It’s probably one of the questions I get asked most when I give talks or attend seminars, “What do I have to do to become a designer”.

There is no easy answer to this question, I have interviewed people that have taken the traditional route through education and not employed them as I didn’t consider them to be designers, they had the knowledge but not the skill.

I have however employed people with no formal design qualifications, and indeed little knowledge of operating the, dare I say, stock design software, who, with some training have become amazingly creative designers. I am lucky enough to be still working with some of them years later.

So back to the burning question…

Over this series I hope to investigate some of the elements that may help along the rocky path to working in the design industry, I can’t profess to be able to make you a designer, but I’ll try to help.

Equipment

As the saying goes, ‘Horses for Courses’. As in any trade or hobby personal preference rules, there is also the small matter of budget. These are my unashamed personal choices and are based on equipment I actually own.

Hardware

iMac 27” – 2.8GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 processor with 8MB shared L3 cache; Turbo Boost dynamic performance up to 3.46GHz; Hyper-Threading for up to eight virtual cores.

I use mine daily and nothing phases it. I undertake all types of work from traditional graphic design to 3D CGI. This Mac is allegedly the fastest Apple produce at the moment, even out performing a Mac Pro.

MacBook Pro 13” – 2.53GHz Intel Core i5 processor with 3MB shared L3 cache; or 2.66GHz Intel Core i7 processor with 4MB shared L3 cache.

I use this for taking to clients and demoing work, showing our portfolio, attached to a projector for exhibitions and allowing me to work whilst lounging around in odd places.

Some people suggest that you really shouldn’t go for anything smaller than a 15” screen, but I have found that in reality 13” is big enough for working and presenting and is really portable.

iPhone – Ok so I’m looking like an Apple fanboy at this point, and yes, I guess I am, but the products really work for me.

The screen is big enough to show elements of your portfolio at the drop of a hat. The camera is good enough for reference shots (on my 3GS, the version 4 looks exceptional with 7mp). I can pick up my email and react to it from anywhere which has made it worth it’s monthly outlay so many times, ensuring that I have won contracts and again allowing me to be anywhere whilst appearing to be in the studio.

Graphics Tablet – I have a Wacom

Not essential but it makes graphic manipulation so much easier, particularly photo editing. It also allows me to sketch ideas directly on the screen instead of having to scan paper sketches.

Digital SLR – I have a Canon 350D

My Canon is very much an entry level model and is actually getting quite old now but I still manage to satisfy clients with shots for websites and even brochure work.

This list is by no means exhaustive or essential, but it is the kit I work with on a daily basis and may give you an insight into the designers hardware toolbox. I would actually find it quite hard to work without these tools in some kind of format.

Next time ‘Software’…

 

When the site was displayed using the .com domain it threw up an invalid api key error.

Here is the fix:

Some applications may be hosted on multiple domains. For example, many content management systems push the same content to different domains (e.g.example.com and example.net) and wish to have that content single-sourced. Since Google Maps API keys are generated per domain, you’ll need to generate separate keys for each domain and configure your application to use the correct one. The easiest way to do this in JavaScript is to dynamically generate the 

tag using 

and assigning the correct domain-specific key within the src attribute’s URL as a parameter. In doing so, you’ll need to pre-generate and hardcode the list of keys within your application.

Create an object which contains a mapping between domain names and its corresponding Google Maps API keys. Use 

to retrieve the domain name your application is running against, and pass it into the object to select the appropriate key.

Below is a JavaScript snippet you can copy and paste into your application. Replace property names labeled 

on the left with your list of domains and assign to each entry its corresponding and unique Google Maps API key.

When using the snippet above, be sure to include it within your HTML document above any script tags or JavaScript containing references to Google Maps API objects.

 

IIllusion of the Day: iPad + Magic = <3

 

The obligatory iPad video to mark the international launch.

Two of mankind’s greatest inventions, together at last. Note: this is an exploration of what is possible, not necessarily what is practical. Tweet from the street at your own risk!

 

Iron Baby is an amazing ‘spoof’ of the Iron Man film series.

