Well last Saturday [30/08/08] I went to London to visit the Design Museum on Shad Thames. It was a bit disappointing that there were only two exhibitions on. But I did find out about the London Design Festival and it looks set to be big.

Just browsing through the website I can see there are more events than I could possibly ever all see. I never really gone to a Design event, let alone such a massive sprawling event such as this so I’m a little at a loss of what to do.

I’m sure my lecturers would implore me to go and there are certainly some events that grab my interest but it’s the travel arrangements and such that make it more complex than it should be.

I intend to go to a few events at the very least, but if I don’t get a regular ticket then it’s going to cost me £20 a day, which is quite a lot for 5 days on a Student allowance.

I’m sure I’ll figure something out, in the meantime I should really return the Continuous Ink System I got for my Canon iX4000 printer, it sort of leaked everywhere. Not very good.

Okay so I’m still sort of new to this whole social network idea so it does surprise me when I can mention something out of the blue and the person or company in question comes and comments on it or adds me on Twitter.

I’ve got to get used to the idea that they’re all valid communication routes but to have your Broadband provider add me on Twitter just seemed very abstract. I’m not even sure how Be Broadband did it. 

Okay so I recently added Be Broadband to my University home after a year or two of easy going at home. I suppose my account name is the same as everywhere else so perhaps they searched me?

It’s happened to me with Moo.com, crowdSPRING and when I was using LiveJournal the posting client I used tracked down a remark I made about it (it had a bug at the time).

Starting to get bored of this really thin posting area, kinda restricting for a designer to post things after all, but I really like the other three columns with all my stuff in.

Hmm, I’ll think about it.

Pinch, punch, first day of the month and all that jazz. Today I thought I’d put together some brushes, textures and useful bits and bobs that I’ve found over time.

Just click one of the squares below to get to that resource. Of course my del.icio.us is a great place to find other things I’ve found, for instance I put all fonts, brushes and textures like those below under the tag ‘photoshop‘.

Paper Textures by Bleeding-Dragon on dA. Watercolour Brushes on Bittbox.

Spray brushes by David Leggett. Watercolour Brushes 2 on Bittbox.

Word Map vector my mac daddy. 21 Texture Pack collection found by Speckyboy.

Perhaps next time I shouldn’t make the previews so small thinking about it. I’ll know that for future reference now.

I’m sure I’ll do more of these, besides they’re a great way of keeping useful resources together should I ever lose them.

Well the Summer holidays are a very long break and after my first year at WSA I can’t help but want to go back there now. But until I eventually do start my new term I’ve got to keep myself busy.

I only recently found it (and that was because of imjustcreative‘s Twitter feed) but crowdSPRING is becoming my favourite way to past the time. Admittedly I haven’t won anything yet but I enjoy keeping my mind thinking of Designs and Logos.

After only a few days I’ve begun receiving ‘personal requests’ from buyers complementing me on my designs and asking me to submit a design for their project. I find this suspicious and more probably a wide spectrum spam message to drum up interest. Hopefully though there isn’t some easy way of messaging lots of people.

Unrelated but useful all the same, the above image was captured using WebSnapShot which is a little program on Adobe’s AIR that can take screenshots of full web pages at a size you specify as well as ordinary screenshots and automatic thumbnails.

I also went to the Design Museum on Shad Thames today, however with poor planning on my part there weren’t many exhibitions on but the two that were there were still interesting. Found out about the London Design Festival, might stay at my Winchester house and get a week long Train ticket so I can go up and visit the events.

I have noticed that my blog posts seem to be more elaborate Twitters with just as much structure and as the idea fades from my head the entry just trails off but that just seems to be my writing style.

Okay not really relevant to anything but it’s my birthday. Doesn’t change too much, except I’ve got to change all the 18′s I mention to 19.

Well that seems a bit of a fluke, not a week after reminding myself about Photosynth they’ve released it as a desktop client. I learnt about it from this article linked to on Digg.

Admittedly it has to upload to the web and is made public and is only available on Windows but it’s a good start. As I write it’s computing and uploading some photos I just went out and took of the front of my home.

I gave it a pretty focused area of photos to work with so the results should be good and that article stated that it can be embedded on any website so should be able to put it directly here when it’s ready which is a neat feature.

Okay well it doesn’t seem to want to embed but I think the results are pretty good. Have a look here.

Photosynth

I’m sure I’m going to mess around with it some more but it’s a good start.

There’s always some form of revolutionary new technology just about to come round the corner but when it finally does get round that corner something else is promising something even more impressive. But here are a few I thought were quite impressive.

Photosynth/Project between Microsoft Research and University of Washington

Now this one seems to have been in development for years but this video I saw recently reminded me of it. And in its latest iteration it looks even more amazing. Quite a few things seem to be turning up this week because of SIGGRAPH 2008.

