Despite having retired from being a full-time website designer, I recently completed a small website for a Twitter friend Helen Wilson to help launch her new book The Remarkable Pinwill Sisters: From ‘Lady Woodcarvers’ to Professionals (which will be available soon). The sisters, Mary, Ethel and Violet, worked in Plymouth from the late 1800s creating beautiful carvings for churches across Devon and Cornwall. Violet carried on working almost up to her death in 1957.

Helen has created a comprehensive catalogue of the Pinwill’s work in over 200 locations, which represents a mammoth ten year’s work.

During the early part of my career as an architectural photographer I was lucky enough to be asked to do the photography for both the 1066: English Romanesque Art exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in 1984 and the Age of Chivalry: Art in Plantagenet England 1200-1400 exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1987-88. This sparked a life-long interest in medieval art and architecture.

As part of my research before setting out to visit and photograph a new (to me) church, one of the websites I would always visit was paintedchurch.org, Medieval Wall Painting in the English Parish Church, a labour of love put together by Anne Marshall over a period of some 18 years. It featured detailed academic articles on several themes of medieval wall painting as well as articles on hundreds of individual paintings in hundreds of parish churches. I was very disappointed when it disappeared from the internet in 2018.

I’ve just finished working on a new website for my wife, Caroline Reed who is just starting out on a new career as a glass artist, specialising in kiln formed glass. She has been experimenting with both open and lost wax casting and has made pieces in pâte de verre where she has experimented with shape, texture and the fragility of the pieces, basing some of her work on the Cornish coast where she spends a lot of time walking.

I’ve just completed a redesign of the website for Robert Hartshorne, the composer who trades as ECG (Ex Cantibus Gaudium). Up until recently he’s the man who made all of the music for Thomas the Tank Engine, or Thomas and Friends as it’s now called. I first made a website for Robert back in 2000 and that was redesigned in 2007, so this is the third iteration. The new website is built in WordPress and uses video clips hosted with Vimeo and audio via SoundCloud. It’s so nice not to have to build custom audio players in Flash as I had to back in the old days.

Last night in Clapham there was a lantern-lit parade along the High Street (organised by Omnibus and Clapham BID) to celebrate the switch on of the Christmas lights. The parade started at Clapham North tube station and marched west towards Clapham Common. Outside the library the parade stopped to be joined by a stilt walker who led the way for the rest of the walk. The parade stopped on the small green behind Clapham Common tube station, where the crowd was entertained by the award-winning gospel choir Get Gospel and the raising of the lanterns. Read more…

LinkedIn has just reminded me that it’s 18 years since I’ve been working as a freelance website designer. And that reminded me that it’s 20 years since I made my first website – for the audio visual production company that I had at that time with my business partner Darryl Johnson. I can remember having loads of fun getting my head around table layouts and frames and probably loads of other things that would be anathema to web standards today. The first browser I used would have been Mosaic, but Netscape came along in 1994 and that’s the one I was using when I made the website in 1995. It’s quite amazing how far the web has come in just those few years.

And to wind up a few very busy weeks, a complete redesign of Performance & Wellbeing‘s website has just ‘gone live’.

PaW commissioned illustrator James Oses to produce a set of drawings for the site. These give a light touch and are a welcome relief from the more typical stock library photos that are all too common on small business websites.

I’ve just completed a redesign for The Alliance’s website. The new site has been made using WordPress and is based on the Smart theme by ThinkUp. It’s been heavily customised using a child theme and some extra bits in the functions.php file. The site is fully responsive and has been tested on various screen sizes, platforms and devices. It’s been a very nice project to work on.

I’ve had two new websites ‘go live’ this week. One for Weaverbird, “an international independent executive search consultancy with an exclusive focus on finding talented digital and technology leaders”. And the other for Lisa Carter, a chartered clinical psychologist. Neither site is my design – I’ve worked with two different design agencies on these projects.

The Weaverbird site uses HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery, while the Lisa Carter site is based on WordPress and uses a child theme based on picochic. The theme is responsive, but it took quite a lot of tweaking to get all the responsive levels looking good with the new design.

A long time ago I animated all of the International Sport Kite compulsory figures using Flash. These animations became the de facto standard for competition kite flying – in fact some of the judges wanted them to be the official standard instead of the static diagrams. When Jobs and Apple decided to drop support for Flash on the iPhone and iPad it meant that people using those platforms couldn’t view the animations when they were in the field. Read more…