http://danieloliver.co.uk/index.php/site/index/ en daniel@solutionweb.co.uk Copyright 2008 2008-06-09T20:08:00+00:00 http://danieloliver.co.uk/site/eden_sessions/ http://danieloliver.co.uk/site/eden_sessions/#When:20:08:00Z The RQD massive have been hard at work for the past 2 weeks working on the website for the 2008 Eden Sessions. With a line up that includes the Kaiser Chiefs, The Verve, KT Tunstall, The Raconteurs and more, it was quite a big deal for everyone. The RQD massive have been hard at work for the past 2 weeks working on the website for the 2008 Eden Sessions. With a line up that includes the Kaiser Chiefs, The Verve, KT Tunstall, The Raconteurs and more, it was quite a big deal for everyone. Things have been absolutely chock a block with work over the past few months for RQD and we have some great stuff in the works that hopefully I will be able to post a little about around here soon. We’re also excited to be moving into new offices at the start of next month, which will give us a little more space then we currently have. I’ve had the chance to get stuck in to plenty of design work over the last 3 weeks, which has been great. Most of it has been user interface design, but I’ve also had the chance to mix it up with a week of flat out print design, which all came through today just in time for our client’s trade show. So hopefully I will have some photos of the exhibition and some of the materials that I designed for it. Later this month I will be reaching 6 months since leaving uni and setting off into the land of full-time employment so you can expect to see a write up regarding all the work I have been doing as well as my thoughts on the whole experience of leaving uni and starting full-time work in the not too distant future. All I will say for now is I’m really enjoying myself and am constantly learning and improving my skills, while working on some really cool projects. So until my little reflection post for the last 6 months, make sure you head over to the Eden Sessions website and check it out. If your feeling really keen order up a ticket! General, Work 2008-06-09T20:08:00+00:00 http://danieloliver.co.uk/site/are_you_going_to_fowd/ http://danieloliver.co.uk/site/are_you_going_to_fowd/#When:08:11:00Z So yesterday I received confirmation that I am going to Carsonified’s Future of Web Design conference and I have to say I’m really looking forward to it. As always there is a great line up of speakers with the likes of Andy Budd and Jon Hicks giving presentations. These are two in particular I can’t wait for. So I was just wondering if anyone that reads this site (there must be someone out there that does) is going to attend and if so drop me an email or holla back in the comments. So yesterday I received confirmation that I am going to Carsonified’s Future of Web Design conference and I have to say I’m really looking forward to it. As always there is a great line up of speakers with the likes of Andy Budd and Jon Hicks giving presentations. These are two in particular I can’t wait for. So I was just wondering if anyone that reads this site (there must be someone out there that does) is going to attend and if so drop me an email or holla back in the comments. General, Conferences 2008-04-04T08:11:00+00:00 http://danieloliver.co.uk/site/work_at_richard_quick_design/ http://danieloliver.co.uk/site/work_at_richard_quick_design/#When:20:27:01Z It’s been two months since I made the decision to leave university an take a full-time job at Richard Quick Design and already they are looking for someone else to join the company. The role would be as a web developer/php guru. Knowledge or experience of ExpressionEngine would be nice but not essential, as would a good understanding of xhtml/css. Code Igniter would also be groovy too. We’re based in Falmouth, Cornwall so you should probably bear this in mind. Your be expected to work onsite so it’s not much use if your based in Sydney, Australia… It’s been two months since I made the decision to leave university an take a full-time job at Richard Quick Design and already they are looking for someone else to join the company. The role would be as a web developer/php guru. Knowledge or experience of ExpressionEngine would be nice but not essential, as would a good understanding of xhtml/css. Code Igniter would also be groovy too. We’re based in Falmouth, Cornwall so you should probably bear this in mind. Your be expected to work onsite so it’s not much use if your based in Sydney, Australia. As I said above it’s been two months since I joined the company and I have to say, I’m having a jolly good time and know I made the right choice. It’s a growing company and we’re working on some exciting projects for some great clients. So if you think you would like to work in a friendly environment, on exciting projects, for a fast growing web design company in Cornwall, then you should probably head on over to the website and send on over a CV and some examples of work. General 2008-03-16T20:27:01+00:00 http://danieloliver.co.uk/site/big_changes/ http://danieloliver.co.uk/site/big_changes/#When:16:21:01Z Well I have been seriously slack over the past few weeks to update this site with what’s been happening and I’m very late with this. As of the 18th of January I decided to take a job as web designer at Richard Quick Design and withdraw from university. It was a huge decision to have to make, but I feel as though it was a good move and have absolutely no regrets even if I do miss the cheap beer and lying in bed until the early evenings (shocking I know)… Well I have been seriously slack over the past few weeks to update this site with what’s been happening and I’m very late with this. As of the 18th of January I decided to take a job as web designer at Richard Quick Design and withdraw from university. It was a huge decision to have to make, but I feel as though it was a good move and have absolutely no regrets even if I do miss the cheap beer and lying in bed until the early evenings (shocking I