We’ve all been there, with an opportunity to impress only to fail by handing out a scrappy piece of paper with your name and number on. Is anyone likely to find that piece of paper again once they’ve put it down? Are they likely to pass it along to another potential client? Or are they more likely to throw it in the trash?

A business card is an important piece of promotional material. Something that is unlikely to be thrown away if it does it’s job properly. It must be memorable, easy to read and contain all the information needed in a short amount of space.

Making an impact…

A business card usually comprises of two separate sections, and these two sections give you ample opportunity to get your point across quickly and concisely.

Section 1 – The imagination

The first section (namely the front of the card) is your canvas to create whatever you like. Try a doodle on your Wacom, write a funny line or even pop your tag line on there (mine for example is Artfully Illuminating Design, something I’ve stuck with from day one). It allows you to show a bit of personality, a bit of creativity and create something more eye catching than a scrap of paper.

The above design is quite eye catching using a bright blue (my trademark colour). Someone is unlikely to throw it away and is likely to remember the card. The little tag-line of “all your design are belong to us” probably won’t be understood by most clients as it’s a rip off of a humorous online phrase. It can however add that little extra in allowing the potential client to remember you.

Try drawings, jokes, fancy patterns, cartoons, phrases, photographs or even Haiku. It can really make a boring piece of card interesting.

Section 2 – The details

So you’ve got your potential clients attention, how do we hammer home the contact details?

It’s all about organisation and importance. You need to gently organise your details according to what you want on there. Obvious details are telephone number, email address and website (if you have one). Additional details you could apply are (depending on your industry);

1. Address
2. Work & Mobile telephone numbers
3. Social networking links (such as Twitter)
4. Alternative contact details such as Skype
5. Fax number (not so common lately)
6. Your job title
7. Your skills/attributes

Don’t overload the card with details, only list the important stuff and make sure the important stuff is the largest test on the card. Also ensure it’s readable when printed before you go an order 500 business cards. You have to bear in mind that just because it’s large on your 27″ monitor, it’s not when it’s printed only 3 inches wide.

Free Photoshop Template (UK sizes)

I’ve drummed up a few free templates for you to use. Simply pop in your details, print them and see how the look!

Please note these are set at 85mm x 55mm which may need changing before printing depending on which country your in.

Please also make sure your guide lines are on by using the shortcut Ctrl+H/Apple+H or clicking View>Extras. The outer border is your cropping area and the innder border is your bleed area. The inner rectangle is your safe zone. Try to keep everything in there. Happy designing!

Section 1 – The Imagination | Section 2 – The Details

Every web developer should (and probably does) use these tools on a daily basis. They streamline your development and help speed up little niggles with your site.

Web Developer Toolbar

This handy toolbar includes features such as in browser CSS editing which lets you see CSS changes live, the ability to disable Javascript, Cookies, CSS and Images (for usability testing) and includes many handy features.

Some fancy tricks also include:

• Element outlining
  This allows you to see which <div/input/anything> tags are lining up wrong and combined with the CSS editor proves a powerful tool in element alignment.
• Disabling CSS
  This allows you to see how your layout holds up with browsers which don’t support CSS (such as screen readers). If your content is laid out poorly, it. will. be. read. out. loud. poorly.
• Browser Resizing
  Want to see how your site looks in a 1024×768 browsers? Click the re-size button and the toolbar will set your browser window to any size you specify!
• Quick Validation links
  Want to know if your XHTML or CSS validates? There’s quick handy links under the Tools drop-down.
• Generated Source vs Source
  Is your Javascript messing up your code? Then view the Generated Source to see what it’s actually doing to your pages.
• Quickly Edit HTML & CSS in-line
  It’s a quick and dirty way to see how your new CSS/HTML code works in your site. Simply open the editor and type away to see your page update live.

There’s many more options you can play with. All you need is Firefox and the Web Developer Toolbar.