Made by a French Canadian autodidact director, Patrick Boivin. For most of what you can see on his YouTube channel, he wrote the script, operated the light, the camera, the directing, the editing, the animation and the special effects… For some of them, I also made the sound and the music.

 

In a 2009 Department of Health survey of 2,000 adults, four in 10 admitted they didn’t know those facts about calories in alcohol.

The survey also revealed that the average wine drinker consumes 2,000 extra calories each month. Over the course of a year, that’s the equivalent of eating 184 bags of crisps or 38 roast beef dinners.

Calories in alcohol are empty and extra-fattening

Wine, beer, cider, spirits are made by fermenting and distilling natural starch and sugar. The high sugar means alcohol contains lots of calories – seven calories a gram in fact, almost as many as pure fat!

Calories from alcohol are ‘empty calories’ – they have no nutritional value.

It’s not just the calories that are a problem for our waistlines. Drinking alcohol reduces the amount of fat your body burns for energy. While we store nutrients, protein, carbohydrates, and fat in our bodies, we can’t store alcohol. So our systems want to get rid of it – and doing so takes priority. All of the other processes that should be taking place (including absorbing nutrients and burning fat) are interrupted.

Alcohol and appetite

Along with drinking alcohol comes the temptation to snack, once you’ve had a drink your will-power goes and you give-in to the take away on the way home, the bag of crisps or chocolate that you have been refraining from before. According to the Department of Health survey, almost one in three people order crisps, nuts or pork scratchings to accompany a drink, while nearly a fifth regularly opt for takeaway food.

More than six out of 10 drinkers have an unhealthy breakfast if they have a hangover.

How many calories are in my drink?

With a pint of bitter the same as a medium slice of pizza, and a standard size ‘ready to drink’ bottle (‘alcopop’) the same as 100g of cookies, the calories from alcohol soon add up…

Gin or vodka and tonic =126

gin or vodka with diet drink = 56

Dark rum and coke =142

Medium glass of white wine (175ml) =130

Medium glass of red wine (175ml) =120

Bottle of wine (white) =555

Bottle of wine (red) =510

5% Lager (pint) =240-50

Cider (pint) =180-250

Stout (pint) =210

Bitter/Ale =180-230

Liqueur (50ml) =100 -170

Brandy (50ml) =110

Whiskey (25ml) =55

Mixed drink (Ready to drink) (275ml bottle) =160-228

The Government guidelines recommend that women should not regularly exceed 2-3 units daily and that men should not regularly exceed 3-4 units daily. Drinking within these guidelines, and trying to give yourself a couple of days off alcohol every week, will help you avoid piling on the pounds.

 

It seems that their PR or marketing companies had uploaded the programs and failed to provide a disc of originals to the organisations. The first couple of times this happend I put down to lethargy in the organisations internal marketing departments not wanting to be bothered to send me the files, but after the fifth time it seemed to be a trend.

So I had permission to use the footage but no way of embedding clean visuals without the YouTube logo, I also would much prefer to host and control the footage myself.

There are a few online sites that will rip the video for you and allow you to save it as .FLV or .MP4.

Some examples are:
http://keepvid.com/
http://vixy.net/

These worked ok but were quite slow and wouldn’t rip the HD versions of the video. After some searching I stumbled across MacTubes.

This neat little app (yes Mac only I’m afraid), is free to download and use and works fantastically well. It allows you to search, play and download videos from YouTube even in HD 720p and 1080p versions if they are available.

System requirements:

• Only for Mac OS X.
• Universal binary application supported PowerPC / Intel(R) processor. (Maybe)
• Mac OS X 10.4.2 or higher / Mac OS X 10.5 or higher.(Maybe)
• Safari 2.0 or higher / Adobe Flash Player Plug-ins 9.0 or higher

Download:

http://brpg.hp.infoseek.co.jp/mactubes/index_en.html

Screenshots:

 

Everyone needs to exercise.

