Soo, ive been through all the figures and the paperwork, and its just not going to be salary viable, startup cost if pretty steep, its £1600 for adob photoshop and macromedia studio 8 web bundle. thats just for software. i could get a total of 2k from the princes trust and biz gateway, but there grant system takes up to 2 months and its all depends on where i live, which is a bit gutting. Advertising cost a compleate bomb as well. its all a bit much.

Dunno what im gonna do with regards to the company. looks like im gonan just have to leave it alone for the time being. cant start trading untill after aprll, makes more sence for tax reasons, so if i do go ahead with it it will be in my spare time while i work during the day, doing god knows what kind of remedial work.

Job search ............. its been over a full year since i started applying for media jobs: video editors, graphic designers, web designers, multimedia designers, cd-rom authors ... anything that i would enjoy doing, that i have skills in, but apparently skills dont pay the bills anymore.

Pure gutted lol, on a bit of a downer about the whole thing, i think i can hear cojent calling.........and that prior knowledge scares the bejesus out of me. Gonna have to start looking at boring jobs, ive applied to a few IT jobs but there all abit heavy going with MySQL, PHP, and Ajax.........Lost. Dutch Football ? lol

Ive been offered an oppertunity to try and get into IT Supoort at Dell in glasgow, but again its just another call centre. Sucking the creative indirectly

I checked out the competition as well, Graphicware house pretty much own the market in this area, there just so felxible covering everything all in the one place, Richards a cool guy with a great business head, they have this genious cms web design system wher ethere clients can basically update the sites themselves, it really good for large sites as well taking half the time to create. Ive been working on a similair idea that David from swift ask me to do, he wanted to be able to update his property search items him self. i was going to use a mysql system, but A) i dont know how to do it , although ive been reading up on it for the past few weeks, sounds easy enough and B) i dont have enough money to get MySQL added to my server. so i came up with a really simplified PHP system based on this blog except with out comments and other blog like things, its up at here but there is nothing up on it, just the mini ive been drooling over lol. So if anyones wantig work done by me ask me before the end of aprill and it will be done for free lol, i had to adjust my prices as well i was a bit too cheap and it wasnt going to be viable to keep my company afloat, but i supose thats all oot the window for the time being.

i just watched the nme awards....not impressed.

my driving instructors went off on holiday for a month, feels like im stuck in limbo with noting to do for the next wee while, its disapointing, suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

i just sent a job aplication with the words "im the best at everything, dont bother reading anyone elses cv" thats what its come down too. I need some appreciation for talent lol.

Oh yeah went to see nine inch nails the other night.. was a bit poor, they were good but there was just this really weird atmosphere of high expectation, and they didnt really kit the mark, ladytron where surprisingly good live, probibly the best best bit of the night.

After looking at php for pure agesssss......and ages.......and agess...........i found a bunch of script for a php blogging system. But i couldnt get it workin, So after more research I found another simple php blogging system, so after messing around with different codes again for hours on end, and numerous calls to my server people I finaly got php5 up and running and my permissions all set correctly and here it is. Still got some minor bugs to fix but u can add comments and stuff now which means my clients have a way to comment on my work and discuss there likes and dislikes.

thers a wee problem where comments come in under a anonymous names, think clients mite have to have a log in namem which i think ill have to provide them with, but im still working on the testing with Drew ill keep you all posted

So got together with John Mc Conville today, hes decided against a website, hes oldschool and uses the old telephone and post office lol. so ive just been hired for a full print graphics package of letter heads, bizcards, envelopes, tax return forms the full print boonah. But the good thing is hes hooked me up with another client who wants a website for their conservatory designing company. Plus he went though all the paper work and vital information im going to need. So j-digital-ink wont start trading untill Aprill ths year, it gives me more time to finish my biz plan and get funding from the biz gateway and princes trust. Since j-digital-ink is a sole trader thers no need to register the company name, but will register with the inland revinue for tax in April. So i have just over a month to get all my initial portfolio sites finished, get my bizplan finished and submited, then get my advertsing sorted and then finally finish learning to drive lol, so a busy month comming up. Plus im still looking for another job for a steady wage. but as always everything will be kept up to date on here.

First of I made my self a j-digital-ink toolbar. Quality search and email notifications! plus!!! a grear radio station slector from Alternative, Classic Rock and Metal. Give it a try. you can.



So over the last few days a whole load of things have happened, to begin with I’ve found loads of stupid spelling errors in my site, I’ve corrected some of them but ill have to fix them all soon enough. I was having this crazy problem getting my contact forms to post to my email, so I consulting Drew from Drewnotwierd and then Krist from Carbon Mojo (Php wizard) who both supplied me with different php scripts. I still couldn’t get things working. Now Im pretty much a php virgin, never really used them, I understand how they work etc but never had to work with one in mind. I found this amazing form to email tutorial on Hotscripts.com that give you basic templates for php and then guides you through the rest of the process. So after an hour or so I got my tutorial finished and working perfectly. Of course when I got to the end of the tutorial I found a download completed tutorial link, was a bit gutted. But anyway my contact form now work and it has really inspired me to start looking in to php programming, there is no way Im going to learn it but if I can at least get a better understanding for it ill feel better. I’ve also started looking at database authoring and in particular MY SQL. I downloaded a copy earlier today, seems a bit full on; but I have a few sites coming up that would greatly appreciate a database and search engine. You can check out my first attempt at a pearl search bar on the front page of my site. My sites not really big enough to appreciate the use of a search bar but it does work all the same, dont know how to customise my search results yet, they just look very bland. try searching for graphics.

