AlbinoMosquito is alive.

The website I’ve designed and built for AlbinoMosquito is now live and ready to great you with a big smiley face.

AlbinoMosquito™ are a leading force in providing creative visual solutions to everything from music videos to gigs to corporate events.

Their background:
Albino Mosquito is a visual arts collective which was started in Manchester (UK) 2002. Founders Richard Ramchurn (painter), Rachel Livingstone (sculptor) and Jonathon McGrath (playwright) set up AlbinoMosquito as a series of exhibitions to showcase Manchester artists. People moved on, followed their own career path. Richard kept the name alive by VJing, directing music videos and running an electronica night. In early 2010 Mauro Camal joined forces to relaunch AlbinoMosquito as a fully fledged production company.

You can visit their website and stuff here: AlbinoMosquito.com

Your Opinion, Sir? v.1.5

Hello all. I’ve been on something of a nostalgia trip of late and at the weekend I decided that it was time…

for my music / film / tv reviewing-ness website Your Opinion, Sir? to get a fresh lick of xhtml / css / wordpress-y paint.

So, in short, I’ve taken all my old reviews I wrote (and some that others wrote) from my 2005/6 website named eatmycheeseplease.co.uk and I’ve placed them (actually – not all, as yet) on Your Opinion, Sir? for your viewing reading pleasure… should you have time to read 100+ reviews written about music and film from a few years ago.

The website now makes use of the WordPress the_excerpt tag, so there’s several reviews per page now, with the option to read more and comment.

Go check it out! Your Opinion, Sir? Version 1.5

Ace Things: Cypher13.

Sex sells. Even veraciously homoerotic tongue in-cheek-cheek sex. This post is a quick love letter to Cypher13, a design team who aren’t afraid to let it all hang out.

As a web designer chap, I spend as much time as I can find looking around the internet eating up all the coolizt things the internet can muster. Today, the web-gods have blessed mine eyes with Cypher13; a design-agency team based in Colorado, USA.

They say:

We recognize the opportunity for communication that we’ve created and with it the inherent responsibility. From this responsibility stems a commitment to enrich culture through the creation and execution of our work.

What’s interesting about Cypher13 is their originality. For me, the ‘agencies’ – if they wouldn’t be insulted by being called that – that are truly great aren’t the ones who are falling over themselves to be what they think the client wants them to be, they’re the guys who strip down to their matching y-fronts and hold hands. Perhaps throwing in a suggestive lip-lick.

So, Cypher13 I salute you, your design work, and your rather fetching monochromatic homoeroticism.

AlbinoMosquito

Hello one and all. I’m currently knee-deep in design-ness whilst working on a website design and build for a AlbinoMosquito.

AlbinoMosquito are a collective which provide creative visual solutions in the Manchester area.

The website will include the WordPress CMS which will allow for the client to update their website with the latest news, projects and videos.

Once the website is live, you will be able to browse the thing here: www.albinomosquito.com.

Working on... Alicehorton.com

I’m currently working with an Manchester based Illustrator named Alice Horton designing and building her online portfolio. As we’ve got lots of other things to do currently, I’ve no idea when it will be finished.

As mentioned, Alice is a Manchester based freelance Illustrator who demonstrates a variety of different styles and is experienced in a range of commissions; including Amnesty International, various Art magazines and promotional work for Manchester bands. Her work is also quite ace.

But anyroad, as I’m a fan of Alice’s style and level of perfectionism, I’ll work with her until we’re both happy with the website. On a geeky note, the site will feature a nice gallery section making use of the nice WordPress custom fields / metadata functions.

Note: I’m pretty sure the logo and the background image will be changed at some point.

As a special treat, you can see the website in progress here: www.alicehorton.com.

Bernisson France - Now Live

The website I designed and built for Bernisson France – that picturesque 7 bedroomed home in France (who’s have guessed) is now live and available through a link somewhere on this page.

Bernisson France intro:

Bernisson is a 7 bedroomed property that can also be split into 2 seperate houses as 3 and 4 bedroomed self-contained accommodation. Bernisson is located 2kms from the beautiful Bastide town of Monsegur which is just inside the borders of the Gironde and close to the Dordogne and the Lot et Garonne, just 15 minutes from the Autoroute and an hour to Bordeaux Airport or 40 mins from Bergerac Airport.

