Bitten By Design » Article

Flash versus Jobs. Flash is dead. Jobs is dead. Jobs wins.

Nick — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 11:47:20 +0000

The news of Adobe deciding to drop Flash, means that the war between Jobs and Flash is over with Jobs winning after his passing.

Below is an iPhone wallpaper that you can use to celebrate the death of Flash.

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Redbubble Rocks! Part 2

Nick — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 11:43:44 +0000

After developing designs for several years and putting them up on sites like Cafepress and Zazzle, I found the way they display products to be a bit bland. Discovering Redbubble thanks to a friend, I was really impressed with just how awesome your products look. I can certainly use the product images as is, to help promote them elsewhere online. Check out some examples from my product range below.

The added bonus of Redbubble is it ends up looking more like an artists portfolio than its competitors. Now I have somewhere that not only presents my work in a very professional way, but I can get all manner of different sized prints.

Yes, this is the christmas card I am intending on sending out to a couple of friends. As they check out my work for sale, I am in no doubt that I may end up with one of my designs coming in the mail the coming festive season.

I find that developing designs of things that you think are cool or that your friends have said they want is a great way to get started with these websites, creating topical and interesting designs can help you build up a passive income. Lets face it, you aren’t going to be rolling in money from it, but if it gives you beer money or pays a phone bill each month, that is one less thing you have to be working to pay each month. And if you are like me, those payments will sit in PayPal until it builds up to a nice chunk of money and you can go splurge on something cool. Then there is always putting the credit you have earned back into the site by purchasing copies of your own designs to give as gifts or to use as promotional pieces for yourself.

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Redbubble Rocks!

Nick — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 10:49:31 +0000

After speaking to another designer about online providers of tees and stickers, he put me onto Redbubble.

Why am I so impressed? Check out how cool the product images look when you drop your designs in!

I will be posting up more designs shortly along with the links so you can check them all out for yourself.

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How to be a Rockstar WordPress Designer! Book Review

Nick — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 04:20:46 +0000

As seen in desktop magazine here

Most designers will at some point be asked to develop a design for a particular content management system (CMS) like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla or any number of a hundred others. Your client has asked you to design a theme for WordPress. Where do you start? Before you get your pens and paper madly working away, you need to know if you CAN do the theme.

Getting stuck at the last minute with a looming deadline trying to learn .PHP programming code is not something anyone wants to go through.

One of the best e-books I have found for WordPress development is How to be a Rockstar WordPress Designer. Not only does the name sound pretty cool, but the book is a straight forward practical process of the things you need to do, with lots of explanation as to why each process was done. You will need to know a bit of HTML and CSS otherwise it may be a bit over your head. These days, most designers have to know a bit of code.

This is a great reference and one that will help ease you into making your own themes. The satisfaction of having built everything and not having to rely on a programmer cutting it up for you is quite substantial.

It also means you know what does and does not work with the CMS and the scope of things you can actually do with it.

Recently the book has been updated for 2010 with the new WordPress functionality covered, but if you have already bought a copy, you can get the new updated version for free. Pop over to their website to find out more.

Can anyone recommend other good books like this one?

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As seen in desktop magazine.

Nick — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 12:30:30 +0000

After a bit of discussion, I have decided to start loading copies of all my desktop magazine articles to the BittenByDesign website. All the articles from here [insert link to author list of articles] are going to be added to my site after the traffic to the desktop articles starts to wane.

Each will be logged with a ‘Originally posted on desktop’ or ‘As seen in desktop magazine’. It is really a way of keeping a copy of my work in a format that I can access regardless of what may happen in future.

Now most of the people who know me well would be surprised to find out that I am writing for a design publication. I was never the talker nor the writer, I was the guy in the back of the class illustrating comics and sketching through all my classes, regardless of the actual topic of the class. For me, maths, english and art were all the same. I drew in all of them! Even after several years of the moving from one rental to the next I have lost quite a bit of my illustration, but I am kicking myself I didn’t take the time to scan and save it all. There is even quite a bit of work I did for the CIT and University newspapers, none of the articles and reviews I wrote up are available to me. Mostly due to two failed hard drives losing most of my stored work from the last fifteen years.

If I had added the scans of illustrations and copies of the articles to a blog, I would still be able to access them. It sort of pays to keep a blog around for maintaining backups of all your work in a format that you can use to recreate things like a portfolio after a house fire. Remote backups are a massive help, and if cloud server backup was faster I would certainly be looking at using that as an option.

It also won’t hurt to have more examples of my writing all in the one spot. That way anyone who comes to the site has the option to see all my other design work. Building up my opinion pieces and articles, crafting them better and producing higher quality content will show through the ages of the work. My communication skills are improving, but I am the very laid back surfer type who lets everything wash past without stressing me out. More often than not my oldest friends will talk of a time when I didn’t really speak at all, not that I couldn’t, I just didn’t have anything to say. A friend of mine once commented that she didn’t hear me speak for the first two years she knew me.

It was somewhat a case of right place right time in regards to my writing, I had begun blogging and had started working on an ebook on my experiences in design, which lead me to writing quite a bit of short opinion pieces and product reviews for a website that did lots of cool stuff to buy or shop for. That in turn led me to writing a few pieces for various design magazine sites, and finally leading me to desktop which at the time I was already actively participating with, via the comments on articles and in response to a couple of twitter call outs for comments on various design articles for inclusion in the magazine.