It amazes me as a personal trainer, the amount of people I meet who do no exercise at all. They get out of bed, drive to work, sit at a desk, drive home from work then sit on the sofa and watch t.v, before going to bed. Does this sound like you? Most adults today spend the majority of their time sitting in front of a computer or a TV. Our increasingly sedentary lifestyle has led to obesity rates higher than this country has ever seen before. Even our children are battling obesity. Your children learn eating and lifestyle habits from you, so if your inactive you can expect your children to be also.

I’m sure for most of you guys who are stuck behind a desk all day, you probably think you don’t have time to workout, or your not overweight, so it doesn’t matter?*
Wrong!*

I’m sure most of you spend copious amounts of money and time protecting your computer form viruses, make sure its running smoothly and keeping at its optimal health. Yet you do nothing for yourselves?! Read on to find out why its important for us all to exercise and simple ways to do it.

What happens if I don’t workout?

Before the age of physical maturity at about 25 years, our body is continually growing and developing and during this phase muscles and the entire body stays strong even without specific exercise. After we reach the age of 30, we basically have two options available to us. We can either begin the long process of becoming weaker or we can work to maintain our strength for the rest of our life.

After this point, if the body does not receive the necessary stimulus to trigger muscle growth, a slow process of muscle wasting begins. This loss of muscle tissue hastens the degenerative processes and conditions that characterize the dreaded ageing process.

Muscles and the bones they are attached to become weaker, joints deteriorate without strong muscles to support and cushion them; the metabolism slows (the rate the body burns fuel) allowing body fat to accumulate; body shape and appearance change. All body systems weaken including the immune system leaving one exposed to life threatening disease and illness.

The really good news is that it does not matter how old you are when you start, 60 year old muscles respond to strength training and exercise in exactly the same way 20 year old muscles respond – they get stronger. It is easily possible to become 100 to 175 percent stronger, even stronger than you have ever been in your life.

“Being thin doesn’t automatically mean you’re not fat”

Doctors now think that the internal fat surrounding vital organs like the heart, liver or pancreas — invisible to the naked eye — could be as dangerous as the more obvious external fat that bulges underneath the skin.

“Being thin doesn’t automatically mean you’re not fat,” Dr. Jimmy Bell, a professor of molecular imaging at Imperial College, London. Since 1994, Bell and his team have scanned nearly 800 people with MRI machines to create “fat maps” showing where people store fat.

According to the data, people who maintain their weight through diet rather than exercise are likely to have major deposits of internal fat, even if they are otherwise slim.

Without a clear warning signal — like a rounder middle — doctors worry that thin people may be lulled into falsely assuming that because they’re not overweight, they’re healthy. Just because someone is lean doesn’t make them immune to diabetes or other risk factors for heart disease,

Even people with normal Body Mass Index scores — a standard obesity measure that divides your weight by the square of your height — can have surprising levels of fat deposits inside. They believe that internal fat disrupts the body’s communication systems. The fat enveloping internal organs might be sending the body mistaken chemical signals to store fat inside organs like the liver or pancreas. This could ultimately lead to insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, or heart disease.

The good news is that internal fat can be easily burned off through exercise or even by improving your diet. Even if you don’t see it on your bathroom scale, caloric restriction and physical exercise have an aggressive effect on visceral fat.

How to keep active:

At Work

• Walk to work if you can, or park as far away as possible and walk the rest.
• At lunch, go for a walk/jog or bike ride.
• Get a personal trainer to come to your office at lunch. That way your committed to working out.
• Have a gym near work? Go lift weights or ride the stationary bike on your lunch break.
• Instead of sending an email across the building, get up and walk to your co-workers office and talk in person.
• Take the stairs instead of the lift.
• Live close to work? Bike or walk instead of driving.
• Arrange for your office to have a group trainer visit at lunch times. Its great for team building, fills you with energy and will make your afternoon far more productive!
• Make an appointment in your diary to workout, the same as you would for a meeting and keep to it.