know). Although I think a degree is a great thing to have, I don’t feel as though it’s going to hinder me whatsoever that I won’t have one to my name. I think in this industry it’s much more important to have commercial experience and if I was looking to employ someone it would be the quality of their work and their commercial experience that I would look for and people seem to agree with me when I was getting advice. So it’s exciting times for me at the moment and I have to say I’m really enjoying it, working on some exciting projects for exciting clients. I’m planning on giving this place a bit of attention over the coming weeks, shifting things around and just giving it a little realign and I have some cool ideas in my head. I’m going to be paying particular attention to the blog as I plan to write a bit more now and hopefully write a bit on ExpressionEngine. I would also like to integrate things such as Twitter to just give the site a little bit more. I haven’t been fully satisfied with the blog from day one but have just been too lazy to do anything about it. So there’s a brief update for you really. Time for me to start tinkering with some designs I think. General, Design, Personal 2008-02-03T16:21:01+00:00 http://danieloliver.co.uk/site/development_of_simulacrum_movie_details/ http://danieloliver.co.uk/site/development_of_simulacrum_movie_details/#When:18:37:00Z So after deciding on my initial idea and doing further research into the history and current state of surfing, I decided to create an advert for a surfboard. Here I’m going to discuss finer idea details for the advert. The advert would be for a new replica surfboard for surfing legend, Kelly Slater, who rides for the popular surf brand, Quicksilver. I planned to start the movie with some footage taken from a crowded beach, surfers carrying boards towards the beach and footage of people chilling out on the beach. It was important that this fitted in with the a soundtrack for the movie, which would start with a quick intro building up and then breaking into something a little more exciting. I settled on Rob Zombia - Dragula for the soundtrack to the movie, which seemed to fit well with the captured footage I had, and also made timing the video with the music fairly successful and gave the advert an exciting edge… So after deciding on my initial idea and doing further research into the history and current state of surfing, I decided to create an advert for a surfboard. Here I’m going to discuss finer idea details for the advert. The advert would be for a new replica surfboard for surfing legend, Kelly Slater, who rides for the popular surf brand, Quicksilver. I planned to start the movie with some footage taken from a crowded beach, surfers carrying boards towards the beach and footage of people chilling out on the beach. It was important that this fitted in with the a soundtrack for the movie, which would start with a quick intro building up and then breaking into something a little more exciting. I settled on Rob Zombia - Dragula for the soundtrack to the movie, which seemed to fit well with the captured footage I had, and also made timing the video with the music fairly successful and gave the advert an exciting edge. As I wasn’t totally satisfied with my end product that I created in 3D I decided to keep the emphasis of the advert on the surfing footage and then show brief previews of the surfboard at certain times during the movie, which would fit in with the music. After this I would finally end the movie with the full advert and photo of the surfboard that is being advertised. I worked on designing some screenshots with artwork that would fit in with the theme of the video and advert, that wouldn’t look out of place at a surf competition or in a store, which I think works well and finishes the end of the advert off nicely.  I-DAT, IDAT201 2007-12-05T18:37:00+00:00 http://danieloliver.co.uk/site/development_of_simulacrum_research_and_discovery/ http://danieloliver.co.uk/site/development_of_simulacrum_research_and_discovery/#When:22:44:00Z After finally settling on the idea of creating an advert for a new surfboard I had to look into the history of the sport and in particular the surfboard itself. This particular stage was surprisingly interesting as I became aware of the factors that go into designing and producing these boards, as well as just how far these boards have come since the early days of the sport. Hawaii was in fact one of the early adopters of the sport and naturally this is where the design of the surfboards originated. These ancient boards were made with by using the Wili Wili, the Ula and Koa tree’s and the sizes of these boards varied from 10 to 16 foot in length depending (amazingly enough) on social class. It wasn’t until the 20th century when there was any major change in these designs as surfing declined for a period of time. It was George Freeth who took the design of these surfboard further by experimenting with the board design. He took his original 16 foot Hawaiian board and cut it in half making the solid redwood board around 6 to 10 foot in length… After finally settling on the idea of creating an advert for a new surfboard I had to look into the history of the sport and in particular the surfboard itself. This particular stage was surprisingly interesting as I became aware of the factors that go into designing and producing these boards, as well as just how far these boards have come since the early days of the sport. Hawaii was in fact one of the early adopters of the sport and naturally this is where the design of the surfboards originated. These ancient boards were made with by using the Wili Wili, the Ula and Koa tree’s and the sizes of these boards varied from 10 to 16 foot in length depending (amazingly enough) on social class. It wasn’t until the 20th century when there was any major change in these designs as surfing declined for a period of time. It was George Freeth who took the design of these surfboard further by experimenting with