Alan Coleman

I’ve been getting back into buying CDs lately, as it seems to be the only way that I actually get round to listening to music. After a few years of downloading off dodgy sites it occurred to me that I was simply going through the motions for the sake of it, not because I wanted to listen to a particular album.

Essentially, digital greed. Just because it’s free, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you want it.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I don’t like the idea of getting hold of an infinite music collection for free, it’s just that things are never really that simple. For example I might be using Limewire or other such software to get hold of an album I want, great, but more often than not I’ll end up with half of it at a dubious quality. Even if I do get the whole album it’ll probably end up forgotten on a memory stick at work.

If I buy an album on CD I’ll listen to it because I’ve spent the money, I get the artwork and it’s easier to put on for a few minutes whilst doing the washing up. Also, when I write the thing to iTunes, or whatever, I can dictate the quality.

Finally, I got into music through my old mans music collection, thumbing through records and getting to know the artwork, putting an album on and listening to it like you would read a book. If I ever have kids, it’s unlikely they’ll get the same satisfaction from a hard drive full of MP3s.

I wrote this on my Boomablog back in August 2005 and thought that it would be quite relevant here.

It may sound like a bold claim, but in a small way this book changed my life for the better. Over the last year or so I’ve been trying to implement as much standardised CSS and XHTML code into my web development work as possible. This has been an enjoyable and enlightening experience that has been complemented by a gradual move to PHP / MySQL for my personal stuff. In the early days of the web it was like everyone was building their own car for the very first time, now people like me are waking up to standards compliant code as if we would the idea of tuning up the carburettor to make the machine cleaner and more efficient.

In Web Standards Solutions Dan Cederholm succeeds in bringing a sense of order to some of the paths towards standards compliant and lighter code that have been well documented over the past year or so. The book is broken down into 16 easily digestible chapters that each focus on a different aspect of design, there are workable approaches to each solution that are appraised and documented for their individual merits.

Personally I like the way that the chapters remain autonomous, many markup / scripting / code related books tend to revolve around a large project so you can’t turn to the bits you want to without having to relate back to the start. In that respect the examples can seem very simplistic, but that is where the power lies. Chapter 2 for instance, I’ve always used headings (h1, h2) but have never really had their importance laid bare in a simple manner – now it all makes sense and I can implement accordingly. The same goes for lists, ‘Evil’ tables and other elements.

Essentially what we’re dealing with here is a book that champions the merits of CSS, it does this by not trying to achieve to much and by leaving the real work to the reader, which I think is clever. It also demonstrates that there’s still life left in the book for this sort of thing, whilst all this information is available online this is a neat package that has a beginning and an end. And most importantly, you can put a bookmark in and read it on the train.

On Tuesday I wrote an article on BoomaBlog about how Apple Mac computers get on my nerves. It was a little harsh perhaps, but despite my obvious inverted snobbery it did get me thinking about the pros and cons of Mac or PC from a development point of view.

I once heard the Apple Mac touted as computers for people, an alternative to the human orientated wintel PC. At the time I was a Mac user and thought this seemed like a perfectly reasonable comment to make, after all the Mac has a half decent OS and the hardware is as stylish as it is well built. Also, SCSI and 16 bit sound came as standard. The PC on the other hand doesn’t look all that and has an operating system who’s musical equivalent would probably be James Blunt.

All was well and good with me and Mac until I left a creative industry to start college, which was a PC stronghold. The change over wasn’t that difficult as most things where in the same place, if anything the machines at college seemed to be that bit more stable than the Macs I’d used before.

The true turning point came on an autumn day in London. Whilst working for Fatty on a paving job at the Millbank Tower (that’s another story) I found a dented PC in a skip, covered in brick dust. Whilst it wasn’t going to break any records for speed, I used it for the whole of the first year and even used it to build an ASP site. Things got better when I realised that the cracked software available worked flawlessly, I was hooked.

The throwaway PC theme continues with our home network. The two laptops that myself and Mandy use were also dragged out of a bin. They can be customised, salvaged for parts or modified with open source operating systems very easily, and that’s where the fun starts.

It’s because the PC has become so cheap that users don’t get attached to them. As a patronising analogy, consider having a vintage Triumph Spitfire in the garage, great for impressing your mates, but an old XR2 would be faster, cheaper and more reliable. So despite the let down of its most popular OS, it is the common old PC that is actually the peoples computer. An everyday tool that can be anonymously recycled, never too precious to leave outside with a label on saying, ‘Please take me, I work’.