At Home

• Go for a walk/jog before or after work…or both! There are lots of ‘early bird’ classes and gyms open now.
• Work in the garden or mow the grass.
• While watching TV, lift some weights, do an exercise dvd, walk on a treadmill.
• Walk the dog–they need exercise too!
• Get a personal trainer to come to your own home either before you start work or when you finish.
• Play with the kids.
• Housework burns a huge amount of calories.

Spare Time

• Plan your holidays to be as active as possible i.e biking, hiking, backpacking, walking, swimming.
• Take your kids to the park for a picnic. Take a Frisbee, a football or other games and just have fun as a family!
• Go out with the family swimming.
• Turn the music up and dance in your living room!
• Like to golf? Walk instead of renting a cart.
• Join an adult sports team. Gym or just start working out with a friend.
• Get out and about where you live. Instead of spending weekends at home in front of the t.v, go out for a walk. Dorset has the most amazing countryside and beaches in the country. Make the most of it.

All it takes is a little creativity and a bit of effort to fit some extra activity into your day! Try to find things that you enjoy or that you can easily incorporate into your daily routine so that extra activity simply becomes a way of life. Give it a try.

Your office based workout.
Try this great little workout at your office, you only need a couple of meter’s space. Do only as much as you are able to and slowly build up to completing the reps and times. Listen to your body, if your feeling tired or unwell, stop.

1 minute skipping
30 sec. alternate squat thrusts
15 press ups
REPEAT X3

1 minute skipping
30 sec. squats – finish as low as you can, making sure the knee does not travel over the line of the toe.
30 sec. cycle crunches fast then 30 sec. slow – 1 leg in per second.
REPEAT X3

30 sec. burpee’s
30 sec. split squats (static lunges), (each leg)
1 minute plank
REPEAT X3

Followed by a whole body stretch for 5 minutes.

Remember folks, fitness should be fun, if its not, change it and find something you enjoy!

For further advice on Personal training, group classes or just general health and fitness questions, don’t hesitate to email me on charmaine@trainwithcharmaine.com or call 0782 444 6561.

 

There has been an upsurge in the innovative use of vinyl recently, not least for laptop customisation. Taking that one step further Hu2 Design have created some amazing avant garde  interior design elements using die cut vinyl.

They have just about every room in the house covered and the art is not just decorative but useful too, from eco reminders to directional signage.

Anyone who has ever tried knows just how hard it is to make a one colour design work and be instantly understood, the guys at Hu2 have managed this feat with aplomb. The designs are not just quirky but classy too, and probably won’t date too quickly, the great thing is that if you get tired of them the vinyl’s are completely removable. You just need to scratch a corner and then peel it off.

They should definitely be considered vector art masters.

The founder and originator of the Hu2 design collective originally from Paris, Antoine has worked in Miami and London for the past few years.

Known as a Designer, Antoine wanted to deliver a product and service that was born out of the creativity and talent of those employed by and affiliated with Hu2 Design. A way for people to come together, present their ideas and have the opportunity to develop them in a truly collaborative environment.

Some examples of the stickers can be seen below.

For more information and mode designs go to – www.hu2.com

 

It’s an easy-to-use app dedicated to providing a full suite of copyright solutions, from registration to management.

Myows has been created for designers, photographers, bloggers, writers, musicians and anyone who creates copyrightable work.

All in one place, online, for free: www.myows.com

• Assists in securing the removal of unauthorised copy(s) of your work on- and off-line.
• Provides access to a growing pool of copyright-related knowledge and resources.
• Helps you keep track of permissions granted and active cases.
• Provides you with deterrence measures including custom warning graphics.
• Lets you store, view and manage your protected works in one place, online.
• Creates valuable evidence of your copyright.
• Presents the opportunity to become part of a global IP-savvy community.
• Proves the exact dates on which you uploaded your files, down to the minute.

I have been a champion of this great original idea since it’s inception, it’s what the design has been needing for some time. In fact my design agency (Cocoa Media) even gets a mention on the home page..

Oh and if you are wondering the great MyOws character was designed and rendered by the amazing Vonster – http://www.vonglitschka.com/

Who should use Myows?
Photographers, writers, designers, artists, journalists, bloggers – anybody who has created an original work and therefore has a copyright (owns intellectual property).

