Instead of joining the real world just yet; me and two friends succeeded in applying for a fellowship at Teesside University through Digital City, they’re basically giving us money and all the office space we need to set up our own web company. We’re starting a social network for backpackers and travellers (more info to follow, its still all a little hush hush at the moment).

I’ve just today been assigned the title of Lead Developer which has a certain ring to it although admittedly I did choose the title and I’m yet to acquire any web monkey slaves to do my evil bidding.

As well as the fellowship I also have a few other projects on the side.
Firstly I’m working on a revamp of UK Disco’s website aimed towards gaining them some more wedding and mobile disco work, I’m pretty pleased with how it’s going so far and the designs I’ve done have been very well received.
Another site I’m starting work on is a website for the excellent illustrator, photographer, painter (pretty much anything) Catie Atkinson. From design ideas she’s sent so far It looks like the site has real potential to be very good.
Finally I’m working on a music & design blog with designer Pablo Munez which will finally give me somewhere to vent music I like as well as any good design happening that we find.

That’ll do for now I think, toodles!

Here’s a screenshot of what I came up with;

Bearing in mind that it is a prototype and as such is a little buggy on the ‘Create’ page the link to the project is here: ama prototype

Further Development

My next assignment in the module is to develop the full flash application. Since I haven’t really had a chance to experiment with php & MySql I’m going to use those to store and retrieve the content for the flash app. All of my content (where appropriate) will be loaded in dynamicaly and I’m planning on adding save functionality to the create page. The ‘See’ page (I think it should be ‘Listen’ really) is going to show songs other people have made on the ‘Create’ page.

If I have time I’m also going to add more instruments to the creation page and let you choose how long the song is going to be. Hopefully users should be able to create some quite cool tunes on the finished app.

Metronomy - Nights Out

1

Cut Copy - In Ghost Colours

2

Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes

3

Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend

4

Crystal Castles - Crystal Castles

5

Hot Chip - Made In The Dark

6

Kings of Leon - Only By The Night

7

The Futureheads - This Is Not The World

8

Beck - Modern Guilt

9

Laura Marling - Alas I Cannot Swim

10

Honourable Mentions: The Presets - Apocalypso, MGMT -
Oracular Spectacular, Friendly Fires - Friendly Fires, The Foals - Antidotes.

What do you think? Anything I’ve missed?

The album is being released officially on the 22rd of September and have announced a UK arena tour for the following dates;

• December 1st - Brighton Centre 
• December 2nd - Nottingham Trent FM Arena
• December 4th - Newcastle Metro Arena
• December 5th - Sheffield Arena
• December 7th - Glasgow SECC
• December 8th - Liverpool Echo Arena
• December 10th - Birmingham NIA
• December 11th - London O2 Arena
• December 14th - Bournemouth BIC
• December 16th - Manchester Evening News Arena
• December 17th - Cardiff International Arena

At the moment my songs are a bit electro/dance orientated with songs from Justice, Soulwax, Metronomy (I can’t wait for their new album!), some excellent mashups with the Beatles/Kraftwerk and some SebastiAn.

I think when I have some spare time I’m going to extend the Beatles/Kraftwerk mix so that I can play it while djing, it needs an intro and outro. I think I might play it in my set in one of the dance tents at leeds festival too.

This is the current version
Tour Da Elenor Rigby (Soulwax Remix)

I’ll upload my extended mix when its done.

Two Column Examples

.twoColumnExample
{
/* For the Firefox users */
-moz-column-count: 2;
-moz-column-gap: 20px;

/* Safari's implementation */
-webkit-column-count: 2;
-webkit-column-gap: 20px;

/* to make it stand out from rest of the article  */
padding: 2em;
border: 1px solid #ccc;
}

And the result:

Simple CSS beauty. But how about some more styling to see this in action.

.twoColumnExample
{
/* For the Firefox users */
-moz-column-count: 2;
-moz-column-gap: 20px;

/* Safari's implementation */
-webkit-column-count: 2;
-webkit-column-gap: 20px;

/* to make it stand out from rest of the article  */
padding: 2em;
border: 1px solid #ccc;
}

.twoColumnExample2, .twoColumnExample2 *
{
line-height: 1.5em;
margin: 1.5em 0;
}

.twoColumnExample2:first-letter
{
font-size: 5.2em;
margin-top: 0.1em;
float: left;
padding-right: 0.1em;
color: #CC3333;
}

.twoColumnExample2:first-line
{
font-variant: small-caps;
letter-spacing: 0.1em;
}

The Future

I am looking forward to when the column CSS properties are widely supported. For a long time multiple column layouts have only been possible through the misuse of tables or through lines and lines of styling. I.e. the “Perfect 3 Column Liquid Layout“.

Of course this future is quite far away; IE8 Beta 1 was recently released which I suspect won’t render some of the CSS2 features correctly (or at all) and CSS3 support is still a long way off. Imagine that? The net being held back by rubbish Microsoft browsers. hmm…

Although it must be said that the print industry has had hundreds of years to get to where it is now, I really hope that Microsofts browsers don’t hold the web back that long.

The new design is mainly inspired I love Typography (interesting articles about guess what), BearSkinRug (the personal website for illustator and designer Kevin Cornell) and A List Apart (a really good blog on everything from web standards to design). Erm, yeah… Thats three links that I already need to add to the non-existant resources page so that one is already going quite well.

Any comments on the new design would be groovy. In fact any nearly legible ramblings at all would be brilliant for the first post of my new site. PS: How is your dog?