Hello everyone, and a happy New Year to you all. This year starts quite busy for me, as a flip side to the inconvenience of a full time development job, I’ve a load of great sideline projects to be getting on with. Stuff the latest celebrity show on the shit pump, the real winters entertainment for the dark evenings involves playing around with PHP on a local server, great fun.

I’ve been looking for an open source CMS (Content Management System) for a friends football club website for ages, but everything was either too vague or complicated. So in the end I’ve decided to make my own CMS, which will be a simple but functional. I anticipate it to be a few weeks worth of evenings, with the News section almost there. After the News I’ll be moving onto Fixtures, then Match Reports and finally Teams.

So I get to play around building the CMS, and Arron, the First team manager, gets to spend more time on the touchline screaming at people (probably whilst making a circular motion with one hand, and holding four fingers up on the other). Which he’d much rather be doing than arsing around with HTML and FTP.

The end of the road for Microsoft Windows and myself could be in sight, just. I’ve been banging keyboards for years, swearing and becoming increasingly frustrated by the Windows experience.

For despite what the misleading adverts might suggest, the whole package is an unnecessarily bloated afterthought that makes for a clunky and tiresome encounter. If it’s not popping warning balloons up, it’s trying to download some security update or bloody instant message centre with pictures on it. There seems to be little distinction between a teenage bedroom and a professional environment.

In short, it’s simply not good enough.

So I’m turning to Linux for some salvation, and with some generous help from the forums and Paul in I.T. I’ve managed to load an old laptop with Fedora Core 5. First reactions are extremely positive. It’s fast, uncluttered and supported by quite literally millions of users the world over. For me however, it’s the nature of the open source software community that appeals. The idea that there can be a viable alternative that is a superior product based on functionality, rather than profit.

I switched from Mac OS to Windows after moving on from the music industry to web development in the late 90s.What’s most surprising, is that it’s taken me six years to finally jack it in and join the millions of other Linux users out there.

A colleague at work sent me this link, it’s to a great site called Modern Life is Rubbish. This particular article is entitled 8 Web Design Clichés of 2006 and is about web design clichés of 2006, funnily enough.

Anyway, it’s just occurred to me that I have been using all of the above mentioned design clichés.

So it’s official, as much as my Tesco T shirts suggest otherwise, I’m a fashion victim.

I’m currently working on a redesign for Esher Athletic Football Club, who are managed by a collegue at work.

The current site is a bit old hat in the late 90s style of things, so I’ll be bringing an up to date web 2.0 look to things with a dynmic PHP driven presence.

The club badge was first for an overhaul, which involved a reworking of the origional design that was hand drawn. Using Illustrator to create a vector graphic version, the aim is to respect the identity of the origional but give it a more professional feel.

Recently I’ve been using PHP include function to present a common menu to a set of pages. As you’d expect it all works fine, the only problem being that the user can’t tell what page is currently being browsed from looking at the navigation.

After posting a message on the Textdrive forum, ruiling from the US sent me a link to this tutorial on Alistapart:

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/keepingcurrent/

This uses the same include function but with a unique page identifier that is read by the menu.

So easy even I could understand it.

We had a BBQ this weekend, and it was while we listened to the football online that a friend of mine mentioned that Firefox is now the best browser available for the Mac. As everyone knows, Mac users can be like old women when it comes to what they run on those nice looking machines they lug around Shoreditch. So it came as quite a surprise to hear that they where sharing the same enlightenment as their dirty PC using inferiors.

With Apple now turning to Intel for their chipset, and in doing so allowing Windows to run alongside their own operating system, Mac – PC convergence could be coming a whole lot more familiar in the future. I think this process will be helped along by the arrival of Web 2.0, with its clean Mac like interfaces, functionality and adherence to web standards.

This is good news for everyone, and a welcome move forward from the ‘Us and them’ of the past decade.

This is something I’ve been meaning to do for a while, the complete separation of my professional and personal life on the web. This should prevent the feeling of paranoia I used to get when displaying professional work alongside my personal ranting in Boomablog.

Messing around with code and design ideas is something I’ve been doing for a living for a number of years now, and it’s something that’s provided me with immense enjoyment. Developing projects for the web reminds me of taking my bike apart and putting it back together in the garage when I was little. The idea of discovering how something works, making it better and seeing the results is as exiting then is it is now.

On a personal level I’ve been overwhelmed by the informal community vibe that development seems to foster. There’s always someone willing to help, make suggestions or even just let you know that you’re not alone in what you do.

