Recently there has been quite a few articles about what makes a web designer. What a web designer should have to know in order for him/her to be a web designer. Should they all know how to write HTML and CSS as well as come up with designs in Photoshop and Illustrator?

I design sites but do not code, I have a basic knowledge of code and have built sites in the past. But for the company I work for I do not need to code, I am surrounded by a team of highly skilled and knowledgeable people that are experts in front/back end site building. I try to keep my knowledge up to date by learning from them.

I find it all slightly disrespectful to all designers like me who work in teams of people to have these so called heads of web design or professionals who find it so hard to believe that designers cannot or do not build the back end of their designs.

You could compare it to a manager of a football team (soccer for all you yanks) It is never essential that they were a world beating football player on the pitch, you just need to understand what goes on. If you were looking for a defender for your football team and you had two football players one who was pretty good up front and also quite good in defense but the other was a far superior defender you would not discount him because the other guy was slightly better all rounder.

If you want to design for anything, you have to understand the medium you are working within. For web design it’s usability within the browser.

In the end a designer that can code does not automatically become a better designer.

Today I have been finishing off some illustrations for a product on Catn. I have been working on a pack of Husky’s to represent team work (pulling together), strength, speed and lots more things.

I love Husky’s so this has been pretty easy to draw. First off sketching my characters in Photoshop via my Cintiq Wacom. After I had my pack of sketched Husky’s I dragged them across into Illustrator to finish off.

I chose another one of my Husky’s to show you my quick vector illustration process. As he is much happier dog

This is only a quick overview on how I would create such characters in Illustrator and Photoshop.

First I overlaid the main base colour vectors onto my sketch lowering the opacity on each layer to show my sketch and each individual layer underneath.

You can use gradients on your layers but I chose to keep this husky pretty simple and block coloured. Adding small lighter/darker streaks of hair to the dog will add a little texture to your character.

After a while of creating pretty much hundreds of vector layers on my Husky I was finished! Hope you like him I named him Godfrey.

My last few days at work of 2009 I saw a few different ideas for year long blogs. One idea I put to my friend Steve was Project52 a personal challenge geared toward getting fresh content on your website. The goal is to write at least 1 new article per week for 1 year. I didn’t think too much more about the idea and actually thought that maybe it would be too much in one year.

Then a day before we left to go on a  New Year trip to North Wales Steve put his new idea to me, yearblog.co.uk. Steve had created this site with the aim to post 1 blog everyday for a whole year. So that would be 365 blogs in one year! For some reason being the mugg that I am, I wanted in right away.

Luckily enough Steve new the solution for allowing multiple blogs on the same domain (using either sub-domains or sub-directories), in the form of WordPress MU. He therefore created harryford.yearblog.co.uk for me. We both officially started our blogs New Year and have now been writing them for 5 days.

If you would like to get involved and create your own Year Blog please contact Steve at YearBlog.co.uk and make sure you follow his blog aswell.

Another year long blog idea I have seen grow quite popular is the 365 day design blog. Where designers create a unique piece of design every day for a year.

A few example blogs:

http://www.jarvisaddison.com/

http://365daydesignchallenge.blogspot.com/

http://kandicepoirier.tumblr.com/

Having followed and photographed the making of this movie I was obviously anxious to see the first trailer and here it is. Thankfully it does not disapoint. Straight away the whole feel of the movie is dark and sinister which I always imagined that era to be.

The music with the trailer is awesome, perfectly suited to a modern cutting edge Robin hood movie. So turn up your speakers sit back and take in this fast and furious trailer.

If you had followed my previous Robin Hood film set posts you’ll appreciate the quick snippet of the Castle blowing up in the background. Check out the castles building process here.

Stanley Laus is one of the most popular artists in Deviant Art his page now has 7,519,784 views and nearly 2000 comments. Him and his friend Kendrick Lim a game designer who worked previously at a Tokyo-based game studio, founded Imaginary Friends Studios.

You can check out all of Stanley Laus’ beautiful artwork on his Devient art - http://artgerm.deviantart.com/

You can check out all of Stanley Laus’ beautiful artwork on his Devient art - http://artgerm.deviantart.com/

]]> http://fordoing.co.uk/2009/12/inspiraing-artwork-by-stanley-%e2%80%9cartgerm%e2%80%9d-lau/feed/ 0 http://fordoing.co.uk/2009/12/norma-jean-baker/ http://fordoing.co.uk/2009/12/norma-jean-baker/#comments Tue, 08 Dec 2009 10:06:06 +0000 Harry Ford http://fordoing.co.uk/?p=581

A quick sketch I did of Marilyn Monroe. Couldn’t help myself she was beautiful.

So far we have had a huge response with around 30 designers and companies now writing articles for the site. Web companies like Fhoke have now written two great posts and I hopefully look forward to seeing more from them in the future. Developers from companies like Redweb have written and are writing posts for SixCrayons. It is an exciting time and we will hopefully enjoy watching SixCrayons grow in to a very large competitive web design resource.

I have also created a weekly web comic called ‘No Soup Allowed’. It is about a bunch of little web designers and their mini adventures and exploits. You can keep up with their weekly adventures here or grab the rss feed to have it delivered to you.

If you are a web designer/developer and would like to write for SixCrayons please submit your details and I will contact you straight back.

I hope you enjoy the site and if you know any web designers or developers please get them to contact me at SixCrayons to get them involved.

Yeah a few people will probably have a good moan because Windows are once again using tiny smart arse children to show how easy their product is to use when they are 50 odd and still can’t work out how to switch their monitor on. But I actually think Windows have got it right this time. Check it out.