I am sometimes hard, sometimes easy. I can be a blessing or a curse, some weeks you’ll love me, some weeks you’ll hate me. There are times when I make life seem great, then there are times when I prevent you from pursuing any life at all. I will drive you insane every May and June and you’ll be relieved when I’m over, yet you’ll always wish I wasn’t. What am I?

If you’re like me, then simply reading a tutorial on a design technique (which you currently under-use) is not actually enough to get you to start using it more. So whenever I stumble upon a good tutorial which I think I can really learn from, I bookmark it and try to find the time to mimic the effect.

A few days ago I read an excellent tutorial by Veerle Pieters called illustrator Pucker and Bloat Effect and more and thought I’d give it a go as I very rarely use the pucker and bloat distortion tool.

Chances are if you’re reading this blog then you already know about good coding practices, and that in essence, semantic coding is focused around the separation of design and content. You’ll know that HTML is your means of serving up content and that your pretty gradients and curved edges should be applied with CSS. So as soon as you started using CSS properly you instantly started advocating semantics and using it as a marketing tool on your website.

But are you actually coding semantically…?

Anyone who has been keeping an eye on my website over the past few weeks will have noticed that it recently went through a colour transformation from bottle green to shades of grey. So why, when I was so close to finishing, did I decide to completely change the colour scheme?

Finally I’ve got the site to a launch-able state! I must be my own worst client – the scope creep I have had to put up with over this past few weeks is insane. I started out with all the structure and most of the content in place; I just needed a bit of tweaking here and there… Jump forward three weeks and I now have about 6 post-it notes scattered over my desk and I seem to be adding things faster than I can cross them off.

It was always my intention to have a blog when I eventually got around to producing my personal portfolio. All my experience with blog design had been in Wordpress and so that was the obvious choice, so why did I end up with Textpattern?

Hello and welcome to my portfolio website and personal blog, at the moment there isn’t really much to see. I am incredibly busy with a mixture of web design work and the demands of university life, particularly as I’m in my final year and, contrary to popular belief, some work is actually required.