For me, that’s what it’s all about.

I finished working as a web developer at Espresso Education in May 2006. We provided media rich teaching resources and student activities that are as robust as they are engaging.

The content is delivered to a cached server within each school and is updated on a weekly basis, this allows us to avoid many of the bandwidth restrictions associated with file size and steaming media. Standard Internet and Web browser technologies are used to deliver content from the cached server to the end user.

On the practical side of things I have been building intuitive and accessible projects with consistent design themes, whilst also applying creativity and technical input to a weekly news broadcast. Wherever possible we respect web standards and the use of valid, minimal markup.

Below is a montage of some of the projects I have worked on over the past couple of years. I’ve tried to give each one a look and charm of its own without reusing too many ideas, like shiny buttons or predictable web 2.0 fades!

All work relies heavily on CSS for functionality and layout, with a clear distinction made between the content and presentation layers.

This was the final project for a graphic design course I did in the evenings at Central Saint Martins last year. It is a modern take on the classic design of the London Underground map by Harry Beck in the 1930s. The hardest part was mapping the various points during the preparation stage. Executing the final article didn’t prove that difficult, with Illustrator being the perfect tool for the job.

The old front pages for my personal site, had great fun playing around with these. Check out the old browsers!

2005

2004

2003

2002

2001

2000

I designed this logo as the basis of an identity for a new online store, chippz.com.

I liked the idea of all the letters being formed from the same shape, thus giving the impression of something created by a machine or as part of a mechanical process.

The center of the ‘O’ is pressed out to look like a chip, as in chippz and microchip. The work of genius I’m sure you’ll agree.

The process of building the letters was as easy as chopping bits out of shapes. I enjoyed doing this and remember being pleased with the outcome.

A corporate website designed for the Control Circle group. It serves as a constantly updating news source, community area and PDF download facility.

The front screen is built in HTML with an embedded Flash object, this uses ActionScript to produce the smooth fade effects on mouse over. The image mouse overs in the top left hand corner could have been done in CSS, as could much of the layout, but that was back then and this is now!

Secondsminuteshours.com is a micro site that fronts a telephone network support service. It is built in HTML using the Photoshop slice function, something I’ve never been that keen on but works quite well in this example. I spent ages trying to find pictures of a fluorescent jacket on line with no success, however the one pictured here is on the back of a telephone engineer who turned up at the office. The flash made the reflective material come to life and the rest was done in Photoshop.

jetaway.com is a database driven site providing a travel agency style flight booking facility. It uses Active Server Pages to query and update a database.

The design is based around a simple colour and logo scheme that is implemented using Cascading Style Sheets. The form validation code that checks the user entries takes the form of an external JavaScript file that returns errors within the page.

This site will not function on my UNIX server because it is written in ASP. the screen dumps below provide an overview.

I built this interface to function as the front end of an information kiosk at Anglia Polytechnic University. It uses Visual Basic for functionality while the content comes courtesy of a small database. The maps were built in 3D Studio max, and as with the rest of the imagery uses the GIF format for compression. There is also a media player to play videos.

A Large Web development project for SESSA (South East Students Sports Association) involving the Conqueror online editing system. The site provides text based information, downloadable documents and a bulletin board for members to organise sporting events.

Conqueror is essentially a UNIX based CMS, which is great in theory but in reality makes even the simplest layout change a cumbersome experience. Hence the reason it has an extremely simple design. Whilst this is a developer’s nightmare the flip side of the coin is that it provides for browser based editing, thus making it an invaluable tool for displaying weekly scores and league tables.

Cheers to the APU employment office and Steve in the sports department for setting me up with this little number. The cash helped more than you could ever know!

These images were created using 3d Studio Max during the second year at college. Most of all they demonstrate the reflection, refraction, lathing and materials functions of the software. These examples are fairly basic, to be really good at 3D work requires a certain amount of dedication, and as I didn’t see a future in it for myself Studio Max and I parted company here. Good fun though.

This is a multimedia example designed for a college module called Communication Models. Built in Flash, the final movie runs as a full screen SWF file intended for a 1024 x 768 screen resolution. Photoshop was used to manipulate and build the images.

The finished article contains mouse over animation, audio and sound effects, picture fades between every screen and a menu default navigation.

Due to the nature of the product it is not suitable for viewing online, however there are some screen shots to give a general idea of the approach taken during the design process.

