Layer Tennis

This very exciting news – me and Rex Crowle will be playing in an All-English bout of Coudal Partner’s Layer Tennis this Friday. The idea is we swap a photoshop file back and forth every 15min over a match of 10 ‘volleys’. I’ve no idea how it’s going to pan out, but I suspect they’ll be much doodling of monsters, moustaches and general mayhem.

I think we’re going to create a little lawn tennis club in my front room, I’m going to paint my desk to look like a little tennis court with our Macs either side. Obviously we’ll be quaffing Pimms and munching strawberries & cream in between each volley.

The match kicks off 4pm Greenwich Mean Time and lasts about 2 and a half hours. Sign up for your free season tickets here and watch it live on the internets!

To get a flavour of what it’s all about, check out last weeks match between Jason Santa Maria & Derek Powazek. Jason also wrote an interesting account of the match here »

Grip Wrench

Ah great, Rex’s animated series Grip Wrench is now online! All 10 episodes are on there, featuring Hollywood hardman, Vietnam veteran and fearless patriot – Grip Wrench.

This is Rex’s favourite episode ‘Keep Safe with Grip Wrench’ is embeded above, I’m a big fan on Conad the Barbarian, sounds like gonad, probably one of my favourite testical gags to date :)

You can also download a tonne Grip Wrench goodies (meat) for your iPhone and computer here »

Why not follow GripWrench on Twitter, latest tweet – “Eating a piggy for lunch. His face is crunchy! Ha! Ha!”…

Also Rex has posted a few pictures of Julie’s white sofa that she bravely let us all attack with sharpie markers during her house warming party. I think it maybe needs another round to completey fill in all the white space…

This’ll get your eyebrows moving

Cadbury Dairy Milk is going Fairtrade! I’m sure you’re all aware what Fairtrade is about and that’s it’s a good thing. So far I’ve seen it as a bit of a niche, with the odd logo on expensive bags of coffee. So it’s good to hear that Cadbury are annoucing that it’s mega mass market flagship choccy treat is going to be using 100% Fairtrade ingredients (in about 6 months). Find out more on their blog »

“Fair trade means products are purchased directly and at a fair price from small family growers and co-operatives that do not rely on hired or illegal forced labour. Growers receive a minimum guaranteed price that covers real production costs, regardless of how low world market prices fall.”

Cadbury is a big dirty corporate company, but it does seem to have a history of doing nice things, such as – Back in 1879 Mr. Cadbury didn’t want his chocolate factory workers to live in city slums, so he built it out in the countryside (Bournville) along with a model village which would ‘alleviate the evils of modern more cramped living conditions’ for them to live in. No pubs though, Mr. Cadbury was a Quaker, well you can’t have it all ;)

How come I know so much about This Cadbury Fairtrade thing? Well I was pulled in at the eleventh hour last week by Hyper to re-design the blog after the client rejected previous work. There wasn’t much time (the announcement date was set in stone) Started on Thursday morning then 27 hours later without rest or sleep the blog was finished. I think Guy Bowden who built it must have been burning the midnight oil over the weekend too.

Anyhow, check out my late-night chocolate & caffeine (I don’t they were Fairtrade) fueled efforts our on the Cadbury Fairtrade blog »

Cargo – portfolio site

Pay close attention to this post dear blog readers – this portfolio site is 100% free and 200% awesome! I’ve tried out many portfolio systems over the past year, this is head and shoulders above the rest and won’t cost you a penny to have a play, can’t say fairer than that eh? It evolved out of the system that runs the SpaceCollective community, so has a fair fine heritage.

Cargo is largely much like all the others, but what makes it so briliant is down to a few key features like:

A strong focus of design and visuals – it’s all about the images
Navigation is a full page of projects thumbnails, the defacto best way of naviagting visual work
Simple enough for the novice, but enough advanced features to keep the seasoned developer happy
Unlimited – uploads, projects, customisation, fun.

