If you want to come along to check it out tomorrow (April 4th), it’s all happening at the Coronet Theatre in Elephant & Castle from 7:30pm to midnight. Tickets are around a tenner from Amiando (for 10% off, use this code: DWDK707N), or about £15 on the door. I could do with a cheering section, so come on down!

© Rob Barrett Design.

While browsing the beer aisle in the supermarché here in the French Alps on Monday, on my first skiing trip, I received a phone call from Lizzie at Germination, the company behind the London version of the event.

“Good news — you’re in!” A great way to start my holiday off, knowing that I’d be one of the eight starting competitors in the showdown on April 4th. Plus the prizes are something to look forward to… My poor Wacom pen is gaffa-taped together now, so the replacement tablet and pen’s going to be very welcome.

If you’re around in London that weekend, come on down to Elephant & Castle and support me and the other guys (but cheer louder for me!).

For those of you interested, here’s my process for getting ready for the tryout…

Initial Sketch (24/02/2009)

I received an email last Tuesday night letting me know that I’d been accepted for a trial to enter Cut&Paste, and that I was to come up with a 15-minute design on the theme “Bliss”, with an optional challenge that it should be a t-shirt design.

Out came the notepad straight away, and after a brief brainstorm, I came up with this, which is a kind of ‘blissful unawareness’. The guy’s strolling through some post-apocalyptic landscape while listening to music, which transports him away into his own mental paradise.

Practice #1: 15 mins (24/02/2009)

This dreadful first attempt is a clear indicator that I had no idea just how much can be achieved in 15 minutes if you don’t panic and rush…

Practice #2: ~30 mins (24/02/2009)

Whereas this one’s an example of what can happen when you get carried away and decide to ignore the timer. Actually, it was a case of taking the image as far as I would have liked it, and seeing how long that took.

Practice #3: 21 mins (25/02/2009)

Refining the previous image, trying to find ways to cut some minutes off my time. It’s getting there…

Practice #4: 15 mins (27/02/2009)

The next couple were strict 15 minute tests with my decent design, trying to get as much done as possible while still furthering the illustration.

Practice #5: 15 mins (27/02/2009)

Practice #6: 15 mins (28/02/2009)

My final practice, finished about 10 minutes before I had to leave my flat for the real trial… I realised that I could save myself an easy minute or two by drawing the smoke with my Wacom instead of a series of ellipses — believe me, over 15 minutes, a one minute time-saving is a massive advantage!

Trial Entry: 15 mins (28/02/2009)

And finally, the final submitted image. I’m mostly happy with how it turned out, but there’s a few things I would have liked to have done a little differently. Unfortunately, the trial took place on a Mac — currently as a PC user, the keyboard layout and the terrible default Mac mouse got me pretty stressed out, which means I didn’t get to intersect the man’s shirt, nor did I have time to clip the background to a t-shirt shape. In fact, with 20 seconds remaining, I went to crop the image and couldn’t find the icon in the CS4 toolbar, so my final submitted image was actually about 10,000 pixels square. Oops.

© Rob Barrett Design.

OK, it’s just a holding page for the time being, until I build the site (and that probably won’t happen for at least a month or so — March is already filled up with holidaying and moving house), but it’s good to finally have something more substantial than just an idea in my head.

To reflect that I’m trying to involve myself in less web development, and more work involving graphic design and illustration, NHC will be geared towards generating clients requiring need print design, and digital design that doesn’t involve much in the way of back-end coding. I’ll still be working on web development for a number of existing clients, but I’m not going to be actively pushing this service.

This site, Rob Barrett Design, will remain in order to showcase my personal projects and to host my blog (I’m still undecided as to whether I should blog under RBD or NHC, so I’ll keep it here for the time being), and it will likely shift towards a role that supports my search for a full-time design job in London.

I’ve got a nice UPrinting giveaway planned to mark the unveiling of the finished NHC site, so keep your eyes peeled for that!

© Rob Barrett Design.

For those of you who don’t know what Cut & Paste is, it’s a design competition taking place in 16 cities across the world in which 2D, 3D and Motion designers battle it out in 15 minute create-from-scratch rounds in front of judges and a crowd of fans and well-wishers. Over a few stages, the contestants eventually get whittled down to one grand winner (for each category), who — along with receiving some sweet prizes — gets a place to compete against the other 15 winners in a global final in New York.

