michael-smedley.co.uk

Tag

Mike — Sun, 20 May 2012 13:50:43 +0000

Tag is my first attempt at building a mobile app using the increasingly popular PhoneGap development platform. The application itself is simple in nature, in that it allows the user to take a photo, add a comment and tag words, and then upload to a web server to display on a webpage. However, the service is something that will be built on as I attempt to learn more about how to use PhoneGap, and the mobile app already includes features like geolocation, authentication with a web server and interacting with a server via a JSON feed. The site itself is …

Education Leaders Forum

Mike — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 20:47:23 +0000

The Education Leaders Forum is a yearly event joint hosted by Microsoft and UNESCO, along with a selection of conference parties, aiming to promote the impact of ICT in Education.

For this years event, they required a site that was nice, clean and minimal. For me this meant only 1 thing – Metro. The site takes advantage of the proportional squares, the oversized Segoe font and, thanks to the fabulous Metro JS, can bring some of the Metro effects to life.

Along with modern HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery, the site takes advantage of media queries so that the site …

Photoshop CS6, by a not-so-designery user

Mike — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 23:37:55 +0000

For me, Photoshop is a bit of a strange subject. My extent of using it will most likely consist of either cropping an image, applying effects to shapes or possibly tidying up some photos. It definitely isn’t the most essential piece of software for my web work – if I design anything I tend to do it in the browser instead – plus, whilst I’d like to think I know my way around most of Photoshop’s features, I’m definitely not up there with some of the people who I know use it on a regular basis.

However, the strange thing …

Light The Way – Original Concept

Mike — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 23:10:16 +0000

Light The Way wanted a new website to help promote their products and services. The one proviso they had was that it used the branding, which is white rounded rectangles on a blue background.

This design hoped to keep to that brief, but help it stand out using modern design techniques such as CSS transition hover effects and font replacement via TypeKit. The site was built in WordPress so that stock and other content could easily be managed.

In the end, the client wasn’t happy with this layout as it didn’t quite meet the design idea they had.. but I …

Florence Nightingale Foundation

Mike — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 22:07:39 +0000

For this years Florence Nightingale Foundation Annual Conference, a new, fresher website was needed to entice delegates to the conference.

For this site, absolutely everything, from the logo to the style guide, was completely rewritten using modern design techniques such as @font-face replacement, use of the 960 grid system and lots of jQuery to enhance the user experience.

Note: This work was done for Glasgows Event Management.

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Developing Mobile Apps the PhoneGap way

Mike — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 22:24:38 +0000

These days there’s no doubt that the web industry is moving towards the mobile market. The advances in mobile browsers, along with design trends like responsive design are pushing designers into placing as much time and effort into mobile and tablet layouts as much as desktop versions. Another step further on this is the development of mobile apps. Up until now (for me at least), this hasn’t been the domain of web professionals due to developers needing to know a more advanced language like C# or Java, but there is now a solution that can help bridge that gap. Introducing …

Logo design – Popcorn

Mike — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 20:38:48 +0000

A few months ago, I had an idea for a personal project to help me better understand the MVC workings of the CakePHP framework. The idea so far hasn’t got further then the templating phase, but I’m quite keen to get this back on sometime soon.

One thing I did get finished was the logo. The project is (obviously) related to movies, so I wanted to come up with something along those lines. One typeface that always stands out for me is that of the art deco phase of the 1920′s, so I was happy to find a font that …

Vintage Box

Mike — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 20:29:43 +0000

Vintage Box is a new online retailer selling high end, custom made vintage jewellery. The client wanted an online solution that was quick to set up and easy to maintain stock levels. As such, the site was built using Magento.

The theme was kept minimal so that the products on sale would stand out, while still offering the customer plenty of search and filtering options

The site is in its final stages before launch.

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Neesh Events

Mike — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 20:19:13 +0000

Neesh events are an event management company who also deal with weddings and creative design. They needed a website where they can continually add new images of their work. There was a challenge of there being no database use as well. As such, a custom CMS solution was created that essentially allows new images to be added simply by uploading to a certain directory.

The site has recently been upgraded to a WordPress solution. A database has been found.

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I got bored, so…

Mike — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 21:15:08 +0000

…I decided to redo my website again!

I’ve kind of realized I suck at blogging, so I’ve decided to try and take the focus off that element and return to where my site was originally, in showcasing the work that I do instead.

Now, obviously I realize that I have no work on here at the moment, but I’m hoping to get some work on here pretty soon, so erm, check back later and stuff!!…