the board design. He took his original 16 foot Hawaiian board and cut it in half making the solid redwood board around 6 to 10 foot in length. It was then in 1926 when the first hollow board was made by the famous Tom Blake. The board was originally mocked by locals but this soon stopped when they saw the speed in which the board travelled through the water. This new design was 15 foot long and weighed 100 lbs and eventually became the first ever mass-produced board in the 1930s. Blake then went on to design and introduce the first fin to the surfboard which added stability and allowed the surfers to manouevre the board in the water better. This design was then taken by other surfers and experimented with. They changed things such as the tail size of boards, removing the square end of the board and therefore further increasing the maneuverability of the boards. After the world war, advances in technology meant new materials had become available and it was the turn of fibreglass surfboards, which were hollow in the middle. It was these boards that came the most influential towards the design of our modern day boards with the exception being now different shape boards are designed for different types of wave surfing, such as big wave surfing. From this research I have decided to base my board design on that of the big wave surfing boards called “guns”. These long and narrow boards are designed to be easier for surfers to paddle out with and allow for maximum rail contact with the water. Websites used for this research include - http://www.surfresearch.com.au/ http://surfing.about.com/od/thesurfboard/The_Surfboard_Section.htm http://content.surfline.com/mag/features/anatomy/index.html I-DAT, IDAT201 2007-11-28T22:44:00+00:00 http://danieloliver.co.uk/site/development_of_simulacrum_idea/ http://danieloliver.co.uk/site/development_of_simulacrum_idea/#When:22:39:00Z After originally toying with the idea of creating an animation inspired by that of the Honda “Cogs” advert it soon became apparent that taking on such a challenge would prove to be too difficult with my limited 3D skills and knowledge of the software. So it was back to thinking of ideas of what I could possibly create with limited time left. After a lot of thinking I finally settled on trying to create something that I would find interesting and have a little knowledge of. Coming from Cornwall it’s only natural that I’m well aware of the surf scene and have even had a dabble (unsuccessfully) myself with the sport. I decided that it would be cool and hopefully not too challenging to do some research into the sport and hopefully eventually produce my own surfboard based on this research. After originally toying with the idea of creating an animation inspired by that of the Honda “Cogs” advert it soon became apparent that taking on such a challenge would prove to be too difficult with my limited 3D skills and knowledge of the software. So it was back to thinking of ideas of what I could possibly create with limited time left. After a lot of thinking I finally settled on trying to create something that I would find interesting and have a little knowledge of. Coming from Cornwall it’s only natural that I’m well aware of the surf scene and have even had a dabble (unsuccessfully) myself with the sport. I decided that it would be cool and hopefully not too challenging to do some research into the sport and hopefully eventually produce my own surfboard based on this research. I-DAT, IDAT201 2007-11-28T22:39:00+00:00 http://danieloliver.co.uk/site/portfolio_updates_and_site_launches/ http://danieloliver.co.uk/site/portfolio_updates_and_site_launches/#When:12:59:00Z I’m delighted to finally be able to point you in the direction of the new Saunders Extreme Sports online store. This project has been my biggest to date and I have to say I’m very pleased with the end result. I only handled the front end design of the site and then just oversaw the rest of the project. Steve Lawrence took charge of the xhtml/css coding as well as the development of the impressive back-end system and payment processing integration. It was quite nice for once just to worry about the design of the site and not anything else. It made a rare change. So head on over and check the site out and see what you think. On that note I decided it was time I finally got around to updating the portfolio section on my site with a couple of the projects I have been working on in the past few months. Saunders Extreme Sports has been joined by… I’m delighted to finally be able to point you in the direction of the new Saunders Extreme Sports online store. This project has been my biggest to date and I have to say I’m very pleased with the end result. I only handled the front end design of the site and then just oversaw the rest of the project. Steve Lawrence took charge of the xhtml/css coding as well as the development of the impressive back-end system and payment processing integration. It was quite nice for once just to worry about the design of the site and not anything else. It made a rare change. So head on over and check the site out and see what you think. On that note I decided it was time I finally got around to updating the portfolio section on my site with a couple of the projects I have been working on in the past few months. Saunders Extreme Sports has been joined by Trialsblog and Bonsfeather in the portfolio section of the site. Bonsfeather was a nice little project I worked on for Gleam Studios whom I have worked on a couple other cool projects for in the past. Gleam top dog and ExpressionEngine guru, Steve Sharpe took care of the site design and then handed over to me to take care of the xhtml/css template builds and then the eventual integration with ExpressionEngine. Again head on over and feel free to have a butchers at the site. You can read a little more on Trialsblog here as I have already rambled on a little bit about what I did here. General, Design 2007-11-20T12:59:00+00:00 http://danieloliver.co.uk/site/killer_web_application_brief/ http://danieloliver.co.uk/site/killer_web_application_brief/#When:13:36:00Z So last week we were given our new brief for idat204, which in short is to create what we consider to be a “killer web application”. I’m teaming up with Kane for this project which should be good because he’s pretty clued up with all things web. The brief - Semantic Web The emerging Second-Generation Web that is an extension of the current, FIRST-GENERATION WEB. The concept of the Semantic Web was produced by Tim BERNERS-LEE, who has also coined the term. The main idea of the Semantic Web is to delegate many current human-specific Web activities to computers. This will be possible if Web data are expressed… So last week we were given our new brief for idat204, which in short is to create what we consider to be a “killer web application”. I’m teaming up with Kane for this project which should be good because he’s pretty clued up with all things web. The brief - Semantic Web The emerging Second-Generation Web that is an extension of the current, FIRST-GENERATION WEB. The concept of the Semantic Web was produced by Tim BERNERS-LEE, who has also coined the term. The main idea of the Semantic Web is to delegate many current human-specific Web activities to computers. This will be possible if Web data are expressed in a machine-readable format suitable for completely automate transactions. It can be achieved by adding several hierarchical levels of METADATA to Web data and using specialist technologies that can make use of these metadata. ’ [Vladimir Geroimenko. Dictionary of XML Technologies and the Semantic Web. New York, 2004] A killer application (commonly shortened to killer app) is a computer program that is so useful that people will buy a particular computer hardware, gaming console, and/or an operating system simply to run that program… There have been a number of new uses of the term. For instance the usefulness of e-mail drew many people to use the Internet, while the Mosaic web browser is generally credited with the initial rapid popularity of the World Wide Web. The term has also been applied to video games that cause consumers to buy a particular video game console to play them. ’ [Wikipedia.org] Working in pairs, students are required: to investigate the most interesting and promising directions in the development of the Second Generation Web (also known as the Semantic Web or the XML-based Web); to propose a possible scenario for the future of the Web that can lead to creating a killer application for the Semantic Web; to simulate or implement the scenario and/or the killer application in a multimedia form using Flash XML (or any other relevant technologies, such as Shockwave/Director, DHTML/JavaScript or Java). I think it could be quite a cool project and a good chance to produce something that could be well worthwhile. Myself and Kane have only spoken briefly about it so far but both agreed we should look into the possibilities of using Adobe Air or maybe Flex to produce our “killer app”. I’ve got a couple books on Flex, which will no doubt come in handy for this if thats the direction we are going in. I-DAT, IDAT204 2007-11-13T13:36:00+00:00 http://danieloliver.co.uk/site/simulacrum_idea/ http://danieloliver.co.uk/site/simulacrum_idea/#When:21:32:00Z I’m so late at getting started on this one for numerous reasons really. Firstly getting my mitts on some decent 3D software (hopefully will be fixed tomorrow) that runs on a mac and secondly just lacking ideas I really feel that are worth pursuing. I think I finally have an idea that I am going to start looking further into and hopefully start producing very soon as it’s already going to be a manic next couple of weeks trying to get my HCI essay done let alone with this and our group marketing project. I can see a few late nights on the horizon. But anyway, my idea. I have been looking into various popular TV adverts that I have liked over the past few years when the new guiness advert came to my attention. The most expensive guiness advert ever and I have to say it’s probably one of my… I’m so late at getting started on this one for numerous reasons really. Firstly getting my mitts on some decent 3D software (hopefully will be fixed tomorrow) that runs on a mac and secondly just lacking ideas I really feel that are worth pursuing. I think I finally have an idea that I am going to start looking further into and hopefully start producing very soon as it’s already going to be a manic next couple of weeks trying to get my HCI essay done let alone with this and our group marketing project. I can see a few late nights on the horizon. But anyway, my idea. I have been looking into various popular TV adverts that I have liked over the past few years when the new guiness advert came to my attention. The most expensive guiness advert ever and I have to say it’s probably one of my favourites (along with the evolution one). So after seeing this advert I was immediately reminded of my favourite advert of all time, which is probably the same for so many people. The Honda Cog advert, which you can watch here. So with this is mind I am going to try and take the basic idea of things “just working” and try to construct an environment which I can use to perhaps direct another object to an eventual destination. As I think this is going to be quite a challenging and time consuming task I plan to keep my object to something very simple, such as a ball or something like that. Then I plan to construct an environment that takes this object on an interesting journey. Hitting different objects, coming off at different angles and different speeds and maybe creating different sounds. I plan to really start cracking on with this now and hopefully tomorrow providing I can sort out the software problems I will be able to get cracking. In the mean time I plan to sketch out a few possible environment ideas and then try to break down in my head how I will go about making it. I-DAT, IDAT201 2007-11-11T21:32:00+00:00