Just completed the design work on a couple of magazine adverts for ispective.

They are releasing an iPhone/iPod Touch app aimed at football fans which contains an encyclopaedic knowledge of every thing World Cup based i.e. “every tournament, every match, every team, every manager, every player, every goal and much more.”

The ‘universe’ advert is due to appear in the next issue of World Soccer magazine. The ’stadium’ advert is appearing in the next issue of FourFourTwo.

Update: World Cup Universe is now available for download for your iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad. Download it here. Follow it on Twitter here.

The magazine describes itself as a “How to magazine for everything Adobe” and is available both in digital and hard copy. If you select the three-month subscription gift from Adobe, they allow you to download the latest three issues in digital format which you can view onscreen using a software app called Zinio Reader.

I downloaded my three free issues and started browsing through them – to be honest, it’s a pretty good magazine with some interesting tips and tricks and articles provided by professionals who use Adobe’s software.

Each issue they run a really interesting feature called “Design Makeover”. Basically, the publishers of the magazine take a particular piece of existing design (which has been submitted in by the owner), that is serious need of a refresh and ask three designers to provide a ‘design makeover’. The subject of the article can be anything ranging from a website, magazine layout, book cover, piece of packaging or CD cover etc etc.

I viewed this as a great opportunity to get a piece of my design work out there and hopefully generate some leads. So I contacted Layers magazine and made them aware that I would be interested in being a contributing designer to this article.

Low and behold, within the space of a month or so, they asked if I’d have a look at doing a makeover on a company logo and website layout that had been sent in. Below is the before and after…

Before.

After.

Finally, after constantly being put on hold, I’ve managed to get round to designing myself some business cards.

Just sent the artwork off to Moo – hoping to get them back a week on Monday.

These are just a temporary measure and should keep me going until I can invest some serious coinage in proper, die-cut versions.

If you’d like one of my cards – drop me an email and I’ll bang one in the post.

Next step… get a business bank account set-up.

Plus, this puts more pressure on moi to get some business cards finalised – which has been a job that constantly slips down the ‘To Do’ list.

Obviously, it is still very early days for this website plus I’m still finding my way round WordPress. Unfortunately, for the next few weeks until I get new pages and sections completed and uploaded, this site is going to look a bit empty and unfinished. Sorry about that.

The website that preceded this had been knocking around for a fair few years now and was beginning to look a bit dated, so I decided it was time to give it a bit of an overhaul.

By now you’ve probably spotted that this new website has a bloggy/news type appearance – as opposed to a more conventional gallery/slide show approach. Not only is this becoming a more common way of producing websites in the design industry, I also felt this was a more effective way of keeping the site constantly updated and looking fresh, while also keeping the general maintenance down to a minimum. Using a bloggy news feed approach means I can upload new work and latest news on the fly and hopefully encourage readers to come back more often and possibly leave feedback.

The conundrum I’m faced with now is where to start. Do I go back and upload all the major work I’ve done over the past few years or do I treat this website as the start of a new dawn and therefore a blank canvas? I’m strongly tempted to draw a line on all my previous work and start this website from now but I do have work on my previous website that I’m quite proud of and I’m not quite ready to assign it to the archives just yet.

With that in mind and the flexibility that this type of website offers, I think I will introduce old work into this site but possible under a category entitled ‘The Vault’ or something along those lines. Who knows?

At the end of the day, this website is an experiment of sorts and I’m not entirely sure how it will end up. I’m quite liking the thought of being very spontaneous with it and therefore it becomes a bit of an evolving beast. Besides, as a graphic designer, I’m faced with rules and guidelines day-in, day-out – the last thing I want is my own website to become that rigid.

And on that note I’ll sign out. Hope you enjoy the website and I look to forward to any feedback (positive I hope!)