Who needs designers

Sat Nov 3

Damn right. Who needs designers? Designing a good advert is as easy as pie. So why waste money getting a so-called “professional” graphic designer to create your website or advertising campaign when you could do it yourself using Microsoft Word or Corel clip-art.

And if that sounds like too much hassle, you need these products:

  • Make My Logo Bigger Cream
  • Whitespace Eliminator
  • Starburst Dust
  • Fluorescentciser
  • The Emotionator

An if you don’t believe me, just check out the website.

(This reminds me of my days working in a recording studio. I remember there was a client who wanted the track to be more ‘funky’. The reply was “Sure, I’ll just press the Funky Button”.)

Savannah Dachshund Club

Wed Sep 5

Today is a proud day for me. One of my pictures of small dog racing has been used in the new website for the Savannah Dachshund Club.

I particularly recommend you check out their photos of Dachshund racing (this is my favourite).

HotSwap, selling cars online with Web 2.0

Fri Jul 27

There’s a new online second-hand car site called Hotswap.com (hat-tip) which allows account holders to upload videos about their car. The design is good and there are some neat tricks thrown in with nifty AJAX (for instance filtering cars by colour). But there are two points to note which I think are indicative of the way the web is moving.

Firstly is the use of Jeroen’s Flash video player, a free Flash player for video. Just like his Flash MP3 player (which I’ve used all over BeatsBase.com) it makes it easy to provide good-looking media capabilities to a web page. HotSwap have certainly benefited from Jeroen’s generosity.

The second point is that hosting for the videos and images is handled by ,a href=”http://www.amazon.com/s3″>Amazons S3 service, the massively scalable solution I mentioned a few days ago. So HotSwap don’t pay directly for the bandwidth they use, and they also have the technology scalability of one of the worlds largest websites behind them. Good move.

So there’s two ways that a new start-up is harnessing the power of the web: using the high-quality free tools available, and using commercial services designed to scale. This, I believe, will be a model for a lot of new websites to come.

My new best friend: Beryl

Mon Jul 9

Further to my experiences loading Ubuntu Studio on my main machine, I thought I’d let you know about something that may just change your opinion about Linux. You thought it was a hard to use, graphically boring operating system for geeks, yes? You’d be wrong, then. Meet Beryl (watch this selection of videos for details).

Impressed? You should be. That’s some sweet window effects right there, yes sir. And it’s as easy to get as ticking Beryl for installation - the system takes care of the rest (downloading, compiling, organising, fettline, installing, cleaning up and initialising). OK, I admit I had some problems getting the operating system onto my machine, but it was worth it.

SO hopefully we’ll start to see some more people agreeing that Linux is ready for the big-time.

All the ducks are swimming in the water

Fri Jun 29

If you think that statement is strange, just wait until you see the video that accompanies it: YouTube - lemon jelly - nice weather for the ducks.

Thanks to Dalaq for the link.