The website uses all the usual suspects; XHTML, CSS, jQuery, PHP, WordPress and Flash. It also has a nice little Feedback page to leave nice comments.

Have a browse of the website here – www.bernisson-france.co.uk.

What's Your Problem?

This past week I have been redesigning and rebuilding an old website that I made called What’s Your Problem? It is now live for you to play with.

What’s Your Problem? is an experimental and irreverent website I have made whose purpose is to provide random diagnosis to the mental-ailments of the user.

It’s my hope that people will maybe enjoy the surreal humour of the random diagnoses and decide to have a go at writing their own, which they can do by using the ‘Write Your Own Diagnosis’ form.

The website makes use of the WordPress commenting capabilities and blends them into a custom PHP / MySQL random call out. JQuery was used to add a bit of interest to the sliding diagnoses, and CSS3 was used to style them.

I decided to base the design of the website on a typical 1970s theme, beards and all. I’m not 100% sure why.

You can view the website and receive a free diagnosis by clicking here.

Speak The Web

Hello campers. I went to the Speak The Web conference in Manchester’s Noho (that’s in Northern Quarter, yeah?) this week, to hear internet luminaries wax lyrical about their prospective fields and the future of net-land.

The event included talks from Ben Childs (mobile web development chap), Dom Hodgson (SEO and all-around coding geekery), Remy Sharp (HTML 5 know-it-all) and the self-styled rockstar of CSS Andy Clarke (or ‘Clarky’ as he kept referring to himself).

It was an emotional affair, particularly with Remy Sharp’s explanation of HTML 5’s current limitations – he was showing examples of flash-less video content using only html, as well as showing how HTML5 will be able to communicate directly with MySQL without the dependence of PHP – if I’ve got that correct. Either way, it blew my tiny mind somewhat.

Even more rousing was Andy Clarke’s ‘Hardboiled’ or ‘no-compromise’ proponent of CSS3 usage, where he advocated graceful degradation of the more advanced CSS3 techniques – basically, he wants us all to build websites using all the latest CSS3 techniques available to us, and then work backwards to try and fix up horribly old and massively annoying browsers such as IE6. This was controversial in that most web designers have been under the mantra that ‘thou shalt make websites that work across all browsers and look and function the same’ – Andy Clarke simply stated that this was rubbish and if we don’t take advantage of the latest CSS3 offerings as well as the facilitations of the latest browsers, there may never be need for people stuck with IE6 to upgrade. Other than the frequent security risks that have been in the news a lot of late.

His talk drew the most criticism, but was thusly the most entertaining. There was also quite a bit of facial hair in the room. And much coding-knowledge-pugilism.

If you get chance, you should go along to another Speak The Web event as they’re focusing on the web-talent of North England, rather than doing what most of the other conferences do and just focus on London and Brighton, which makes a nice change.

View the website here: http://speaktheweb.org

Yay Everyday!

Inspiration is rather important. If there was no inspiration, browsing the internet would be as about exciting as browsing through a really, really boring internet. Which makes sense.

Luckily though, there are some valiant individuals out there who strive to destroy the aesthetic dire straits, and colour the web with a collection of the most pretty, witty and often nude things.

And although it might lack the sheer volume of images that ffffound.com has, I think my personal favourite creative inspiration blog is: Yay Everyday!.

They say:

We’re not an image bookmarking site. We don’t selfishly hoard images for ourselves. We’re more interested in sharing the inspiration, website and artist behind the work.

- Which is lovely.

I also happen to like the design and functionality of the website; which was created by Chris Kalani and Tim Neuwerth.

As featured on...

Huzzah! Since the latest version of Ghosthorses has been set free among the vast, incomprehensible plains of web-land…

It has been selected or at least got a mention on a number of CSS gallery / inspiration websites – which is more than a little lovely and flattering.

If you’d like to take your website viewing apparatus over to those various websites, I will now place a list of where Ghosthorses 4 can be found.

