I hope your design course goes well, and prepares you well for a future design career. Thanks for the compliment!

Thanks for your comments and critique. I see your point about the archives links - I have removed these although I do hope to be posting more than once a month from now on. I have also changed the font and nav colour to a darker shade of gray which is much better.

Thanks again fro taking a look.

Steve

Steve’s last blog post…Graphic design resources

Thanks very much. Your business name is a different scenario, for sure. I knew my business would be me alone for a fair chunk of time.

I’ve taken a look around your WordPress blog, and left a few comments. A couple of suggestions: Are you sure you need to list ‘archives’? I notice in some cases there’s just one article per month. I’d prefer the body text to be a slightly darker shade of grey, improving legibility. Overall though, nicely tied in with your site design.

I also think you made the right move from ‘New Dawn Graphics’ to your personal name. It is a bit different for us as we are a partnership and as such came up with a name to represent this.

And finally, just want to say thanks for giving me the nudge to move our blog to Wordpress. I have always been a bit hesitant to make the switch but being a regular reader of your blog made me think - go for it! We have just launched our new wordpress based blog and would love you to have a look around and let me know what you think - http://www.eightyonedesign.co.uk/blog

Steve

Glad you enjoyed viewing my progress, and that you, too, see the error in the FrontPage ways. I guess I took a step backwards from my first site to the second, because those huge images you mention you had in your first attempt, I employ in my second!

Web design has tempted me, and I’ve produced a few sites here and there. Nothing special though, and nothing I feel I want to display in my portfolio. To be honest, branding is where my main passion is, and I enjoy creating logos / corporate stationery more than any other aspect of my job. Because of which, I tend to pass web design projects on to my contacts.

It’s worth a blog post though, the whole “should you specialise or branch out area”.

I had a few minutes to do some reading this morning, and found this post. Very cool to see your progress. Since I started doing this, I have had about 6 different websites through the years, and I too started off in Frontpage! (”Yikes” is an understatement”).

Your first website attempt is pretty amazing! My first attempt included one big jpeg image as the entire page, and many image maps for the links. I hadn’t quite figured out the html thing.

I think your current logo is excellent, and is a nice personal brand. It is comfortable yet profressional.

Im not sure if this question has been covered somewhere before , but I am wondering if you have ever been tempted to get into web design and development, coding languages etc? (Forgive me if you already do this). I personally couldnt help myself once I got a taste of HTML, and just over a year ago, I learned how to create fully css websites, and even more recently, I have played with asp programming and understanding the basics of queries, databases etc..

Your switch from branding yourself as a company to “just David Airey” is also interesting. I have struggled with this whole issue recently. I am trying to build a company, where we are a full time design/marketing studio, with a great team. Right now, I have two programmers (freelancers and friends) for the more difficult web stuff…but I do all of the design work. Ive struggled with how I want to brand myself/the company and which way I should really go. I would be interested to hear more detail from you on this subject sometime. Perhaps some of your other subscribers would too as I presume a lot of them are in the same position or will be in the future.

Brian Yerkes’s last blog post..Eulda Award Winner : Best of Sweden 2007

It’s an aim of mine to be as transparent as possible, and I feel it benefits the relationships I build with clients.

I’m glad I made you question your own approach. Continued success to you too.

Continued success to you!
Gareth