So, I’ve been given the theme for Saturday’s audition, I’m coming up with ideas, and I’m having a go at some speed sessions in Illustrator. I’m down to 30 minutes to get from blank page to presentable design, so I’ve just got 3½ days to knock 10 minutes off my time now…

© Rob Barrett Design.

Basically, the first 24 people to commit to this (I’m having spot #25!) will have their image displayed on the calendar, along with their bio and contact details. I’ll be pushing this through my feed, my Twitter friends, and various social bookmarking sites, so it’s a great free opportunity for some holiday-time publicity. Each day in December, up to Christmas Day, I’ll be showcasing a new designer/illustrator.

Free reign on the subject matter, as long as it’s somewhat festive.

Just drop me a comment below before Dec 1st letting me know if you want to take part.

© Rob Barrett Design.

I’m off to a networking meeting in central London on Thursday evening, so I’m hoping to drum up some interest from potential future clients. Unfortunately, I don’t yet have any business cards, so earlier this week I was putting one together to get printed off to take with me.

It turns out, though, that I don’t have the cash flow right now to get them printed in time — it’s a choice of fast or cheap, not both. As that does mean that I have a little longer to mull over the design of my new business cards, I thought I’d give a sneak peak, and ask for any suggestions anyone may have.

In the meantime, I’m going to be listening out for the postman to bring me a new printer cartridge, so that I can run a few dozen of these babies off to take with me later in the week.

Update (11/02/2009): I just received my order of business cards in the post yesterday! I’m pretty happy with how they came out — if you want to take a look, you can see them on my Flickr account: New Business Cards for Rob Barrett Design

© Rob Barrett Design.

Successful logos and branding can put the customer in a specific mindset about your company, helping you to steer them towards your goal. Having a unified branding package also helps consistency of your company image, which in turn builds recognition and trust with your audience.

It’s true, there are places that you may come across which offer logo design for £50, or where you can name your price and have designers bid for the job, but with something as important as branding, this isn’t a wise route to take.

In this area of your business, you get what you pay for. If your branding looks cheap and unoriginal, then by association, so will your company. As Wikipedia quotes,

The best value you can get is to work with a designer who understands the individual needs of your company and customers; someone who can hone the design to your liking and requirements, rather than offer you some out-of-the-box, generic solution. After all, if your branding is catering precisely to your audience’s demands, then you’re opening yourself up to be a market leader, instead of ‘just another name’.

Branding solutions can be enormous, depending on your company’s size and activities. However, an example of a minimal, basic branding pack would include the following:

• Logo Design
• Business Cards
• Letterheads
• Compliment Slips

If you would like to discuss your company’s logo and branding requirements, please get in touch through my contact page.

© Rob Barrett Design.

I’d love to see other people’s costumes — if you want to show off your warts and scars, leave me a comment with a link to your best photo. To start us off, here’s what I looked like on Friday night…

Name: Rob Barrett
Website: Rob Barrett Design
Costume: Zombie (not Rob Zombie, haven’t quite got that much hair!)

© Rob Barrett Design.

Don’t start work until the manuscript is 99% complete

Or as near to that as you can get, anyway. Really, this is the really big one. It doesn’t have to be polished and perfect, a few bits can be added or dropped, but make sure that the vast majority of the content that you’ll be typesetting is complete before you start work on it. The sheer amount of back and forth between myself, the author, and the translator to complete various sections of the book in stages was mind-boggling, not to mention at times extremely morale-sapping.

Had I insisted that I would not begin work until the author input stage was complete, I could have saved on so much hassle, and really, a lot of the following points are born of this one oversight.

Don’t have more than one point of contact (unless absolutely necessary)

With this particular book having both an author and a translator working on it, wires inevitably ended up crossed at times. The translator should have dealt solely with the author, and he should have been the sole liaison with me (save for any possible urgent contact that could be needed with the translator). Fewer points of contact = fewer possibilities for confusion.

Don’t keep your To Do list on scraps of paper

On such a large project as a book (this ended up as a 718-page novel, plus covers), there is of course a very large To Do list to keep track of. I’ve finally found a system that works for me, although it had a process of evolution throughout the project.

