Hillman Curtis sadly passed away at his home on April 18th 2012 at 6:03 pm. He was 51 years old and died after a long and fiercely fought battle with colon cancer. He was one of my early design career inspirations.

Hillman Curtis was well know for his film directing, graphic design, web design and much more. I remember when I started my career as web designer back in 1997, he truly inspired me by both his graphic design and web design work. A real loss and my thoughts go out to his family and friends.

A beautiful tilt-shift miniature day in a life of Kiev.

This was shot with Canon 550D, during 5 days and 2 nights, shoted over 25,000 frames, from all of them they used about 4,500. The post-production took months apparently.

Time lapse sequences of photographs taken by the crew of expeditions 28 & 29 onboard the International Space Station from August to October, 2011, who to my knowledge shot these pictures at an altitude of around 350 km.

This was probably one of the best things I saw on the internet last year (2011). Simply stunning.

The Challenge

At the start of 2012 I decided to set myself some targets for various things, one of which was to ride 100 miles ideally in a sportive. I have now “bitten the bullet” and signed up to the annual Circuit of the Cotswolds in June 2012, where I’m aiming to ride the full 104 mile route and raise money for Helen and Douglas House. To some, 104 miles on a bike may not seem like much, to some an awful lot! At the time of writing this, the furthest I’ve cycled so far is approximately 50 miles which I found hard, so to double that will certainly be a big challenge.

Helen & Douglas House

Helen & Douglas House is a registered charity providing respite and end of life care for children and young adults with life-shortening conditions, as well as support and friendship for the whole family. The two hospice houses are bright, vibrant and positive places, where the emphasis is on living life to the full, even when that life may be short. Children can stay at Helen House and young adults can stay at Douglas House, along with their families, for short periods of time for rest and recuperation, treatment of distressing symptoms and end of life care and support. In any one year we support over 250 children, young adults and their families.

Children can stay at Helen House and young adults can stay at Douglas House, along with their families, for short periods of time for rest and recuperation, treatment of distressing symptoms and end of life care and support. In any one year we support over 250 children, young adults and their families. It costs over £4.5 million every year to run Helen & Douglas House, most of which comes from voluntary contributions – your support can make a big difference.

So now for the plea. If you can spare any money for this very good charity and help me towards my target then it really would be appreciated. You can sponsor me online here.

1. Reinstate my blog/journal and actually do some writing. This is something that I’ve now actually implemented and you’re seeing the result of that here - hope you’ll come back in future to see what else I’ve been rambling on about!
2. Photo 366. This just a little photography project which entails taking a new photo every day for a whole year, and this one is a leap year so my project and photo blog is imaginatively title ‘Photo 366’. You can view it on my dedicated blog site and read more about it here.
3. See more live music. I love listening to music, it’s something that I generally do for at least 8 hours a day during the week. What I love more is seeing live music and this is something that I’ve never done loads of, but I certainly didn’t do enough of it during 2011. I will remedy that this year and have made a start by booking tickets to see ‘Little Dragon’ in February. I’ve only really got into them in the last year but really enjoying their music. Now I need to get some more gigs lined up.
4. Complete a 100 cycle ride for fun or in a sportive. I’ve always loved cycling and have been mountain biking (mainly XC) for at least five years now. I’ve done a couple of small events but it’s mainly just for fun, riding with mates up our local woods (Brickhill/Woburn) and occassionally further afield, like Wales. Unofrtunately about 18 months ago I completely ruptured ACL and did some other damage to my knee playing a 6-a-side football match. This put me out for a long time and I had to have an op in April last year. One thing that I was encouraged to do for recovery was cycle, initially on a trainer and then on the road. To do this I got myself a lovely road bike (Trek Madone 4.7) and have slowly been clocking up some miles. The furthest I’ve ridden so far is about 46 miles so this will be a challenge, but hey, that’s what this is all about! You can follow by cycling exploits and progress on Strava.
5. Shake up my business. I’ve been running Pixel Creation for over 8 years now and although I don’t want to start taking on employees etc, I do want to change a little about how I do business and find work. I’m not really going into any detail on this one as I’m not sure what the best route or method is yet, but I”m sure I’ll report back when I do.

That’s it for now and if you’ve got this far then I thank you. I’m not great a writing but I’ll hopefully improve over the year. I’ll posting updates of my progress and hopefully not of my lack of this.

I know quite a few people who have done this in the past, but a good friend David Hughes is also doing Photo 366 and inspired me to actually participate this year. You can see his 366 blog at 366.davidhughes.org.

I’ve setup a specific Tumblr blog to host my 366 photos, plus a quick sub-domain of pixelcreation.co.uk and job done. Well sort of - I have struggled to find a simple photo specific Tumblr theme but have settled (for now) with ‘High Res’ by Jstn. When I get a little more time I’d actually like to make my own Tumblr theme for the site and then maybe sell it, but we’ll have to see how that goes.

I’ve always got my phone on me, currently an iPhone 4S which does have a very good camera. I also have a Nikon D40 which I need to start using more and hoping that this will inspire me to do so. I’d actually quite like to upgrade my DSLR but I can’t justify it at the moment given how little I use it.

The main place I’ll be posting my 366 photos is on my 366 blog (as mentioned), but I’ll also be posting these and many other pictures to Instagram, Flickr and sometimes Twitter.

Here’s my photo from today (day 12), titled ‘This Way’. I hope you enjoy this pic and many more as the year progresses:

Since reading these great articles, I have been starting to implement some flexible responsive designs on some new websites. It’s great, but I’m not going to explain why here, there are enough articles out there on the interwebs explaining why.

Media Queries are great but are not supported by IE6/7/8. So you can make beautiful new flexible, responsive websites, but they’re not going to work the same for the worlds most popular (crap) browser.

Step up css3-mediaqueries-js. This JavaScript “hack” enables Media Queries to work in Internet Explorer 6/7/8… awesome!

That’s all good then, right? Well yes, apart from I couldn’t actually get css3-mediaqueries-js to actually work with my sites in IE. After much tearing out of hair, several profanities and quite a lot of searching on the interwebs, I was still stuck and couldn’t find a solution, especially as there is little or no documentation on css3-mediaqueries-js.

After a (long) break, I finally figured it out. I was using the @import method for my CSS, so from within my HTML document I was referencing a single ‘base’ CSS file, with several import rules:

@import url(‘reset.css’);
@import url(‘base-main.css’);
@import url(‘type.css’);

My main CSS that contained the Media Queries was also being pulled in via the @import rule. Nothing that unusual here, but this was causing it to not work for IE 6 and 7.

So now, I’m just calling the main CSS file direct from the HTML:

This fixed it and css3-mediaqueries-js is now working fine for me.

If you have the same problem, I hope you’ve found this article and it’s helped. I wish I had found something similar!

We’re still learning new skills and technology all the time, in what is a very fast moving industry.

We’ve been lucky enough to work with some great clients over the years and unfortunately the odd bad one, but hey, that’s life! If you’d like to become a client, get in touch.

We’ll be celebrating with a few drinks tonight, so thankfully our birthday has fallen on a Friday.

On a slightly separate note, is it fate that on the eve of our 7th birthday, we have a potential new business idea? Food for though indeed.