How do I copyright my work?
You automatically have copyrights in any original work you produce but the onus is on you to prove that you are the creator (which is where Myows will help you).

Is Myows just for professionals?
No. Myows is for anyone who creates something original that they want to claim ownership of. You have copyright in your original works – you just need to protect it.

What is an original work?
Original works are anything you create that are not copies of something else and have been ‘reduced to material form’ (meaning they’re not just an idea).

How does Myows help me to avoid expensive legal battles?
Uploading your work to myows provides you with evidence as well as a deterrence measure designed to prevent theft. The site will also assist you in contacting unauthorised users of your work and is able to provide verifiable third-party evidence on your behalf, at your request.

How much does it cost to have a Myows account?
It is our vision to provide copyright protection and management at no cost to freelancers, creative individuals and smaller companies. For corporate users and larger accounts there will be a small fee depending on the amount of storage space used. We’re looking at the possibility of tiered accounts for those users who exceed their storage limits but more about that at a later date!

What storage capacity does Myows provide?
During beta testing, the free account limit is 500MB (this may change for new users as we get a better idea of usage patterns and user-needs). If you’re running out of space, drop us a mail at support@myows.com and we’ll see what we can do to help you out.

Exactly what kind of files can I upload to Myows?
Images (.jpg | .gif | .png | .bmp | .tif | etc.)
video ( .mov | .avi | etc.)
sound ( .mpg |. mp3 | etc.)
text ( .doc | plain text)
vector files ( .ai | .id | etc.)
html files
animations ( .fla | .swf )
code
presentations
… pretty much any kind of file you can think of!

Who can access my Myows account or view my work/information
Only you can (using your unique username and self-generated or system-generated password), unless you give someone else permission to see your files.

Where can I access my myows account from?
Anywhere in the world, as long as you are online.

What do I do if I find that someone has stolen my Original Work?
You open a case on myows which will then guide you through the necessary steps typically required to resolve the matter and any related disputes.

How secure are Myows’ servers?
Very secure. As an additional safety measure, all information is backed up on a second set of remote servers which are located in another part of the world.

How long will my files stay on Myows’ servers?
For as long as your account remains open and active (Free accounts must be accessed at least once every 2 months). Paid accounts must be settled on a monthly basis.

Is it really impossible for anybody to alter the date on an uploaded file?
Yes, not even the team at Myows can alter the date of upload of your files, The unique hash value internally assigned to each file provides additional tamper proof evidence linking the file to the date of upload.

Can Myows keep me informed of activity on my account?
Yes Myows will send you mails notifying you of your account activity if you elect to activate this feature (NB: this feature will soon be deployed). Remember though that you can simply log on at any time to view your most recent activity.

Will Myows warn me if somebody has copied my work or uploaded similar work?
Not yet. But we hope soon to be able to assist you in combing the net for unauthorized copies of your work.

For now, we’d definitely recommend trying out TinEye (for pics), Copyscape (for text) or Fairshare (for RSS feeds) to find your work online.

Can I modify files that I’ve already uploaded?
No, the files that you upload are non-modifiable. You can only delete them and, if necessary, replace them with newer versions.

What’s to stop someone uploading copied work to their Myows account?
Nothing. But if disputed, the original creator would simply have to prove that they had the work before the date that the copier uploaded the work to myows. That way they can prove their copyright and disprove the uploading party’s claim.

Of course, if the original creator also has a myows account, that’ll be very easy! (Just remember to always upload your creations timeously)

Will Myows send any legal letters on my behalf?
No, but we will provide you with great legal templates and will even fill them in for you using the information you supply. Myows will however send proof of your uploaded work and related date to third parties upon your request.

Will Myows assist me in finding a lawyer if I ever need one?
We are building a global database of good Myows-friendly lawyers to assist in this regard.

When will Myows be available in other languages?
We hope to have Myows available in Mandarin, French and Spanish some day soon.