JShakespeare.com

I broke the internet…

admin — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 08:02:15 +0000

After a huge amount of downtime the site is back up. Apologies if you have tried to email @jshakespeare.com during this time as it will not have reached me. Stay tuned for big updates coming…

Sites and pages created at Messum’s

admin — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 22:31:53 +0000

A few select pages I’ve created since starting my 1+ year placement at Messum’s.

StartaCollection.com: Complete site for the Start a Collection initiative, which focuses around a three day sale of 100+ works at Messum’s.
Michael Forster: A landing page for emails and publicity relating to the recently finished Michael Forster exhibition.
Andrew Hemingway: Another landing page, this time for pastel artist Andrew Hemingway, currently showing in the gallery.
Online Exhibitions: November and December: Pages for the online only exhibitions at for November (Alan Cotton) and December (James Dodds). Use the arrows to navigate.

Rain rain, go away

admin — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 22:27:21 +0000

Welcome to the English autumn. A quick 5 minute illustration upon returning home after a soaking.

Wise words on IE6’s (hopefully) imminent demise

admin — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 08:23:38 +0000

Stolen from Digg this morning. I truly hope some vastly paradigm shifting event like Youtube or even Google dropping IE6 support happens really soon. I gave up developing for IE6 last year (hell, sometimes I can’t even be bothered to get IE7 bugs fully ironed out), but until support for it is severely cut, high end commercial web ventures will always be hampered by this dinosaur. It’s a huge waste of time and money and it’s setting back the huge advances that are being made in the web.

Brunelsailing.com goes live

admin — Tue, 26 May 2009 22:10:55 +0000

The redesign of Brunel University Sailing Club’s website has gone live at brunelsailing.com. Built on Wordpress, this is the most content-intensive site I have built to date. To find out more, click here.

Bagel Girl

admin — Tue, 26 May 2009 19:01:01 +0000

This short film was produced with other Brunel MMTD students over a 4 month period.

A greedy businessman becomes obsessed with a delivery girl from the bagel stand he frequents, but when her business becomes successful she is replaced by someone else. Drastic action action must be taken if he is ever to see his beloved Bagel Girl again… Available in HD

Businessman – Andrew Shire
Bagel Girl #1 – Viktoria Hedburg
Bagel Girl #2 – Helena Ren

Old stuff

admin — Wed, 13 May 2009 11:39:28 +0000

I made this a while ago as part of a uni assignment on marketing to attract visitors to a fellow student’s website. Disclaimer: being a noob at font creation, some/all of what I say in this tutorial may be falsified and/or completely useless information. Still, the opening title is cool.

Martian landscape

admin — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 13:13:09 +0000

A detail of the background made for a flash game. All foreground elements were made in Illustrator with the sky made in Photoshop. The complete backdrop took approximately 4 days.

Martian landscape

Street concept

admin — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 16:52:08 +0000

A marker rendering I did to illustrate a scene featured in a short film I am currently involved in producing.

Street concept from 'Bagel Girl'

Bare bones blogging

admin — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 13:24:15 +0000

There seems to be a strange obsession at the moment amongst designers with cramming as many social networking doo-dads onto their portfolio site as possible. I’ve always found it a strange marketing strategy to use a portfolio for bombarding potential employers with every aspect of your social life. Personally, I feel it is more prudent to hold back a bit on the plug-ins and feeds. Do you really think your latest Twitter post will reflect favourably on you as a professional? Do you honestly expect someone to hire you based on your top 10 Last.fm tracks?

In putting together the blog section of this site I made a lot of decisions as to how it would be used, who would be reading it, and how it tied in with the rest of the website. I too was tempted by the shiny plug-ins and widgets, but ultimately I decided they were just unnecessary. I even disabled standard Wordpress features like comments (though that was more through a fear that I’d get spammed or worse – get no comments whatsoever!).

I can of course understand why people choose to display all of these seemingly extraneous details alongside their work, many employers like to see that someone is not just a machine for churning out work, and does actually have other interests. At the end of the day though, I think it takes all the fun out of having a web presence if you know that every tweet, every Facebook status update could in some way affect your employability in the future. That, and the fact that somebody could find out about my crack addiction.