Formula One car liveries haven’t been up to much in recent years. They’ve barely improved – if at all – since Motormouth’s 2006 review, and certainly the Brawn GP livery; last year’s championship winner let’s remember, was a shocker. Absolutely pitiful.
Some good signs as we head into 2010 however, with Red Bull (one of the honourable exceptions usually) and McLaren joined by a beautifully warm yellow Renault (nodding right back to their first days in F1 in the late 70s and early 80s – although it’s also strangely reminiscent of the Jordan B&H “Buzzin Hornets” livery), a definitely more attractive Ferrari, and a return to the grid for “British Racing Green” all over the bodywork of new entrants Lotus (although there’s a certain degree of irony here as the team’s Malaysian owned).
Have a look at the pics, they’re very reassuring… cleaner, leaner bodywork, simpler colour schemes, and more differeniated branding.
I’m setting up my new business at the moment, as I’m currently in the middle of a redundancy process and need to get my head around “Life After Teletext”, where I’ve been for 11 years, busily getting complacent and institutionalised. Getting a similar job is pretty much out of the question (as in it’s both unlikely and to be honest, probably undesirable) so I’m looking at freelancing more than anything – the skills and experience are there; but it’s going to take a lot of hard work and persistence too. There’s some interesting projects that I’m aiming to pursue, primarily because they’d be things I’d love to do and would be brilliant if they worked out – but I’m also keeping my feet firmly on the ground and prepping to do my fair share of “grind” work too; the kind of thing of which the best you can say is that it “pays the bills…”
One of the major upsides to what I’m planning is that pretty much everything I can do on my Macs, but there’s two things that have sadly meant I need to get Windows up and running…
One is that, as a web designer amongst other things, I really need to ensure that anything I build looks and works fine cross-platform, so I need to check it in PC browsers on a Windows OS. The other is that I bought a special application called “Business in a Box” which is basically an adaptable business and legal document resource. Had I wanted just the English version then there’s a Mac one, but as I wanted the English AND Spanish combined edition it’s got a bit more complicated, as it’s not available for the Mac and requires a PC version that is a bespoke app that allows exports to standard “Office” formats.
So basically I’ve just had to shell out on the Business in a Box software, plus Office for PC, plus Windows for PC, plus Parallels to run the whole fat lot on top of the Mac OS.
This had better all be bloody worth it!!! It’s yet another disappointment to my team too, who’ve been devastated by the sight of me buying project-planning and accounting software recently. By the way, the best project planning software for Mac is unarguably OmniPlan by the wonderful folks at Omni Group, who also produce OmniGraffle which is pretty much indispensable for things like sitempas and wireframing.
It’s been a busy couple of days with me overhauling and relaunching a couple of my “pet project” sites. I won’t call them “hobbies” as they’re too important to me, and I felt that given the other rebuilds I’d done recently it’d be a great opportunity to carry on learning about WordPress and PHP and CSS geekery by giving both sites a complete makeover and moving them from Blogger to my own domains and building them from the ground up with revised designs.
And this is how I’ve reworked the new Pere Tutusaus website, although I’ve left the branding more or less intact on this one, compared to the hefty redesign of the whole styling that I’ve done with the ECDL site…
I’ve also been working on a very cool idea that I’ve come up with which will also be a WP project; although it’s huge by comparison, and also very secret squirrel, so I’ve got to try and stay excited about it for months yet while I mess around at refining and developing the idea and figuring out if there’s any money in it! Stay tuned… And stay patient…
This is a short film called “Light Rain” by a lovely and rather talented friend of mine, Neil Horner – entered in the Virgin Media Shorts competition. Please do go vote if you like it…
I’m indebted to British-Canadian singer/songwriter Luke Jackson for dropping me a line about his new video “Goodbye London” which features not only a cracking song about the place where I live, but also a top piece of animation, mixing time lapse and stop-motion of London scenes with drawn characters and graffiti. The result is a belter of a video; charming but unsentimental, and completely evocative of the city. Do pass it on, and if you want to find out more about Luke and his work, including “Goodbye London” and his new album “…And Then Some” you can do so here…
You can buy “…And Then Some” on iTunes by clicking here…
In short, my name's Gareth and I'm the Director of VROOM MEDIA Ltd. I'm a designer, writer, musician and MotoGP nut. I'm a shameless fanboy for Alvaro Bautista & Apple. I go moist over Spanish band El Canto Del Loco, and I'm a total Mac geek. This blog is an ongoing journal of random notes, thoughts and bits of stuff...
...And things.
The latest recordings by my solo music project, The Rain Dogs. These are tracks I'm pulling together over a period of time - some old and some new - and just putting out online for sharing.
My 'formerly industrial' band with my mate Rob.
We grew out of wanting to be another NIN some time back and have developed into a far more interesting, singular, challenging and fun.
With Rob's emigration to the USA, our way of working and creating was fundamentally altered, but we continued to push the boundaries of possible musics as we always have.
Rob's return holds promise to pick things up some more - to develop more ideas, sketchpads, rhythms and approaches to keep us on the cutting edge - and maybe a refreshed approach which might even see us revisit and complete our unfinished masterpiece "BACKLASH".
Yeah, right...
Fifteen minutes into the future, a hot, dry summer in Hull: Coates, a researcher and investigator, is hired to trace the whereabouts of missing adolescent Dominic Russell.
Is he the latest in a number of gruesome blood-letting murders attributed to the city’s “Marginals” that exist somewhere in the underbelly of the population?
That’s what the Police say, but it’s not what the boy’s mother believes - and as Coates digs deeper into that underbelly he discovers that Dominic’s disappearance is just a tiny part of a much bigger story: one that will bring his world crashing down and endanger all those around him...
Rivercity is a book that can be read at many levels, weaving a main plot - a clear homage to the “noir” detective genre - with a vampire story and a myriad of strands about perception and reality, human nature, signs, superstitions, the histroy of Hull, aesthetics, the occult and political expediency. Above all it's a novel about philosophy and the nature of truth and knowledge in the electronic age.
Formula One car liveries haven’t been up to much in recent years. They’ve barely improved – if at all – since Motormouth’s 2006 review, and certainly the Brawn GP livery; last year’s championship winner let’s remember, was a shocker. Absolutely pitiful.