First of all, there was the Excel route, listing out the various tasks and marking them off in grey as each was completed. This worked fairly well, except that on a system as I’ve currently got, having yet another memory-hungry programme open when you’re already running Adobe apps isn’t desirable. Things eventually progressed to be written down on scraps of paper to be entered into Excel at some later date, and in the end not everything made it into the spreadsheet.

The next stage was to ditch the PC altogether and move onto print-outs and paper notes. The tactile approach certainly improved the satisfaction of a job well done when you’re able to scribble out a task, but without being able to group related, completed and outstanding tasks, it proved to be a downfall for me. Things would get forgotten until the last minute when I found them tucked into the work folder, and then the project’s turned into a rush job.

I’m using Basecamp now (and hoping that the free ProjectPier will prove a suitable alternative once I’ve had a chance to explore it), and it feels like I’ve finally found the perfect fit for how I work — I can create a task checklist, clear off tasks when completed, and track milestone deadlines all from one place… and as my internet browser is near enough always open, it’s not a drain on performance either.

Don’t lose track of feedback

For years, I’ve been using CPanel’s Horde webmail for my work email — it’s stored on the same server as my website, and I’m used to how it works. Its downfall, though, is that it’s got a rather poor search facility. I just recently (in the past week) set up all my work email to forward to a new Gmail account. This is so far working ideally, as everything is in one place, I can tag emails from different clients, I can easily see which have attachments, email conversations are tracked, and of course there’s Gmail’s fantastic Google search, making it a second’s work to find the email I’m after.

A couple of other points that were far from ideal on this were that the author would often call or text (SMS) me with feedback. The problem with this is that information isn’t stored together. The sensible thing to do is to always follow up a call with a confirmation email, and (in my opinion) ban feedback by SMS altogether (generally, messages are too short to get the point across clearly enough).

Don’t go in blind — learn the software (or RTFM)!

When I first started the first book project (from which this latest one evolved), I barely knew InDesign at all. There are so many features that I could have used from the beginning to make my work process so, so much easier, but because I wasn’t familiar with the software, I just didn’t know about them, let alone how to use them. For instance, I only recently realised that you can set a language for a paragraph style — in this particular case of having a split language book, this is invaluable! Set one style to English and another to German, and you’ve got automatically correct punctuation, and the Spell Checker automatically switches language when you want it to!

Now that I’ve finally got a breather from InDesign work, I think now’s the perfect time to expand my knowledge with some tutorial blitzing!

Does anyone know of any must-follow tuts on book production (or even just essential general InDesign tips)? How about additions to the list of ideal practices above?

© Rob Barrett Design.

Things have all been pretty busy since I got back, what with catching up on work, having friends and family visiting for my birthday celebrations (I turned 23 while I was in Fes) and starting to look for a job and a place to live for when I move to London in the summer, so I’m going to give a short round-up of things that have come to my attention.

Business Contract

I recently had a request for work from a local school here in Cardiff. I realised that I’ve never really used a contract in my work before, and that it was high time that I did. So I’ve been on Google searching around for contract templates, and have managed to put together one based upon the offerings on the following sites:

Zenful Creation’s Web Site Design Contract, and Creative Latitude’s Resources Downloads.

Macros

When working on projects, I generally have two or three different Excel spreadsheets open, and it all takes time to open Excel, then to navigate to each file, and then to open them, so I figured there must be a better way. After a quick search on ‘windows macros’, I found AutoHotKey, a free and simple, but powerful, macro programme for Windows. After setting up the appropriate script, all I have to do now is hold down the Windows key and press X, and Excel automatically loads up and opens all three of my main spreadsheets… much more productive!

RSS Feeds

I’ve really been getting into RSS feeds recently (at last). I use Google Reader, as it has a simple, user-friendly interface, it’s free, and it’s web-based (so I can access my feeds from anywhere).

Here’s five of the feeds I’ve been reading in the last few weeks (in no particular order):

1. PSDTuts — Photoshop Tutorials and Links (RSS feed)
2. Fresh Brushes on brusheezy.com! (RSS feed)
3. Logopond — Identity inspiration (RSS feed)
4. Blog.SpoonGraphics (RSS feed)
5. Smashing Magazine (RSS feed)

That’ll do for now. I’m off to spend the rest of the afternoon updating my CV and portfolio, ready to apply for some jobs in the capital. Wish me luck!

© Rob Barrett Design.