I saw Girls Aloud last night. I have no qualms about saying that. They were fun.

It’s odd, I wouldn’t really consider myself a fan of that type of music in the slightest, but having listened to their ‘greatest hits’ album for a while now and then seeing them last night, I realised that I am actually probably a fan. It’s good catchy pop. Fun stuff.

I took some photos on my poxy phone, but they’re awful; so the main photo here has been borrowed from here. It was taken the night before their Bournemouth show but the clothes are the same so it’s almost like it’s the same night. It’s amazing that they manage to show so much flesh considering how tiny their bodies are. Well done girls.

They were supported Rogue Traders (their lead singer played ‘Izzy‘ in Neighbours and got pregnant by Karl Kennedy. Random), who were kinda good.. and 2 other acts who were awful. No offence to them, I’m sure they tried really hard, and it’s obviously really hard to be the unknown support act who no-one cares for, but they weren’t good. One was an unbelievably perky and OTT girl from Texas and the other sang about having “your hand in my cookie jar” which was just wrong.

Oh, and Ashley Cole was there, being swarmed by Dads who were clearly amazed by the fact that there was an England international at this thing that their young daughter had dragged them along to.

So yeah, my point is, Girls Aloud were good. And that’s that. I won’t ooh unless you want me too..

Now, I don’t normally like to write about nasty things but sometimes exceptions must be made. Like in the case of these online adverts for amnesty international. Clearly, amnesty don’t deal with nice things on a day-to-day basis, so any ‘promo’ for them is unlike to contain cute animals in fields etc.. but these web spots are particularly harsh I think. But not excessive. They do their job really well, and as such, I thought I’d spread the word. Go and see..

(links via houtlust)
Violence | Torture | Cruelty

In a less shocking, yet similar vein, there’s this ’survey’ thing which is again, very nicely done. Really good ways of bringing attention to these issues I think..

Despite the title of this post, batman & rambo aren’t in the same film. That’d be mental. This is just a couple of links to some upcoming (at some date, sometime in the future, possibly) films which are shaping up nicely.

Firstly, The Dark Knight. I’ve always loved me a bit of batman. Quite possibly my favourite superhero. He’s the shizzle. I used to call myself ‘batmatt’ as a child. Really. But anyway, no trailer for this as yet, but I do like the approach taken thus far with these sites. I always like it when marketing takes this approach and I’m hoping that there’ll be more in this vein. It’s only a wee taster but it’s enough to get me anticipating the film.

Official site: http://thedarkknight.warnerbros.com/
Harvey Dent’s campaign site: http://ibelieveinharveydent.warnerbros.com/
Harvey Dent ’support’ site: http://www.ibelieveinharveydenttoo.com/

The ’support’ site started off as just the defaced poster, with a form which generated an email to you, with some coordinates that revealed a pixel of the poster. And if you replied to the email, you got a reply like: “People always ask me about my charming boyish smile. Jessica used to love it. She was the loneliest girl in high school, and my first big kiss…” or “I always say, you never know what a man is truly made of until you peel the skin off his face one piece at a time. Here is your chance to help:“. Very cool. If you go to the site now, you can see the full ‘reveal’. It’s cool. (In case you’re wondering, Harvey Dent is Two-Face.. and my first cat is called Two-Face. That’s largely irrelevant but still cool).

Secondly, there’s a new kinda of trailer floating around for John Rambo (Rambo IV) which is ridiculously gory and stupidly violent. It’s delicious! Watch it here.. http://www.firstshowing.net/2007/05/19/john-rambo-iv-feature-trailer/. Killing’s as easy as breathing..

This, the new album from Sage Francis, came out last week and I feel compelled to write that it’s very very good. If you’ve been keeping an eye on my Last.fm thingy, you’ll see I’ve been giving it a lot of rotation, and the simple reason for that is - it’s superb. The whole thing is really dope, but it’s the last half of the album that really does it for me.. ‘Black Out On White Night In Rome’ is my shit.

I sincerely urge everyone in the whole world to go and buy a copy. Really, buy it as opposed to downloading it because the cover/in-lay art is quality. A lot of it was done by Sarah Coleman (who did the Sage Francis artwork show thing that I mentioned a while ago) and it’s so nice, it makes my eyes weep with joy. Really.

I pre-ordered it from the Strange Famous Records store and ended up paying about £7 for the album, the instrumentals, a signed poster and some stickers.. AND, in the package was the knowmore postcard that I designed! That made my day .. Apaprently, there were about 4000 pre-orders so that means that my postcard has made it around the block a bit. Uber cool. If only it had my name on it.. Oh well. Good stuff.