The book is still being crafted due to my writing skills improving I am going back and rewriting chapters to better suit the tone of the writing in the newer chapters. It also seems like I find another topic to write about every other week so the book went from ten chapters to thirteen to sixteen and more! I will cull them down, but if there is too much in the book, I may just split them into the core of the book and release the associated extra chapters through my website.

And before you ask, yes, the articles are mine. They are not scraped by some content robot like some other design article sites are doing. Each of the articles will be marked as coming from desktop magazine with links back to the original and they will have an ‘As seen in desktop magazine’ graphic so there isn’t any confusion as to the source of the original appearance of the article.

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Now reading: Sofa Moolah

Nick — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 03:34:11 +0000

I am currently reading a recently launched blog – Sofa Moolah (got to love the name) it caught my attention as I was following one of the guys who has put it together on twitter.

Now it is a blog about making money online, and it is brand new. It is not the wealth of information that you get from a blog like shoemoney as it has only just had the go button pushed, so literally only has one or two posts made to it so far.

For subscribing you can download a free 20 page ebook by Mat Carpenter. It really just covers off some of the insights he had learned from his addtodesign blog when he started it up (he now no longer owns it). There is a few gems in there that anyone into blogging or just starting out can learn from.

It did strike a chord with me, mostly because it is very much akin to what I do with my own online guest posting and article writing. I certainly don’t use the potential of social networks and social bookmarking anywhere near the potential they have, but in regards to guest posts, I am on the same page. I don’t see a guest post as a chance to spruike my site. Rather, I use it as a way of building my reputation and authority as a designer. Mostly just having the link to my site or my twitter account under my name in the article credit is enough to drive some pretty healthy traffic to my website.

And the idea of pre-generating posts to appear at a later date is one that I have to agree with. I started doing that for myself a few years back after looking at comic-press and seeing you could set an appearance date for a post so you were covered whilst you are on holiday or having a few up your sleeve so you are covered in times of sickness so you can push the go button and not have to try and work whilst sick.

I am looking forward to seeing the posts they are planning on putting up on sofa moolah, as I like picking up new tips or ideas to apply to my own website. And if any of them help build up a bit of extra income for me, well, I would not mind one iota.

Hopefully I will catch up with you in the article comments section over there!

A Random Selection of Posts from the site

Goal achievement and rewarding oneself

Nick — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 06:50:08 +0000

Now that I am busy with the end of financial year rush of work, I have had to take stock of exactly what I have achieved so far this year.

Having set myself some pretty lofty goals at the beginning of the year, the rewards were on par. If I hadn’t given myself a set of rewards of things I either really want (or want to have an excuse to buy) I doubt I would have maintained my drive to try and complete these goals. You can get stuffed if you try and tell me it is all about the journey and not the final prize! As humans we need a reason to strive for something, wether it is being in competition with someone, a glittering prize or the adoration of our peers (who hasn’t wished for that!).

Just to give you a sample of the rewards and goals so far, better house, holiday in the sun, holiday in the sun during winter, new laptop, complete a full website redesign, gain five hundred followers in twitter, get to the first page in search results, complete the first draft of my ebook on graphic design and going through all my old work samples and backing them up.

There are many more rewards and goals that I have on a list to refer to. Some are really long term, like complete my Masters in Graphic Design, and others are more monetary based, like complete my ebook and start selling it.

I have keyed some rewards to help stave off burning myself out, like once the ebook is done and up for sale and is actually making sales, I am going to take a short holiday with the family. And at no time am I allowing myself to be doing any work!

What sort of goals and rewards do you set yourself?

Even if it is a case of ‘Complete the book layout for the index section and I am rewarding myself with a cup of coffee and two tim tam biscuits’ good ideas for goals and rewards can help us all stay motivated longer.

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Compare before buying

Nick — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 09:25:46 +0000

These days you are only a quick internet search away from comparison sites that review pretty much anything from apps to zoos. Knowing more about the products or services on offer helps you make an informed decision before you buy. When talking about an investment for your business in phones, webhosting or even software you could spend a lot of time doing research on pricing and the product reviews before making a purchase. Sites like iselect give you a great starting point or if you are after the best web hosting service there are sites for that too.

The other thing to keep in mind is the changing quality of service you receive. When I first decided on a hosting company, it had excellent reviews and a strong set of reviews for the people behind it. Six years on, and they have changed from what they used to include for free and have made them paid extras. Whilst this is not a big thing, coupled with the ever decreasing level of service and the ongoing issues with uptime of their servers, I am looking at switching out to another provider before the end of the year when my renewal comes up. Now there are plenty of places giving great sign up deals, but I have been noticing a lot of them get quite a bit of the ‘money making – get rich quick’ style of websites. I definitely want to steer clear of them so as not to be tarred with the same brush by simply being on an ip address that is almost the same as one that is churning out tonnes of spam like advertising and pushing dubious business practices.

Being informed is really only just a few web searches, and even if we use one of the impartial review sites as a basis it is better than getting something that turns out to be a cheap second rate product that we could of saved time and money in the long run.

If you have any good review sites that show
consumer rankings that you use, please add them in the comments section for the other readers to use as well.

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Crazy spelling autocorrect. Cheesy Toadflax!

Nick — Wed, 18 May 2011 11:24:34 +0000

I want to know, what the hell toadflax is!

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Semipermanent Sydney 2011

Nick — Fri, 13 May 2011 00:25:13 +0000

In the words of Justin Timberlake: YEAH BITCHES!

This is looking like it’s going to be another good year for the event!