Blog

Photorealistic 3D rendering

Videos

Incredibly detailed 3D rendering movie – definitely worth clicking on the video and viewing full-screen; the detail is breathtaking!

The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo.


One-page websites

Graphic design
New work
Website design

I’ve just completed a one-page website for the Three Classicists exhibition, exhibiting at the RIBA in May. One-page websites are a great way of presenting information in a very simple, fuss-free way. They are cheap to set up, which is especially good for short events like this. I can usually set one up in a day – do contact me if you would like a quote for one.

I also set up a one-page website recently for my good friend Kris of McDermaid Design. This was a little more complex as I used WordPress as a CMS so he could update the page himself, but still a very cost-effective way of setting up a site.


Wizard Smoke

Inspiration
Videos

This is some seriously good filming

Wizard Smoke from Salazar on Vimeo.


WordPress – Extending the NextGEN Gallery plugin

Website development
Wordpress

I have been using the NextGen Gallery plugin for WordPress to handle image galleries. The admin interface is easy to use, even for my clients. Unfortunately the plugin outputs the images into Flash movie, which I wasn’t happy with- so I’ve written code to output the images into a Javascript scroller, which is far more customisable. I can change the next/previous image buttons to suit the style of the website, and I can add a number or thumbnail for each image if I wish.

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WordPress – list pages include tree function

Website development
Wordpress

wordpress-logo-hoz-rgb

I continue to use WordPress as my primary choice for a website CMS. Occasionally, a website’s needs exceed the core functionality. Luckily it’s core functions are written with PHP so extending them is an easy job (unlike ExpressionEngine… cough!). I’m going to list some custom functions I’ve created on this blog to help you fellow WordPressers out there.

Today I needed use the ‘wp_list_pages’ function, but to only list the tree (ie. itself and it’s children) of a certain post. The existing function has arguments for ‘include’, ‘exclude’, ‘exclude_tree’ – but ‘include_tree’ is missing. Therefore I created my own function to do this.

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New Senchi Apparel homepage

News
Website design

I’ve just finished a new homepage design for Senchi Apparel who wished to refresh the page by incorporating a large main image on rotation, and smaller ‘banner’ links to special offers etc. There are also links to Facebook and Twitter enabling customers to receive additional news updates and offers from the company. By changing the background to black we were also able to increase the site’s visual impact.

senchi


New website for Working Group goes live

News
Website design
Website development

I originally designed the website for Working Group five years ago, as one of my first freelance projects. The original website was built with Flash in order to offer an unrestricted font choice and provide simple fade effects.

wg1

Old website - homepage

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Film poster designs

Graphic design
Inspiration

I stumbled upon these great film poster designs by All City Media. Through some very good use of typography, colour and imagery, the films are each given a striking and unique personality. Their portfolio website, filled with a variety of film poster designs, is well worth checking out. Here is a selection of my favourite pieces of their work:

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Convert Flickr metadata to Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop presets

Flickr
Photography
Website development

Flickr allows photo metadata to be shown with each photo. The metadata contains shooting information about the photo- eg shutter speed, aperture etc. It can also contain the RAW conversion settings used to process the original RAW photo file. Therefore it’s possible to copy across the settings into your own Lightroom or Photoshop presets to create a similar ‘look’ for your own photos.

metadata

After quickly getting tired of copying settings across manually, I developed a tool which will output a Lightroom or Photoshop preset file based on the metadata found for that Flickr photo. Simply enter the full URL of the photo into the tool below and you’re away!

It is limited to photos which have metadata publicly available. Also custom point tone curve information isn’t converted- as the Flickr metadata page unfortunately doesn’t show all it.

Let me know if you have any suggestions or find any bugs. If you find it useful and have a website, please link to this blog post.

Photo URL: (eg: http://www.flickr.com/photos/joesmalley/3722015814/ )


Output:



UPDATE 05/05/2010: Flickr doesn’t show the processing settings on their metadata page anymore – so unfortunately this converter won’t work any longer. Hope you enjoyed it whilst you had time to use it. Since it’s creation it’s done 3962 conversions!


12 favourite Flickr photos

Flickr
Inspiration
Photography

Somehow I couldn’t whittle these down to just 10…

http://www.flickr.com/photos/oliviaaboone/3413132355/ Read the rest of this entry »


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