Another one I just came across thanks to Reddit is an automated video enhancing program which uses still photographs to correct dynamic range and low resolution of a still video sequence. That is, a panning video of a still scene. Using Photographs to Enhance Video of a Static Scene does make the video sequence a little surreal afterwards but I’m sure its applications are many considering it’s fully automated.

Wordle

I’m sure most people have heard of this, or seen something produced by it, but Wordle is a fun little bit of tech that takes a bunch of text and produces word clouds.

For instance the above Wordle was created from all the words in this post above this point. Of course it’s more useful and impressive when used with a larger body of text.

There’s plenty more technologies out there but those were a few that caught my eye.

If I had to choose between going to University and not going I definitely would choose to go even if I do end up with huge debts. But for £3000 in tuition fees alone I was sort of hoping for more.

The Winchester School of Art said it had a lot of prestige for its arts and textile courses (although it turns out they’re running into problems too) but I wasn’t too worried really, I was more interested in staying closer to home and thought WSA was a safe bet.

I didn’t realise when I first got there but the School didn’t have enough space for a new course. To make room for our studio they kicked out the Print Making students and put them in smaller spaces. The Rotunda used to be an Art classroom before the first year of the Design course.

Rotunda building

After finding this out I was trying to figure out where they were going to squeeze in the next year (being a three year course that’s all the room they needed). Well towards the end of the course I heard about WSA’s plans to decentralise the Computers and spread them.

Turns out they were going to accomodate the new first years in the Computer room, divide the Computers between each course and set up a ‘professional printing’ service.

I’m optimistic because printing was a DIY job before and loads of people kept doing it wrong and slowing things down. It’s the reason I bought my own A3 printer so I could do some slightly larger scale printing myself. Hopefully they’ll do things besides printing such as embossing or foil blocking.

For a Design course it was certainly lacking equipment. Only towards the end of the year did we get a big trimmer and block cutter for out studio. Least now we’ll have Computers in our studio, no printers probably but it’s a start. A Laser cutter would be nice too.

That’ll do for now, but there’s plenty more for me to say.

I recently added me on Last.fm to my Blogroll, it’s under my old moniker but that’s because my account is now padded out with song plays and accurately represents what my music taste is and would take ages to replace if I made a new acccount. I love Last.fm and use it fairly regularly so I was pleasantly surprised when I went on one day to find it had been redesigned.

The out-dated ‘Web 2.0′ look was wearing thin when every website was using the same sort of style so it’s so refreshing to see these sites change their appearance. Not long ago Last.fm and Facebook changed their look, and I think the results are pretty impressive.

Last.fm

New website look

Everything seems so in place and functional now the website has been redesigned around all the new content they have. The recommendations just seem so more accessible, listening now they seem pretty accurate in saying who they think I’ll like as well.

I’m the sort of person who likes new stuff, I think change is good, gives things a fresh new look and renews my desire to use their website as I find all the new stuff and changes.

If you don’t already use it I recommend you do, all you need to do is download the Audioscrobbler (Mac and PC, not sure about Linux) and an account and then you’re set for a excellent way of tracking your music.

Facebook

Now I probably don’t really need to say much about it as probably everyone and their cat has been to Facebook recently, but the redesign might not have been rolled out to you yet. The image above links to the new look page. (new.facebook.com)

I was never a big fan of the masses of applications all over the place, it made it difficult finding the information I wanted, so I’m glad they’ve all been tucked up under a drop down menu and in a different tab. It also feels a lot more spaced out probably because it’s fixed wider now.

Just quickly I’ve been trying out the WordPress iPhone App and I can’t say it’s that impressive at the moment, keeps hiding some menus and doesn’t seem to be working entirely they’d be hoping I imagine.

I’d been meaning to set up a more design related blog for awhile but only after reading this article on Freelance Switch did I get round to doing it. Admittedly I’m not really a freelancer, or anything really, but the advice was good nonetheless.

One of the pieces of advice they gave however seemed a little pointless:

Since we’re looking at this as a marketing tool, after that you should be writing about your field of work. Write with authority and establish yourself as an expert on what you do.

Now if everyone established themselves as an expert in their chosen field things would get a little complicated. And it’s clear to me that I’m not an expert in my chosen field, partly because I don’t really have one currently and also because I’m still learning and there are plenty of others who I feel are better than me.

I’m not saying this because I think people shouldn’t hire me because people are better than me, that’s not how things work, and I’m not out to sabotage myself. Obviously I’d charge less than the best do, and really I don’t see myself Freelancing; I much prefer the idea of a steady and secure working environment.

Over the past year at University I’ve maintained a good production quality and finish to my final pieces. But when you go mainstream and production is taken out of your hands then what I’m left with is determination and commitment.

Also whilst reading Freelance Switch I found what looks like an interesting idea for Moleskin books. Now I’ve never had a Moleskin book before and but this has got me interested (I’ve simply used WSA sketchbooks instead).