lewro’s blog - 2.1 - web designer beginner

Next week I suppose to go on holiday as I planned at the beginning of the year. It is going to be Grand Canaria island. After very busy half year I really feel I do need to re-charge my batteries. The plan is to relax and enjoy the weather but at the same time I am taking my Canon 40D so I expect to get some pretty good shots in those conditions. That was the second target for this year. I hope I can get at least one excellent shot which I can then enlarge and frame.

If I am right, Grand Canaria is the biggest island in Canary Islands so do not expect us to lay on the beach all the time. We will explore the country around us. I am also taking my PHP book so I will not get bored from all that relax on the beach bellow umbrella.

Taking a book with me (which is quite massive - about 700 pages) brings me into the dilemma I am having for last couple of weeks. Should I be buying more paper books? The reason for this question is new technology. There are devices on the market which can store hundreds of books and the readability comfort is very high. They do not use back-lighting so your eyes are not going to be tired after half an hour of reading. Another reason why I am thinking about this option is space in the room I live. I have collected about 30 books during the last 2 years and there is really no more space in our room.

Do you guys have any experiences with eReaders? My favorite so far is the lattes Sony one even I would prefer one from Apple if there was one but unfortunately there is none. The Amazon one seams to be OK but I am not very keen on design…

When it comes to studying technology or languages I almost always reach for book. But when I want to get the latest information about web design or information technologies in general then I recommend podcasts.

Boagworld

Today I would like to introduce couple of podcasts I have been listening to for months. The one am I going to put on the first position is called boagworld . This podcast is about web design and development. It summarizes all important stuff around web design what happened for the past week and brings lots of useful and deep information in its case studies, interviews and reviews. The podcast is run by 2 guys Paul and Marcus where each of them presents different aspects of web design industry. Paul talks about web development, technologies and Marcus covers the business, marketing and management area of running web design company. If you are into web design or you thinking about running web design company I would strongly recommend subscribing to this podcast.

Diggnation

The next podcast I am going to recommend is called diggnation. I am sure you have already heard about web site called dig.com Kevin is the guy who came with the whole digg idea and this podcast is mainly about the best articles featured on the dig.com. Kevin and his body Alex talk about the technology in a really funny way. The usually mix it with stories of their private lifes. During the whole time of the podcast they drink beer so you can imagine that the flow of the conversion is not always strictly following the theme of the articles featured on the dig.com. I can not forget to say that this podcast is video podcast and it is the most entertaining podcast in my library.

Rissington podcast

There is one more podcast about web design and that is Rissington podcasts. This one has started only recently but again, very entertaining and full of excellent advices. The podcast is based on users questions. It is organized by John Oxton and Jon Hicks. I probably do not have to introduce these two guys if you live your life around web design. If you decide to subscribe to this podcast via iTunes do not forget to check the web site as well. It has brilliant design. Try to resize the browser window once you are there as well.

Photoshop user TV

As a designer you probably can not live without Adobe Photoshop and that is a part of the name of my next recommendation. It is called Photoshop user TV. It is excellent source of ideas, tutorials and tricks used in Photoshop. It is run by 3 Photoshop guys where each of them is top specialist and not only in Photoshop but in other Adobe products and digital photography as well. This podcast is again video podcast. There is no better way to learn all the photoshop stuff. You can just watch this guys working in Photoshop for hours and I am sure you will remember most of it because you can see it in action.

So these are all my web design related podcasts and I have to say I would not probably watch them if they were not so entertaining as they are. So if you are thinking about creating a podcast, make it fun.

Did I miss something? If you know about any good podcast let me know.

As usually there is a lot going on in the lewro’s life. Last Saturday I spent on the MAC Expo London 2007. You can see couple of images on my flickr site. So, how was it? It was really cool. The most interesting was presentation of the new MAC OS - Leopard. I have seen most of the new features presented on the apple site but they showed us couple of new once as well. Specially very interesting was how you can create widgets directly from the Safari browser window. For example departures of Tube on the selected station. Creating widgets with zero programing knowledge, that it really cool.

There have been couple of other companies doing presentation among them Microsoft with the latest Office for MAC and Quarks, Crumple and others. I have also spent some times on the presentation of digital photography by Nikon. The reset of the time I spent wondering around with a coffee in my hand, ten minutes here and ten minutes there. It is a pity there were no hardware presentations by Apple. I would be interested to see the iphone, new ipods and ibooks. But anyway it was time well spent.

There is going to be another interesting presentation, this time specially about photography. One of my favorite companies Canon will be presenting in the London in about one week time. I hope I can learn more about digital photography and techniques for editing images. I am looking forward to this one. London is such a great city for this kind of free events where you can watch top professionals.

New books

Except the events I am attending I continue my study of web design and development. I bought couple of new books. Most of them are books for web designers but as you see I am going to study PHP and My SQL. So I am widening my spectrum towards development as well. After reading a book called DOM Scripting I have used the knowledge from this book in the couple of projects but what is more interesting it showed me that programing is not as difficult as I thought it is. I will let you know if I was right in case of PHP programming but that is going to take me some time. I am going to read and study this book as last one from all of these books which you can see on the image bellow.

Work in progress

So that was all about the access to information in different forms but obviously I am working as well. My full time job is giving me a great opportunity to grown, specially working in Photoshop is improving and speeding up. I am very happy about that. I have learned a lots of shortcuts which are extremely useful. I have still long way to go but it is a good start. I have also started a new project. This time it is print. It is going to be finished this week so you can find it later on my flickr, in the design section.

I wish the day had at least fifty hours so I could do more interesting things. I can not find the time to draw for example. But may be during the Christmas holiday I find some time. There are so many things I would like to draw. One of them would be motor bike Vespa or a car Mini. That are such design icons. I absolutely adore their shapes.

Question for you

How do you guys study? What source of information do you use?