Mark Forrester - Independent digital designer and online entrepreneur

Coda published a post a couple days ago about some php functions that interface with Flickr. Basically, what that means in English is: some code that allows you to view your Flickr photos on your blog, without having to visit the Flickr site.

I was pretty lost after visiting the links he prescribed. I’m defintely no php guru, I leave that kind of work to the developers. “Functions” and “Includes” are a foreign language to me.

Instead of giving up right there and then, I looked for an easier way of intergrating Flickr and WordPress. Then I found FAlbum, a plugin that did exactly what I wanted. Without any coding. It was an easy to install, pretty self explanatory, free piece of open source code.

Check out my WordPress/Flickr page now. I still have to customize the CSS a little, but I’m very happy with the functionality.

Lately, I’ve had more of an urge to surf the net for some design inspiration, rather than talk about design on my blog. I’ve been frequenting StyleGala and various other CSS showcase sites; like CSS Beauty, CSS Import, CSS Thesis and CSS Drive. That’s a lot of great site designs to look through! Hence the lack of posts.

Interestingly, over on Damien’s site, some fella, called Luis Garcia, found the Coda design quite inspirational, and decided to steal the design. Not copy parts of it, he stole everything! Check it out for yourself.

This got me thinking. All web designer’s copy some design aspect from other designer’s websites, even if they don’t know it, they probably have. Some guy half way across the world has probably designed a very similar website, using very similar colours, very similar imagery, and very similar fonts.

There’s a great article over on Sitepoint, written by Cameron Moll, a well-known web designer, called “Good designer’s copy, great designer’s steal“. In this article, Moll tries to dissect what Pablo Picasso meant when saying, “Good artist’s copy, great artist’s steal”.

Most designers spend a considerable amount of time surfing the internet for great designs to learn from, and influence their own work. That’s not a crime. Gerry McGovern, a web copywriting guru that I have referenced a little lower writes, “There’s a positive side effect to copying: conventionality. Building on the same foundation as other sites — specifically, layout and information architecture — often leads to intuitiveness and familiarity for the end user.”

Any designer would be quite chuffed, knowing their design is inspirational, and is influencing others designs. The keyword is inspirational though.

Where is the line? Obviously, Luis Garcia has crossed it. Why? Because his site design is blatant plagiarism.

Advice for Luis: copy the inspiration, not the outcome.

In this tutorial I will teach you how to make a seemingly boring photo into something quite spectacular. We will change the mood of the photo from a muggy day to a stormy day by applying a few colour overlays, combined with some magic photoshop filters. This may sound complex, but read on and see how you can be cool like me.

The first step is to source a landscape photo that you think looks boring, yet has the potential to look a little more interesting.

I chose this photo I took in the open fields of the Cotswolds, UK. Its lacking colour, and depth, but watch how we can fix that.

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As promised, and without any further delay, here is the analysis of the Digital Farm re-design (Part 1 can be viewed here).

Let’s start with a bit of a background. The Digital Farm started in about October last year. The reason for it:

• Firstly, to have a bit of fun and try this thing called blogging.
• Secondly, as a bit of a learning experience into this area of the internet and the design it entails.
• Thirdly, to see if I could drive a bit of traffic to our company website.
• And fourthly, to showcase my portfolio and hopefully sell my skills better.

The original design of Digital Farm was basically the default wordpress template file with a customized top banner, not much of a platform to showcase my work! In fact, probably the most average blog design you will see on the internet today. But as I learned more and more about this content management system and the wonderful way it works, the style of the site became more and more me, and less and less wordpress.

Right now we are ready for the re-design analysis.

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