Blog

September 11, 2008

Calling all Designers, Artists, Graffiti-ists and Crayon Doodlers

I'm currently working for a music company in Dublin called Bodytonic. We're starting a new project on the site especially for all you aforementioned creative individuals, called Bodytonic Blobs.

http://www.bodytonicmusic.com/blobs/

Basically, we want you to try and put your own little twist on the Bodytonic logo and homepage design, maybe recreate the logo in Lego, draw it as a person, scribble it in pen or something like that. Then we'll pick some of the best and put them into rotation on our site, so everyone who passes through (and thats a lot of people!) will see your work.

If you're a little confused by what we mean, think of MTV, and all the many variations on their logo that you've seen before.

Hope you can join in!

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Posted by Matthew Comments: 2

June 25, 2008

The Payoff

After 6 years of university (Aeronautical Engineering was a big mistake) and countless more of secondary and primary education, I've finally jumped that last hurdle and got my degree.

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Posted by Matthew Comments: 0

The new Firefox is out. Hopefully by now, the crazy record breaking and website breaking traffic has lessened, but if you're a Windows user, please do your part for the poor web designers of the world and upgrade to Firefox 3 right now! Theres also Opera 9.5 too, if you prefer. Make sure its one of these two though, the only popular Windows browsers to fully comply with the Acid 2 test. Internet Explorer 7 is a start, but not quite there! Why am I posting this? Because nearly one third of internet users are still using IE6 or older, browsers that have ruined many a great website design. Do it for us, the designers!

Posted by Matthew on June 18, 2008 comments 0

June 16, 2008

The Stupidity of Government

It has been announced this week that the Irish Government plan to pass the Liquor Licensing Bill 2008 within the next 3 weeks. This means that all late bars and venues will have to be shut at 2.30am Monday to Saturday and 1am on a Sunday.

If it is passed it truly is a major setback to Irish night life. While other European cities like London, Berlin and Barcelona speed ahead with late night opening hours giving them the freedom to be more creative in their nights, Ireland has taken one step backwards.It is a mystery to many of us why the Government would want a law passed whereby the entire city on your average Friday night pours out onto the street at the same time. Surely this will lead to more public offence incidents?

Having an involvement in the clubbing world I am undoubtedly going to be somewhat biased. However, I cannot honestly believe that even politicians could be this out of touch. Its unbelievable that they really think that non-staggered closing times are going to do ANYTHING to help curb fighting in the streets, anti social behaviour and binge drinking. They have totally lost it, in my opinion, and this move will only end up amplifying the problem, as well as undoubtedly damaging Dublin's prosperous nightlife. I only have to look at what happened to Belfast, which has had its nightlife absolutely destroyed by these sorts of laws and there have been an INCREASE in the amount of attacks and beating committed since they were introduced there.

For those of you reading this who have ever been out in Ireland, I'm sure you are of the opinion that the potential new bill is ridiculous, if so have your say and please put your name to the petition as well supporting this petition on Digg.

Thank you.

Posted by Matthew Comments: 0

May 14, 2008

My 0.015 minutes of "Fame"

So my story starts 2 years ago, March 2006, when I visit New York City. I take a bunch of photographs, do all the touristy things, fall in love with the city and then come home.

Flash forward to April 2008, a little game called GTA4 gets released, some of you might have heard it being talked about. It takes place in a kind of pseudo-NYC called Liberty City. I noticed that there were a lot of great similarities between the real life and the virtual city, so I set about putting together a short little photoset of virtual recreations of the real life photos I took. It was fairly easy, because all the buildings counterparts are basically in the same position, and a lot of care and attention has been paid to getting the details in the game really right.

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Posted by Matthew Comments: 3

May 13, 2008

The randomness of Digg

I put together a little photo set comparing my photos of real life New York City, to my screen captures of made up Liberty City (GTA4) and put it on Flickr, then put a link up on Digg. By last night, the fever pitch seemed to be peaking at 12 Diggs, and I was pretty pleased with that. Then I woke up this morning to see that it had gained 1235 Diggs and gotten into the Top 10 of stories!

Now, I didn't set out thinking it would get that much attention (although I secretly hoped), but it has made me wonder what the secret is to getting 'Dugg' so much, so quickly. If I could bottle that sort of publicity for my own site, I'd be flying!

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Posted by Matthew Comments: 6

April 17, 2008

Deep In Dissertation Hell

My university career is finally coming to an end. A very tiresome and stressful end mind you, with just over 20 pages of project dissertation to write, and still a good bit of coding on a nice little portable Family Tree program. So inevitably, updates here have suffered a bit. I have had time for another university assignment though, a simple little one-page fully XML based site for my Multimedia course.

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Posted by Matthew Comments: 1

April 8, 2008

Goo Do Visuals

I opened up the Visuals section of my site, starting with a handful of the "stings" that I put together for fun and for my own usage. I'll be adding some of my nightclub visuals work soon, as well as probably adding bits and pieces of random creativity whenever I get the time. Feel free to walk around and help yourself to some biscuits.

Posted by Matthew Comments: 0

March 27, 2008

Great Web Designs Part 1 - SpaceCollective

I thought I'd put up a series of posts highlighting some of the fantastically designed sites that I've grown to love on the web. Here is one the best I've seen, for sheer attention to detail, fantastic colours and excellent typography. Some of the subject matter is pretty interesting too.

http://spacecollective.org/

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Posted by Matthew Comments: 1

The power of alpha PNGs....this website is just wonderful. Let it load and then scroll down.

Its a pity IE6 makes using them such a dangerously un-user friendly proposition.

Posted by Matthew on March 27, 2008 comments 0

Theres a new video for a Justice track called DVNO doing the blog-rounds at the minute, so I figured I'd join in, because its well and truly AWESOME.

Flash and JavaScript are required to view this content.

Posted by Matthew on March 9, 2008 comments 0

March 8, 2008

Hooray.

Its taken me a year or so, but I've finally got this site done and dusted...

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Posted by Matthew Comments: 1

March 8, 2008

Back to Mine - A Downtempo Mix

Someone on another message board gave me this idea, to put together a mix of tracks that you'd put on your own Back To Mine compilation, so here is mine..

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Posted by Matthew Comments: 3


The older stuff is back here...