Semiotic analysis

Technical notes

This product is designed to be viewed full screen (Ctrl + f) on a monitor displaying a 1024 X 768 resolution. It requires multimedia speakers capable of playing music coherently, this is vital as the sound plays an important role in forming syntagmatic relationships between the various media.

Introduction

This piece is derived from an interest in the imagery and sound of the Apollo space program in the late 1960s – Early 1970s.

There are technological factors, the incredible obstacles that were over come at a time when computing technology was in its infancy and mankind was literally chartering unknown territory for the first time in centuries.

Then there are the romantic elements, the bravery, improvisation, camaraderie and escapism into a surreal environment. While today’s space exploration is as fascinating, and probably more productive, the sheer audacious and breath taking nature of the Apollo program is still an inspiration to all mankind.

Analysis

As a signifier the product manifests itself as an educational and informative display, designed to be used by viewers of all ages and intellectual ability.

It signifies a tribute to mankind’s exploration, and a general nostalgic insight into the era as a whole. The product works from the outset with a high level of modality with respect to reality and the factual basis in which all the information is presented. Preconceived from the start, it works on a formulated structure that has been edited to provide seamless interaction in a sequential manner.

Although the product is of a faithful nature, the subject matter has strong mythological ties to cultures throughout the world. Its notoriety forms the main part of the era’s genre and its connotations ripple outwards into areas of hippy style belief and understanding.

Modes & Codes

The reality of the Apollo Space Program itself is only held in doubt by the type of theorist that thinks Elvis Presley is working in the local Co-Op. With this in mind some behavioural elements of social codes can be noted. The English language, or human speech in general, is a common everyday activity that is taken for granted the world over. The sound of interaction taking place between Earth and another celestial body somehow takes on a whole new meaning. Armstrong narrates, “I’m at the foot of the ladder” After managing space travel, orbit and lunar landing he still has to clamber down a ladder to reach the objective, much like anyone would whilst retrieving a tennis ball from a gutter. Along with basic manners, these common earth like activities give the whole process an almost comical effect and add to the feeling of mutual admiration.

In a textual context the codes are slightly more obvious, aesthetically the use of texts are reminicant of that era. The title fonts, the rounded TV screens with wooden surround and intermittent white noise all point a period in time. The main body of information is presented in a ‘Green Screen’ style complete with flashing cursor and digitised font, again representative of that computing age. The image of the moon is seen through a style of window, this is important because syntagmatically both planets can be seen whilst listening to radio communications between the two.

The music that forms the backing in the sound hierarchy is also of relevance to the product as a whole. Once described by a friend as music for Bank Managers and Hippies, ‘Great Gig In The Sky’ is derived from arguably one of the greatest records of all time. ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’ offers an obvious connection, not just by its name but also by the interpretation of its sound and era of release. One trait that Bank Managers and Hippies do share is their lack of grip on reality, perfect in this context to tie in with the theme of space exploration.

The interaction between the comforting radio comms and the backing music should also be noted as a form of bricolage. From the beginning the radio can be heard over a black screen with credits, reminicant of a film style of approach that would be expected from a country prone to romanticising its achievements.

Some interpretative ideological codes can also be highlighted. For the first time in its history pictures of planet earth were available to it inhabitants. This started to bring about changes in thinking, at a time when the US military campaign in Indo-China had began to falter, peace movements started to grow as people started to appreciate how small the earth was.

Intertextuality

The product does not make any assumptions towards the user having to understand other texts for its comprehension.

Material sources

• Pink Floyd – Dark Side Of The Moon (1972 EMI)
• http://nix.nasa.gov/browser.html (pics)
• http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/frame.html (apollo lunar surface journal)
• http://www.nasa.gov/
• http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/ (Loads of pics here)
• http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/history/apollo/apollo.html (specific apollo stuff)
• http://www.nasm.si.edu/apollo/AS11/a11.htm (more apollo, quite good)
• http://www.nasm.si.edu/apollo/apollo.htm (the apollo program)

This textbased example uses a simple looking navigation model to present an educational / reference web site.

There are some CSS and Layer problems preventing it from displaying properly on Macs, also due to this being some of my earliest work it uses framesets and the code is scruffy in places.

It has a central frameset that contains subframes showing 42 product and menu html pages. Including the front page there are six sections that follow a similar format. Designed for 1024 x 768 it will run on any browser capable of supporting layers and Flash.

The whole site adds up to 557Kb, which I don’t think’s bad for a first attempt.