a while.

Thanks to everyone for sticking with me during this time of sparse bloggery. It’s great to see lots of new subscribers and I look forward to getting to know you all once I get my blogging butt back in action.

Macs making geeks happy the World over

Aaron — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 22:58:45 +0000

Last week I revealed to the World something that’s had me quite excited for a while now: that I was a Mac owner in waiting.

Well, the waiting is over and for the last five days my brand new Mac Pro has been taking a pasting as I’ve made it earn it’s position on my desk. So how’s she doing? And how have I found the experience?

Christmas has come early

Last Friday I finished work early because I couldn’t bare the thought of my new toy just sitting at home all boxed up and feeling lonely whilst I wasted valuable Mac-time sitting at my desk doing far less important things. I rushed home to find a larger-than-expected box waiting for me.

After opening the box up in a frenzy of excitement and getting the beast up and running, one of the first things I did was unplug it all again and open her up. I had an extra 2 Gb of RAM to stick inside her and an extra 500 Gb hard drive. What a lucky little Mac!

In my life I’ve opened up more PC’s than you can shake a stick at and it’s always the same. Turning the thing upside down, twisting fiddly screws at the back, damning your clumsy fat fingers when you drop that tiny screw into the deepest corner of the motherboard, wiping the sweat from your brow as you nervously stick your fingers into inaccessible crannies to remove and replace delicate cards and components – you know what it’s like.

The first thing that struck me about the Mac Pro is how much of a pleasure it is opening her up. One sturdy lever at the back releases the aluminium side plate revealing what can only be described as a work of art. The build of the Mac Pro is unbelievably solid, everything is organised into a neat modular layout and everything just slides out with ease and and clicks back in to place with reassuring solidity.

The sign of a true convert

There are two Mac applications that historically I’ve never been much of a fan of: namely iTunes and iPhoto. There are lots of reasons why I was anti these apps but mainly it was to do with there being better alternatives on the PC – Winamp and Picassa respectively. After spending a few days really getting to know iTunes and iPhoto I can reveal that I am truely converted – I love them both!

With iTunes it’s just feels and performs much better than it ever did on my PC – it just feels as if it belongs on the Mac. My 16 Gb of music is now sat on my Mac and iTunes is getting a lot more use than Winamp ever did because… it’s better!

With iPhoto I have to admit, I’m not sure if I still prefer Picassa or not. In the past I’ve tried iPhoto and it’s fallen short of my expectations. However, iPhoto 08 introduces the new feature of ‘events’ – the equivalent of albums. This new feature alone is a VAST improvement over previous versions of iPhoto and if nothing else it certainly pars with Picassa.

So far there is only one thing that is disappointing me with the Mac, and that’s my beloved Firefox. It’s crap! Firefox crashes on me several times every day and I have to do a forced quit. It seems to be when using JavaScript intensive sites or apps like Gmail, Google Docs etc.

Unfortunately my research seems to suggest I’m not the only one with Firefox problems on OS-X and there’s not much to be done about it. Safari, Opera and Camino are all good browsers that work well, but they don’t have any of my Firefox plugins which unfortunately have become essential parts of my browsing experience these days. For now I’ll stick with Firefox but I’m sure hoping it becomes more stable with future releases.

So to conclude, I’m absolutely in love with my Mac. The PC still clings on to a small amount of desk space as I haven’t finished moving everything across yet and I don’t have any of the Adobe tools for OS-X. However, the PC knows its days are numbered – it’s been dumped for a sexier machine that is a better performer, and well, just has a nicer personality.

Next week I will be a different person

Aaron — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 23:04:24 +0000

This weekend is going to be a life changing time for me. I will be undergoing a dramatic change. I’ve debated long and hard whether I should share this deeply personal piece of news on my blog, and I’ve decided it’s only the right thing to do.

Let me explain. For the past two years I’ve been feeling frustrated – like I’ve not been able to be the real me. I’ve been able to get on with my life but I haven’t been able to escape the feeling that the real me is someone else.

I made the decision to do something about it earlier this year and have since been saving hard for the ‘change’. Some of my friends have questioned my sanity and asked if I know what I’m doing.

It’s not been an easy decision to come to, but I do know what I’m doing. I couldn’t be more happy that I’m absolutely doing the right thing.

This weekend I will be changing… from a PC user to a Mac.