Firebug

Firebug is a tool used by almost every web developer in the world. If you’ve not installed it yet, do it immediately as it will save you many man hours fixing bugs in your websites code. It’s had over 19 million downloads and averages 22,000 downloads every day.

Colorzilla

When I can’t remember how to count in hex (which often happens) I use Colorzilla. It makes sure my #009ecc is not #02a4d3 and that my #666 isn’t #999. It’s best to keep consistency and is what separates a good designer, with a great designer.

There’s loads more Firefox Add-ons you could also check out:

• YSlow https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5369
• Pixel Perfect https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7943
• Firecookie https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6683
• PageDiff https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4274

Internet Explorer Developer Tools

On the Internet Explorer front there’s not much for the modern Web Developer. However, using the Firefox tools above covers most if not all of your needs, except for IE8, IE7 and IE6 testing. This is what I’ll go over next.

The best tool is actually one released by Microsoft themselves. The aptly named Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar which gives you a few tools to play with which include a CSS and HTML editor, the ability to disable CSS and images, use a colour picker and outline elements. It’s basically a shorter version of the Firefox web developer toolbar. It also allows you to quickly switch between IE7 and IE8 browser rendering. Simply select which browser mode you need and you can see what your page looks like in IE7.

Now for IE6 (cringe). I know a lot of developer are now dropping support but as previously mentioned sometimes it’s not an option, and we sometimes need to think about this when developing mass market websites.

Spoon.net

It’s a tool I only recently found and because Microsoft won’t properly develop something which lets you run IE6 on your machine, Spoon developed a browser plug-in which lets you run ANY browser, well, IN browser. They call it “App Virtualization” and I call it magic as it let’s you run IE6! (note, as of writing I couldn’t get it to buffer on Windows 7 64-bit but could on Vista (32) and XP (32), let me know, maybe it needs to be XP Virtualized?)

Adobe BrowserLab

This amazing tool lets you preview your pages side by side and even overlay pages (known as onion skin). You can also preview your site in many browsers which include Internet Explorer 6/7/8, Safari 3/4 and Firefox 2/3. The only downside is you can’t preview it as a functional page so can only be used for styling sakes, and it’s a little slow to run sometimes.

I hope you found these tools useful for your web developing needs and good luck (you’ll need it if your working with IE6)

Update 6th Nov 09: My panoramic wembley photo has been used in Main Event Magazine (Thanks Ky for sorting this)
Update 12th Oct 09: This photo is now part of the Wikipedia page on Wembley Stadium as the header image

The game was full of controversy, foul play, substitutions and of course, goals. Chelsea finished up beating the Champions 4-1 on penalties and I took along my trusty SLR to photograph some of the action and I got some pretty good shots! Note: all the photos are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales licence which means they are free to use along with attribution to this site! Enjoy!

I’ve been toying with Photoshop filters and different colours lately for a project at work and decided that what I created was good enough as a wallpaper! Therefore I am now announcing for download “Funkydory“. A very colourful and stylised background for your computer in many different screen resolutions. Just pick yours from the list below!

1024×768 | 1280×800 | 1440×900 | 1600×1200 | 1680×1050 | 1920×1080 | iPhone/iPod Touch

So University is done and dusted for 2009. I won’t be returning until September 2010 which makes for a nice break. In the end I got my grades (A,A,B,B,B,C) which I was very happy with. To top all this off I thought I’d showcase some of the work I did to receive these grades.

Visual Design (B Grade)

I’ll start with a Module I didn’t thoroughly enjoy this year due to boring briefs, however, I did a little bit of illustration for it which included some postage stamps, posters and even included some Video in After Effects. You can see the video, the illustrations and the posters over at http://turnitoff.info/ (the posters reside in the footer of the page)
The site was built using the latest in Javascript and jQuery technology so check it out, hover over the elements, play with the buttons. Your probably better off using FireFox too, as IE couldn’t really handle it’s superior web modernness. Make sure you check out the video at the bottom of the website too (yes that is me speaking sounding common as muck).