What you get:

A choice of excellent themes to style your site
CSS editor to fine tune or completey customise your site
Well maintained forum with lots of top tips
Free Hosting
Ability to set up a custom URL (www.example.com)

I’ve been playing around with it for a week or so, you can see the quick & dirty portfolio I’ve knock up here »

Here’s some other great portfolios I’ve found made with Cargo: Folkert Gorter, Josh Pangell, Stephen Cheetham, Kitchen, or just check out the Cargo Gallery.

It’s is in public beta at this stage, you can request an invite here. There’s talk on the forum of bringing in a flickr-esque annual subscription for a ‘pro account’, with a similar price tag – $25. Sound fair to me, would be happy to pay that.

Emptees

This site’s been around for a while, but it’s the first I’ve seen of it – Emptees is a t-shirt design showcase site where people can show off, talk about, and love tees. It looks like the general trend of the community is toward dark (subject noy colour) and highly detailed designs like Garbage Pail kids (not really may taste). But there’s plenty of gems on there too such as – Lucky Strike above and Noopin below.

The site was built by Indie Labs, who also make Big Cartel, the pretty handy online store service.

Krop – Creative Database

There’s a lot of simple ‘build yourself an online portfolio with minimum fuss’ sites out there, such as Behance and Carbonmade. But new kid on the block is Creative Database by the design jobs site Krop.

I must say, out of all the one’s I’ve tried, this is definitely the easiest to add your own content and the most pleasurable to view a finished profile. Sadly the free version only lets you upload 10 images, for unlimited uploads you’ve got to pay $10 a month…

I’ve made a quick (free) page for myself here, but you should check out a pro user with lots of images to see how the scroll bars and image previews really make it a pleasure to use.

Would be nice if they had some way of browsing/filtering all the current users to discover peoples work, maybe that’s coming once they’ve got a few people registered.

Sign yourself up and start making your portfolio here »

Via: k10k.

Dropular – a bit like FFFFOUND!

Every week I get email from people asking if I have any FFFFOUND invites left, once again, no I don’t. But Nicky’s just put me onto this new site Dropular, it’s a bit like FFFFOUND, but you can also grab videos and website links as well as images.

Anyhow it’s just opened for Beta registration at 9.00am GMT today and is only open for the next 24 hours. So if you’re pissed that you can’t get into FFFFOUND, get your self onto Dropular today.

And here’s the link to my drops so far.

World Nude Day

This is just a quick heads up, in case you were wanting to get naked on World Nude Day this year, there’s only a couple of weeks to left, so go get your back & sack waxed in anticipation ;) not sure if I’m up to a full frontal, might just wander round in my naked suit instead. Not a bad prize though for the best video, $10,000 IN GOLD!

DAYTUM

Idon’t think I’ve ever been quite so excited by the prospect of using a website before. The damn thing’s in private beta, I’ve submitted me email, but how long is it going to take before I gain access? I don’t think I can stand the suspense! I’m sure you all know of Nicholas Felton’s dedicatedly detailed and beautifully designed annual reports. Well he’s gone and teamed up interactive designer Ryan Case and built an online version – DAYTUM – for us all to track our daily data.

I can feel that this is going to be massive, as a serious tool and for comedy value (spoof stats). I hope it does well and they’re able to keep on developing it, there’s massive potential here. Get on there now, sign yourself up and have a look though some of the beta testers stats.

Update: Nicholas kindly got in touch and sent me an invite, just been adding my stats (mostly of a booze related nature), you can now see all my 2009 data here. Also the Feltron 2008 Annual Report is now here.

HubsTV

I‘ve never really been a music video junkie, so the core idea behind HubsTV – creating your own music video channel and sharing with your mates the stuff you’re watching – passes me by really. But what does really get me excited is that blue hand, blimey isn’t it awesome? It’s that raised little finger that does it for me. The interface (and hand) was crafted by the consistantly amazing Rinzen and the site was developed by Adam Johnson.