So it’s been 3 days since j-digital-ink went live, so what’s the story so far. I got in a bit of a slump because I thought I was in no way going to get any work for a good while but after having an inspirational conversation with Drew(reminiscent of Jeremy Churchill Clarkston) it became clear that the way forward was to make early contacts and share the load, along with word of mouth etc. So I did, I made a contact with one Mr Krist McKenna of Carbon Mojo, a guy I used to know really well until we unavoidably drifted apart, K’s been running a small web design company called Carbon Mojo, specializing in primarily flash websites (awesome site you should check it out) so after a good we chat we decided it would be in both our interests to help each other where ever possible,I scratch your back you scratch mine etc. I’m not really a fan of designing in flash so I will probably give a good whack of my customers to K or Drew. And I don’t really understand php or databases stuff yet so I could just out source that to K and what ever html or css problems Krist has he can just ask me for help etc a perfect business friendship.

So back to business, K’s pretty busy at the moment as he still works as an I.T. professional at Dell so he has offered to hook me up with one of his clients, giving me a possible job re-designing two websites for Glenbervie Golf Club in Stirling. One for their members club and one for their pro shop. I also bumped in to an old friend David Grainge in Tesco the other night, he owns Swift Property, an estate agents with two shops one in Airdrie and one in Hamilton. I promised him ages ago that I would do his site for him, so I’m organizing a meeting for later on in the week to see exactly what we can do for him, ive already started creating layout designs and ideas to show him.

But first things first, I need to get John Mc Conville web site finished so I can go through all the paper work needed to officially register my company for tax this is really important as I needs to get it done BEFORE I start trading, and since no money has in anyway switched hands yet were still nice and legal.

Anicca are hopefully finalizing there art work at some point this week, so im going to set up a meeting with them at some point after 5 this week, although it wont be Wednesday as I have tickets for nine inch nails at the carling academy (sweet).

Other things that aren’t really to do with the company, but are sort of work related is that my C.V. got through to the 2nd round stage of submissions for a graphic design post at the BBC. Doubt ill get an interview though as I’ve applied for almost 10 positions in total at the BBC. I also have an application consideration for Samsung, as an interface designer. And again I don’t hold high hopes lol. Oh yeah ive also strted using this new free FTP software called coffecup, its really good; was using flashxp before but it randomly started having problems with my firewall settings, and i would highly recomend it, ive never used dreamweavers built in FTP clients, might give it a bash soon.

All righty so where am i at with Anicca . After a few tests i came up with a logo concept that the guys were pretty happy with, and I do too. i really like this logo concept although! it is quite an akward size to fit on things since it's very tall. have a look and see what you think.



After this i was approached by the band to put together some art work concepts, so i imediatly started thiking outside the box, comming up with useless but nice ideas one of them was to incorporate the use of diferent textures and materials, so ideveloped an idea using old brown papper and transparent acetate, looked nice but was a bit to costly,



After this experiment i liked the idea of using papper as the only element that would add colour, eyecatching amd alot! cheaper to print as it is essentially a black and white print on coloured papper. so i came up with some other ideas based on the same design



So After Martin Had a wee look he really liked the "oriental winter" one with the tree, so i did some more work on it and am just wiating for word back on what the rest of the band thought, i hit a wee bit of a problem with it though, theres a band picture in it, and since ive eliminated all white i dont know how the image will turn out but anyyway heres the final art work so far.

So after Finaly! getting a second meating with John he has approved the his new logo art work and preliminary layouts for his website. I added his logo to a business card

So im now begining to put the layout sketches in to photo shop before i split them in to css and html. i need to meet up with him again to discuss the exel documents he wants to be downloadable but he is a busy man, so ill keep this up to date. however here are 2 of the pulmonary photoshop images.Click on there for a bigger view, but disable your popup blockers, usually by holding down ctrl while clicking.




Just stuck those photoshops into html, looks good. Im a wee bit unhappy with the top banner graphics on the contacts page and i dont know if the layout for the contact icons are in the right place, but itl do for now, all i need to do now is get the corect content from Johnny. Oh yeah, i tried a new css technique this time, drew pointed it out before of using background images instead of pictures, lets screen readers skip pointles simages and alt tags. so ill let you know how it works out. oh yeah John McConvilles Prototype website is up here

A good few months have past and I totally for got to publicise the fact that I got two of my t-shirt designs put in to manufacture. The main reason for this was to see how easy it would be to get a design mass produced for any of my band or venue clients. It’s a funny story how it happened, whilst at t-in the park I bumped in to the guys from Ill-fitted. They had a stall that would allow customers to chose a t shirt design and then get them printed off within the hour. I got chatting to the guys about getting my own work printed and there were really helpful. So a couple of week pass and I find there business card in my rucksack (It always takes me a few months to unpack) so I got back in contact with two prototype design and sure enough within a few days the t-shirts were printed; and they looked amazing. The reason I forgot to tell people was because I wanted to test them out first, see how rugged they were as I’ve had t-shirts printed before and thev have simply disintegrated in the washing machine. So I’ve had them since July and they are still in perfect condition. So I would defiantly recommended the guys at www.illfitted.co.uk/ for all your t-shirt prints, they are really nice reliable guys who have really good prices!

So these are the two t-shirt designs I got made and one of me wearing it in Spain. The first is a dedication to Bruce Campbell and is simply called “Evil Dead” while the second is a print of my portfolio logo from my old site.



Classic Zoolander Blue Steal Pose