neilwill » design

Villa de los realejos international tournament

Neil — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 18:39:58 +0000

This was inspired by a posting on BuzzFeed. The idea is a random wikipedia article names the band, a random quote names tha album and a random photo makes the cover art. Only issue I had was nearly all the random photos on flickr were set to all rights reserved. Come on people, share a little!

So here’s the album cover. I should probably have worked on some tracks before finishing off the cover art but working from the end backwards is a nice change.

Original ‘random photo’ In case you were wondering by leedav on flickr.

neilwill.com – a fresh new look

Neil — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 02:40:28 +0000

I’ve been working on and off on the site design for some time now and it’s finally got to the point where I’m happy with it. There may be more to come down the line, there’s a few other things I have in mind but I wanted to start using this new site.

It is the first site with the full design crafted by my own fair hand and I’m pretty pleased with it. I found a few useful design sites that showcase site designs as well as link to fonts, brushes, textures, etc. I’ve learned a huge amount in the last year about web design as well as dabbling in what has turned out to be the very interesting world of graphical design.

Now I’ve got to get back to creating that content malarkey to give you a reason to come back. The blog started off as a diary to keep friends and family informed of what I was up to in California – whether it stays like that or expands into a broader beast I’m not too sure. I may add in more sites I find and videos of monkeys ice skating and that kind of shenanigans. Ah, it’s been too long since I last talked about malarkey and shenanigans in the same paragraph.

New design

Neil — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 20:17:11 +0000

I’ve put this together with a few bits and pieces in the sidebar. There’s not quite as much functionality there as the jaiku badge won’t work, I suppose it won’t allow flash content on this free version of WordPress. But it looks like you can do a lot more with it otherwise, I should be able to see if there is anyone visiting and reading the site or if I’m just talking to myself

I’ll see how it goes and then think about moving across from Blogger.

CSS

Neil — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 03:26:00 +0000

I’ve been working on my web design skills a lot in the last month and have been learning all about CSS. Quite possibly a dull subject to those of you without any interest in web design but its a very powerful tool.

Check out CSS Zen Garden

Click the designs on the right and it will display exactly the same page using a different CSS style sheet so the look changes completely. Its what all the social networking sites use for skinning so I should really have a go and re-doing my myspace page and this blog. Almost done with the other site I mentioned before, still waiting on some content there and then I’ll see what I can do here.

Though don’t be surprised if I still have the same template in six months

Edit: I went in and made a quick update – I’ve always thought the page is rather narrow so I widened it a bit. It’s a start…

Blogging about blogging

Neil — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 02:22:00 +0000

I have a new website project going on at the moment, a friend of mine is setting up a web presence and I’m part of a team putting together the site. At the moment I’m installing WordPress on there which is a blogging tool, kind of like this one. I saw it on Paul’s site Oz Adventures and I’ve heard quite a bit about it before so I thought I’d give it a go. Looks like rather than just blogging like this you can make it seamlessly into part of your site, as I think Paul also did on Utterly Recipes. The blog there seems to have gone but it’s had a bit of a face lift and is looking nice.

Anyway I’m learning lots of new stuff about blogs and am looking in to learning flash too to make my sites a bit more useful. I won’t post the new site yet as its all still under development but will post a link once complete, which will hopefully not be too much longer.

I haven’t had a post this nerdy for a while. I’ll have to come up with some less tech stuff next time.