Go and buy the album. Or, if you’re unsure, read more and download an MP3 from his Epitaph page. It’s dope.

Just a quick one to say that this new bit of software actually looks quite good. It’s basically a WYSIWYG coding type of thing which produces stuff that looks a bit similar to what you can do in Flash (or Director).

Straight from the beeb:

“Computer programming has been traditionally seen as something that is beyond most people - it’s only for a special group with technical expertise and experience,” said Professor Mitchel Resnick, one of the researchers at the Lifelong Kindergarten group at MIT.

“We have developed Scratch as a new type of programming language, which is much more accessible.”

It sounds okay and it looks okay too.. Frankly, anything that can introduce coding (in some form or another) to people gets the thumbs up from me. Not because I think that everyone should know how to code, but it would be nice if those people who are interested in it could start early. However, the thing that; “they don’t have to worry about the obscure punctuation and syntax common in most programming languages,” is potentially worrying because it slightly takes away from the actual nature of programming languages surely(?) Blah.. we’ll see in 15 years or so when the generation of ’scratch’ people come up with Web 5.0 or whatever it’ll be.

Generally though, looks good.

Alas, due to (presumably) a massive amount of traffic, I cant actually get on to the actual site just yet so details are still fairly sketchy for me.. Like, what can you do with these animations? What do they export as? etc etc.. Blah.. I’ll be popping back to give it another look.. As should you

It’s always nice to get noticed and this month, you can find my name in big print thanks to Artzmania Magazine. It’s an..

Independent venture showcasing outstanding international creativity and culture. With blazing passion for design, it is the latest platform for Designer’s Territory to inspire, express and share with fellow art enthusiast profiling diversified design.

Sounds good doesn’t it(?) And it is. To be honest, I feel a bit out of my depth amongst some of the work on show, because it’s stupidly good. Then again, I think that my stuff actually looks rather nice all packaged up. I’m not too sure about the work (of mine) that was selected - as in, I think I’ve done better stuff - but any exposure is good exposure.. and two whole double pages of exposure is great exposure! I’m honoured to have been asked to submit work.

You can download part 1 and part 2 of Artzmania Volume 3 and also a ‘lite’ pdf version of the magazine at the following links. (I’m on page 59 of the lite version and page 346 of part 1 of the full version :)). It’s not great that they’re .exe files or that they’re near 50 mbs each but it’s worth the effort.

Artzmania Volume 3 - Part 1
Artzmania Volume 3 - Part 2

I vaguely intended to write something about the joys of using silktide’s sitescore system to evaluate your site design/build and how, upon submitting my site last week, I ended up at #18 in their chart (out of hundreds and hundreds). Good good.

But then I went to the site today and it’s down for a few weeks. Not good.

So instead, I’m just gonna post this screengrab of my chart position (for preservation’s sake) and leave it at that. It’s not a bad ranking is it(?) I know that ’sitescore’ isn’t the be all and end all of validation and evaluation criteria but it does a spanking job - especially the new version - and I’m quite pleased that I’m doing something right. All good.

So, May 1st is upon us and with it brings the latest incarnation of this site; scpgt v5.1 (in case you forgot).

I signed up for the May 1st Reboot a while ago and since then have been working on the overhaul. I intended to go for quite a drastic redesign, incorporating various cool things that I’ve recently learnt how to do but it quickly became clear that I actually like(d) the old design. There were a few things I wanted to change, but generally it was doing well for me, and there was no real reason to ditch it. So I haven’t.

Instead, what you see before you is a realign (as opposed to a redesign. Apparently that makes me a great designer. Read this.) A large chunk of the site has remained the same, (colour schemes, basic structure, etc) but I’ve gone for a new page width to embrace the 1024+ crowd (it’s 2007; 800 is so old school I’m afraid), new illustrations for the page headings, improved image previews on the ‘work’ pages and more emphasis on my blog (ie. it now features prominently on the main home page). I’ve also tentatively introduced a ‘goodies’ section where I intend to offer up various things for download. It’s not fully live yet but will be in a day or so. We’ll see how it goes.

So that’s about it really. Nothing major; but still a decent upgrade I think. I want to stop worrying so much about the site design and concentrate on producing more work and stuff to put onto the site. I’ve got tonnes of ideas and tonnes of unfinished pieces that could do with some attention. Also, I bought a new camera the other week so expect more and more photos on flickr (like the one at the top of this post.. see it here in full glory).

And that’s that. Well, almost. It’s a work in progress so expect a few more things to trickle in.. but essentially; it is what it is.