Danny Murphy Graphic Communication Ltd

Illustration & Self Promotion

Danny — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 14:13:04 +0000

Illustration
After finishing my website this week, I have turned my attention to improving my current skills and learning some new ones. I really enjoy illustration and I having recently read a lot of Von Glitschka’s wonderful tutorials, I knew I had to give his techniques a try. Being short on time I skipped a few of the freehand drawing syages and jumped straight into Adobe Illustrator. I can hear Von shouting at me now, but I only had a couple of hours and wanted to give the techniques a try. I am really pleased with the results I will definitely be employing the full process in my future work.

Self Promotion
Being new to Australia, I need to build up my client base again. To make a start on this, I have created two new leaflets, for distribution to local companies and for local billboard advertising:

The first leaflet is designed to be an introduction to my business services for local companies. It’s a ‘leave behind after meeting’ offering or a door opener to a potential new client.
The second leaflet is aimed at sole traders / small businesses and shows the $999 website promotion I am currently offering. The aim of this leaflet is to catch the eye of a local builder or entrepreneur on the local supermarket advertising board and inspire them to consider an affordable online presence as an advertising tool.

Move Down Under

Danny — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 05:26:42 +0000

The wife and I have now been in Australia for 2 months having moved here from the UK. The weather has been amazing and despite being almost winter,we have been enjoying temperatures of 27˚ in Mandurah today. We have moved into an amazing house in Meadow Springs with our two cats who are finally out of quarantine, and have spent some great days out and about with my family who emigrated here about 5 years ago.

Converting my static website to Wordpress

Danny — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 03:53:10 +0000

I have finally got around to updating my own website from static html to a custom built Wordpress template with a blog. The process was pretty straightforward as I already had the site in compliant XHTML 1.0 Strict so I just had to create some styling for the comments section and split the code into the relevant Wordpress template pages. The biggest delay was sorting out all the content to use on the website, grabbing screenshots and reformatting them. Something I usually have to pressure my clients for.

One thing I learned from the process is that new aria-required attribute that Wordpress adds to required input fields, makes the page fail the W3C HTML validator. It is however, actually good for accessibility as modern screen readers inform the user that this is a required field, giving blind users a better experience than a bold asterisk.