Bitten By Design

Types of tan.

Nick — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 18:31:27 +0000

Just in time for the wrap up of the summer holiday season, we have the common names for the types of tan and skin conditions we see.

Oompa loompa: bright orange skin from a bad spray tan. Totally unnatural in colour.

Tequila sunrise: oompa loompa with a sunburn

Jar jar binks: sunburn on your back and shoulders but not your front

Sheeting: big pieces of burnt skin peeling off.

Skin fail: huge areas of skin that has just started to peel and come off leaving little gaps and a trail of dead skin over their clothes. The fallen bits are sometimes called ‘skin dandruff’.

Deep fried: sunburn so bad it leaves welts and boils, as well as scarring on the skin.

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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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Free tribal tattoo bat design vector file

Nick — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 04:31:59 +0000

Here is another free vector file for download. The plan is to generate a range of them, and I would love to see it in use or tattooed onto someone.

Let me know what you think, and if there is anything specific you might be after.

I am planning on having plenty more free design as well as premium files available for download in future.

Click on the image below to download a PDF of the vector artwork.

A Random Selection of Posts from the site

Sneak Peek: The upcoming new site design for BittenByDesign.com!

Nick — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 03:36:21 +0000

Over the last six months, I have been working on a new updated look and feel to the website. It is slowly coming together, and as the saying goes ‘the cobblers children are the last to get shoes’ it is very much the case for designers who do additional work after hours and have children.

As you can see in the sneak peek poster, it is a big departure from the gloomy greys of the current site and although I had hoped to run a May Reboot about it, I was swamped with work and the May Reboot passed me by. It didn’t help matters that I am determined to run the site with some custom plugins, and not having the time to build the plugins has meant that it has gone on the backburner whilst other paid projects have taken the limelight.

My intention is to include an improved look to ease reading, to incorporate social media better, and to have some dynamic elements scattered through the site so as to keep the viewers attention for that much longer.

Of course once the site is chopped and coded, I will have no excuse to not work on the ebook I have been slowly working on for more than a year and a half. I may get another designer in to lay it out and save myself for the final revisions and actually have a weekend without working for once!

Any feedback or initial comments would be appreciated, as this has been my little project for far too long and needs a fresh set of eyes to look over it to see where it could be improved.

If it turns out to be popular, I may even be willing to give away a slightly more basic version to people via this website or through smashingmagazine.com. Check back in future to see if it gets enough response to elevate it to a public release!

A Random Selection of Posts from the site

Free tribal tattoo wing design vector file

Nick — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 01:39:13 +0000

Here is another free vector file for download. The plan is to generate a range of them, and I would love to see it in use or tattooed onto someone.

Let me know what you think, and if there is anything specific you might be after.

I am planning on having plenty more free design as well as premium files available for download in future.

Click on the image below to download a PDF of the vector artwork.

A Random Selection of Posts from the site

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!