I had some free time this evening and came across this Photoshop tutorial over at PSDTuts and decided to give it a go, so here is a wallpaper to celebrate Easter, just click the below image to see the full size version (1280×1024).
I would also like to take this opportunity to wish all my readers a happy easter!
Today I woke up and opened my laptop to check my emails, but that wasn’t to be as for some reason I had no wireless signal. After a bit of investigation work the realization was that there had been a power cut, and the power was still down.
I am currently on my Easter break from University (I do a Web Technology course) so I planned to put some serious time and effort into working on my various sites over the holiday. Of course with no power, and no internet this was going to be tough. It suddenly hit me, that I was going to have to be creative on how I spent my time, especially considering my laptop had only two hours left on the battery. I spent those two hours doing some work in Photoshop, and playing around with CSS in Dreamweaver, but once the battery had died, what was I to do, especially considering work was a priority for the day.
I ended up drawing (yes hand drawn!) some website designs and drawing mock ups of logos for upcoming sites, among with listing my plans for some sites, along with tasks I wanted completing soon, and prioritizing them. Having this time away from the Mac, and more importantly the internet, really did help me focus on what needed doing and when by. Oh and I took the dog for a walk or two.
The power was out for over 6 hours. Lesson being? It’s always healthy and more often than not, productive to take time away from your PC (if thats your primary work area).
What would you do without a PC and net access (if you work online that is)?
Recently I have been working on a redesign for my blog, mainly because I feel it’s about time I got a personalized look and a unique design to help strengthen my online identity and brand. I have made several designs and mocks in photoshop but haven’t really hit the nail on the head yet with the look I want to go for.
When the time is right I will no doubt show the mock designs, and of course the design I plan to go with here on the blog. In terms of 
colours I will be using blues, greys and blacks, and for branding I will continue to build upon using my personalized avatar, be it in advertising, emails and around the site. As for coding the design from a psd to a valid Wordpress theme I am still on the look out for somebody to complete this task, and despite me having a few people/companies in mind I am always open to suggestions, so either drop a comment below or contact me.
Getting a custom design for my blog was one of my goals for 2008, and now having made a start on visualizing how I want it to look, I am feeling very confident on reaching this goal.
What’s a Favicon?
A favicon (short for favorite icon) is an icon which when added to a website (by the webmaster) appears in the address bar of most modern browsers. Adding this image can help users identify your site from a list of bookmarks or on a open tab, and could help in increasing your brand recognition. Adding one is simple, and I recommend you do it. Check out this Wikipedia entry for more detailed information on the favicon.
To begin with you need to create your favicon, you can either create it in image creation software like Photoshop, or use an online generator like this one. Creating your image yourself is recommended as the end result will be more personal and individual to you and your sites image. The file you need to create is 16 pixels wide by 16 pixels high. Once you are happy with the appearance of your favicon save it, but, be sure to rename the file name from the standard extension to .ico, the file will need saving as a .ico file. Some browsers do now support other file formats like png and gif but it is best practice to use the most widely accepted format .ico.
With your favicon file saved, it is now a simple case of uploading the file to your server and then including this simple html code in the <head> tag of your page:
<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”http://www.chrisbrandrick.com/favicon.ico”>
<link rel=”icon” href=”http://www.chrisbrandrick.com/favicon.ico”>
It’s that simple, your site should now be displaying your favicon on your webpage, if not try refreshing your cache. Readers of ChrisBrandrick.com should now see my favicon in the address bar! 
A simple way to add more personality to your site, try it out!
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