Ghosthorses – as featured on:

• incrediblend
• cssdeluxe.com
• css-design-yorkshire.com
• cssdownunder.com
• cssluxury.com
• cssmayo.com
• topsitetally.com
• cssworld.de
• kreativeshowcase.com
• egort.com
• csscake.com
• cssdose.com
• cssfury.com
• quandtnet.de

I’ll add more links on if I spot any more mentions.

Bernisson France

To keep you abreast of everything that I do – regarding websites at least – I’m about to start work on redesigning and rebuilding the bernisson-france.co.uk website.

The website that will keep me busy for the next month is a lovely 7 bedroom holiday home in the south of France. The owners have decided they would like to upgrade their website and design to include a fully content managed website, to allow themselves to update listing and prices easily and at any time they want.

You can visit the current website by visiting: bernisson-france.co.uk.

Thank you.

This website is ALIVE!

Ghosthorses (no.4), the website you’re looking at and my web design portfolio, is now live and available on the big internet thing.

It took a while longer than the last few to design and build because it’s quite a bit more complicated, but hopefully… it doesn’t look complicated, as, it’s supposed to be friendly looking.

I would be really, really pleased if you were to look around the website and let me know if the website looks and works correctly with whatever monitor size you use, as well as your choice of browser and your operating system.

Just something like: “Looks ok!” or “That bit doesn’t work” or, “This bit is a bit confusing.” – all of it is very useful and welcome. You can let me know these things by clicking on the ‘Comments’ button at the top or the bottom of this post.

Thanking you muchly,
Stephen

NMA's Website of the Week

The GGR Group website that I designed and built with Cuckoo Design has won New Media Age’s Website of the Week.

The website was design and created while working for Cuckoo Design (which I still do – check them out!) a design and digital agency based in Salford.

Also, Cuckoo Design are going on to design the rest of the various GGR websites although I should mention the other website designs aren’t coming from moi.

GGR is the leading provider of vacuum-lifting equipment to the UK and Irish construction industries.

You can check out the website by Clicking here.

Logo ideas

The process of re-designing the Ghosthorses website had led me to create a variety of new logos which you may view below.

The logos, which can be viewed by clicking here were an attempt to show the progression of the Ghosthorses website, in terms of design as well as technique.

You could argue some of these logos are a bit cumbersome, or just not great, and I’d probably agree… or you may like one of these more than the one I ultimately chose, but I get the final pick, so there.

A happy 2010 to you.

Should I open that 2nd bottle of wine, or would I be a total drunken drunk-face for doing so?

A hearty, 14lbs stab of prime ‘Happy New Year’ from me, served with a side of ‘Many Happy Returns’ from Ghosthorses. I’ve no idea why I decided to tie this statement into food, perhaps it’s my body’s way of letting me know I’m pregnant. As I’m male, I hope this isn’t the case.

Anyway! I’m hoping 2010 will be a glorious year for all, and although at the time of writing this website is only 50% completed, let’s hope that when it eventually set free to roam the wilds of the inter-web, it will be fit enough to survive and flourish. Amen.

Make this year a good ‘un, or I’ll get ya!
Stephen Fairbanks

Cuckoo's Augmented Xmas

Merry Christmas, y’all! As so few people say. At Cuckoo Design, while sitting at out desks, stroking our white beards and trying to hide our chocolate-filled bellies…

We decided that the best way to show our excitement for the festive season was to treat our friends to a magical 3D box of snow-spewing wonderfulness!

This magical 3D box uses Augmented Reality and Papervision3D technology to create a cube that responds to the position of a shape (in this case, an Xmas tree) that is held up to a web-cam.

If you have have a web cam, or would just like to check out what we did, please visit Cuckoo’s Magical Xmas page.

Fanks.

I have grown a moustache. Hear me roar.

Cuckoo Design (the company I work for) took part in ‘Tacheback ’09… a whole month of not shaving the top lip in aid of the Everyman charity… or just an excuse to grow a large, flowing, incredibly handsome moustache.

View my ‘tache below, and please… enjoy.

Behold! Behold! Behold!