That’s why it’s been quiet here as of late — I’ve been working away behind the scenes in my spare time to create a new look and feel for my site. One that’s a lot more… me. I’m polishing it off and covering over the scuff marks at the moment, so it’ll be put in place very shortly.

© Rob Barrett Design.

After a mis-tweet by @thedoodlebar earlier today, here are the rules to my newly invented game of Doodle Pong.

Photo by Yogma

1. The umpire writes a selection of words or phrases on scraps of paper and places them in cups at one end of the ping pong table, like in Beer Pong.
2. Two teams of two players are selected to play. From the opposite end of the table to the cups, Player 1 from Team 1 bounces the ball on the table in an attempt to land it in a cup.
3. If the ball does not land in a cup, play passes to Player 1 in Team 2.
4. If it does land in a cup, Player 1 must read the phrase on the scrap of paper. He then has 1 minute to draw the word/phrase. If Player 2 (of the same team) guesses the phrase in that time, Team 1 scores a point. Play then passes to Team 2 after the umpire has replaced the phrase with a new one.
5. Each time a Team has an attempt at landing the ball in a cup, the throwing Player must alternate.
6. If a Team scores 5 points, and is clear of the opposing Team’s score by 2 or more points, then they win the match.
7. If a Team reaches 5 points but isn’t 2 points clear, then play continues until either Team’s score exceeds their opponent’s by 2.

© Rob Barrett Design.

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.

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.

While steadfastly neglecting the vibrations coming from my trousers (from my phone, of course), I spent the day over at nearby Brockwell Park sledging down the hill on my bodyboard (well, it hasn’t seen the sea in two years, so it deserved some action) and building my best snowman to date, along with my friend Tom.

It actually got a little hard to finish off, as seemingly endless streams of people kept asking if they could pose for photos next to our new buddy, but an hour and a half after starting — at the point where my toes felt like they were packed in ice — we figured he was as complete as he was ever going to be:

I’ll go back to being responsible and getting some work done tomorrow, but damn it, it was fun adding an extra day to the weekend for just being a big kid!

© Rob Barrett Design.

So, what’s new?

1. The Blog has been separated from the main part of the site. This is because I initially want my site to be working to get me job offers and project enquiries, and I felt that the previous homepage wasn’t focusing on that target anywhere near enough.
2. Updated homepage with Rob Barrett mascot. I want to get involved with more illustration work in the future, as opposed to the web design which is currently taking up a lot of my time, and it just made sense to have something illustrated to greet visitors to my site.
3. My portfolio layout has been updated. Rather than have a long list of images and descriptions and testimonials, it’s now a collection of images depicting various works within a project, and if the reader wants more information then they can progress to an individual post to read more. I think this allows a reader to much more quickly assess the type of work that I do. I’ve also added in a small gallery of my personal works on Flickr.
4. The two sidebars have been pared down to one compact sidebar. A lot of the previous sidebar content was superfluous — I didn’t need a long list of post categories, or links to social bookmarking sites (those have now been moved to the information panels inside individual posts), and there certainly wasn’t any need for it to be spread across multiple columns as it was before.
5. I’m now making far more use of the footer. It now contains a list of my five most recent posts, along with links to my RSS feed and my other appearances throughout the internet, as well as a secondary list of navigation links.
6. Lastly, I’ve added my Twitterlove Bird to the edge of the page. Well, it seemed a shame to let him go to waste!

I’ve already had a couple of comments from my friends on Twitter about how they think I could make further improvements, which I will get around to in time, but for now I’m happy with the changes. They’re not huge, revolutionary changes, but I think they’re significant enough that it should make a positive difference to the way my site get used. What do you think?

You can see my previous page layouts here: Archived website screenshots on Flickr

© Rob Barrett Design.

I’m also going to be spending some time looking for companies to get in touch with in the new year for a graphic design job in London (the best Christmas present that I would hope for this year!), so if you think you might be able help out with that at all, I’d be extremely grateful to hear from you.

I’m expecting to get the chance to do some updating to my site this week, but in case I don’t get the opportunity in the next few days, I want to wish all of my subscribers and visitors a very merry Christmas!

© Rob Barrett Design.

After a long break, here’s Day Four. Apologies to anyone who’s been watching this series of posts — the whole project fell apart around a little over a week ago, due to a combination of a heavy end-of-week workload, followed by getting a dose of Man Flu, which I’m still getting over.

Aside from the fact that I don’t have any further artists to showcase (next time I’ll be prepared far in advance, rather than on the day that I need to start!), it seems a little pointless to continue when I’m on Day 4 on December 15th, so I’m going to call it to an end and wish you all a very merry Christmas.

As a parting gift for this series, take a look below at the fantastic work of Cory Godbey, an illustrator at Portland Studios…

Day Four: Cory Godbey (Portland Studios)

© Rob Barrett Design.

Day Three, and today we take a short detour from the festive theme to showcase a website design by MCG Studio. Why? Because it’s a pretty site! Take a look, and maybe let Josh know what you think of it.

There are still spaces left in the calendar, so if you want your work showcased like this, then get in touch. More details below…

Day Three: Josh McGlinn (MCG Studio)

Josh McGlinn

This project was for the AT&T Center about 6 months ago. Home of the San Antonio Spurs and located in Texas, this site needed to appeal to the Southwestern style of the city while clearly promoting sporting events and concerts. I was contacted by carbonhouse (www.carbonhouse.com) to design the website while they handled all development. I’ve worked on several projects with them and it was good to work on this exciting project. Although carbonhouse loved the design and fought hard to keep most aspects of it, the client requested a number of revisions.

The AT&T Center website (www.attcenter.com) is now very different from what you see here. It was one of my favorite designs and I appreciate having this opportunity to show the original layouts for the site.

To see more samples of my work, please visit www.mcgstudio.com.

The places are starting to fill up, but I’ve still got plenty of blank windows — if you want to spread some Christmas cheer and show off your Christmas illustrations, get in touch by leaving a comment below or sending me an email!

© Rob Barrett Design.