Blog
On smallness - 11.02.08
I’ve started using the strapline “your little friend on the big wide web” lately – on my website and on my lovely new business cards (see below). It’s part of a refocusing of my marketing activity.
Sometimes, small is beautiful. There’s no point pretending to be something I’m not, and that’s why I’ve recently started using the first person again, rather than the unnecessarily pretentious “we”, when in fact it’s just me.
But that’s a good thing – I’m friendly and approachable, flexible, and reasonable, because I have low overheads. The type of clients I’m after will be the sort of people who value these qualities, not the multinationals with massive budgets, so there’s no point trying to appeal to them.
Ben Hunt agrees, in his new ebook Save the pixel, he argues this point, as well as offering some other wise words to aspiring web designers. It’s refreshing to read about the process of design, and I’ve found it a useful reference.
Now to those new business cards… Once again Aubergine have printed them beautifully. And here they are:
Happy New Year 2008! - 10.01.08
So here it is! 2008! Another year, another chance to write the wrong date on cheques, at least for the first few months…
Things are busy here at Boiler Room Digital. Firstly, plenty of client work to keep me out of mischief. Secondly, the builders are in. So today I was interrupted by the news that a gas pipe we thought had no gas in it, did. Not the news you like to discover when you’re hammering it, I imagine.
Then the central heating was put out of action. So it was a cold day in the office.
Finally, and somewhat surreally, I was skyped by a man offering to sell me spare heating parts from Turkey. Clearly he misunderstood what Boiler Room Digital is all about.
An interesting start to the year then. Hope it’s going well for you so far…
Happy New Year!
Coming to Sheffield - 16.11.07
Sheffield is a good place. I like it here. The other morning, as I was out for a bit of a run, I was greeted with this view:
Good isn’t it! I’ve been living in the city a few months now, and I’m really enjoying it. If you too live in the fine city of Sheffield, and you need a website, why not get in touch? If you don’t live round these parts, you could always move! Or failing that, give me a call, drop me an email. Either way, I’ll be happy to help!
Brand New - 29.10.07
Regular visitors will have noticed a few changes round here. For the better I hope. The first version of this site, and the first incarnation of the logo was put together pretty quickly for various reasons, and while it’s served well for the last couple of years, in October 2007, I found the time to rework the logo and the site.
Version 1 used some nice arrows to suggest dynamism, and changes in size to hint at added value. The font was one of my favourites, Futura. The website was a largely grey affair, with splashes of the the corporate red dotted about for emphasis, and Textpattern.
This time, I’ve used Aachen as the basis font (with the letters snuggled up against eachother a little). I like Aachen. It’s chunky, with a reasonable dose of personality (not unlike myself, some might say), so it seemed somehow appropriate.
Colour-wise, I’ve gone with a darker version of the red from the previous design, and introduced a few complementary colours – one for each section.
The “Boiler Room” metaphor initially came from the office I shared with a boiler for a couple of years. This time, I thought I’d use the boiler/plumbing metaphor a little in the illustration – hence the sketched “stop-cock” in the logo. I’ve got some other pipes and junctions, sketched in the same style. Maybe they’ll get used later on in the site, or on the printed materials I’m working on at the moment.
So there we go. I’m pleased with it. It’s always hard to declare my own site “finished” – I’m sure it will evolve. But the bold, horizontal stripes make me smile. I’m off to buy a matching jumper…
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