For Visual design I also illustrated the stamps shown in the header image. It’s based on Music Technology over the years and I think I captured the best four from the past century or so. You can see them in all their vector glory too.

Multimedia Product (C Grade)

This was a complex one, which also means I can’t demonstrate it online. The idea was simple, Unique Bidding auctions.

The site featured a worlds first in online bidding. Live real time bidding in auctions. You could actually watch LIVE bidders placing their respective amounts on the page as it went along. This meant users could bid against each other based on other users’ bids. Clever eh! It was all jQuery and PHP grabbing the data from a database. It was awfully complex and also included a 10,000 word document explaing the process and research behind it. There was also a very fancy presentation which explains the fundementals if anyone wants to watch it. Its the branding, the functionality and the UI all rolled into a short few slides.

It also had it’s own iPhone web application which tied into the whole site shwoing live bids from anywhere in the world at any time.

Web Programming (A grade)

Another interesting one. And one which I actually really enjoyed.

Assignment one involved building a file based Guestbook with full admin features, the ability to edit posts and delete them, a swear word filter to stip out those naughty words and a slick simple UI. It also had AJAX editing of comments right in the page. No loading, no navigating, just click and change! I think you can guess what Lady Part and Ping Pongs were supposed to say! It maybe available as a free download if anyone is interested in the future.

Assignment two was a dog database website. Very similar to Battersea dogs homes website. It needed full admin controls and the ability to save dogs as favourites and have the ability to search the dogs too. The brief was very extensive, and I covered everything. Check it out online right now. I ended up building a commercial site based on this for Cliffe Kennels.

Authoring (B Grade)

It was basically Actionscript 3.0 work. For assignment 1 I had to develop an interface which included an animation, using the drawing API and the components within Flash 8. I ended up building a Spirograph kind of application which allowed you to colour it yourself and watch the application build it for you. Very nice! Have a look at it. I also built a flash gallery using XML and class files. But it’s not something I have online at the moment.

Multimedia Design & Production (A Grade)

This is a group project, and something which is a real challenge working with four different creative minds. My University chum Chris Kovalenko was part of our A grade group which created a chairty website and CDROM called the West Yorkshire Autistic Society (completely fake). Check out the site.

Intro to Video (B Grade)

My mate Adam Fisher helped me out with this one as I couldn’t star, edit and film the whole video. He rode the bike, I edited it, The Chemists supplied the music. It actually works quite well for my first every video. So I’m quite happy with it as a 2nd year project.

That’s it! I hope this gives someone some kind of inspiration either for university or for their next project. If it did help you in any way shape or form, drop me a comment!

The other day I realised I had loads of spare web stuff lying around on my hard drive which included canned designs, unused web pages, old university assignments and old website designs (PSD’s and XHTML/CSS).

Well, today I decided I’d start releasing this spare stuff online. If I’m not using it maybe someone else can get something out of it. That was the idea behind the WordPress Olivia template, it was an old design which morphed into a pretty popular free template.

Anyway, we start this new routine of free downloads with a free XHTML template complete with instructions on how to use and modify it.

You can view a demo of the free XHTML theme or even download it for yourself to dissect, prod and poke.
There is also a tutorial on how to edit the pages, adding paragraphs and headers and also how to edit the CSS. It’s a basic tutorial but it explains the beginner methods.

Unfortunately there won’t be much support for it. You’ll have to work it out for yourself. If you are really really stuck you can drop comments for this post below and I’ll try my damn hardest to answer. Honest.

Download (370kb) | View Demo

It’s not far off release date! (well within a week hopefully!)

Features of the theme:

1. Clean fluent design based on the 960 grid system
2. Beautifully selected colour tones
3. FamFamFam silk icons (as they are very pretty)
4. Various stylesheets (colours)
5. Widget ready, as all new themes usually come
6. Other neat little features!

Check out the image of the design above and leave us some feedback and request for features!
We will post the download right here next week and will also submit it to the WordPress Gallery.

Check back soon!