GALLUS BIKES
______I was having a wee check up on my old courier compatriots to see who was doing what, hoping to hook up with some of them on the trip down to London for Artcrank and I stumbled across Jeremy Shlachter (Nooby). Jeremy had been a great pal during my courier stint and we had some fine times round the city and skulking about in the ‘rat hole’. It is fair to say that he has come a long way since, just have a look at his website and the quality of the bikes he’s producing. To say I’m impressed is an understatement, the whole set-up is a class act. Check it out http://galluscycles.com.

Art Crank
______I’ve got a spot in the Art Crank – London – exhibition in September, so I’m left with a decision as to which bike based picture to use as the print? I’m aware that London has a big fixie culture so should I go for that, maybe a guaranteed crowd pleaser. I’ve got plenty of nice mtb based ones that I love but maybe it’s not such a conducive atmosphere for that in the big smoke? What a quandary, I shall mull it over and ask the masses in the world of facebook and see what they think. Regardless I’m dead chuffed to have got a spot and it looks like they put on a fine soiree. Will be interesting to see what everybody else has in the pipeline to, the previous years have certainly proved a rich source of inspiration.
Help me decide on facebook here.

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______Bikes are the world’s most fun and accessible way to get around. Posters are the world’s most fun and accessible art form. ARTCRANK brings them together.
ARTCRANK is a showcase of bicycle-inspired original poster artwork that people can enjoy looking at and afford to take home. ARTCRANK began in Minneapolis in 2007, and has expanded to Denver, St. Louis, Portland, San Francisco and Des Moines. In September 2010, we’ll hold our first international show in London.
Every ARTCRANK show features posters created by local artists from the host city. Admission is always free, and posters are priced to let everybody take home at least one.

Vive le tour
______This years Tour de France was superb, seat of the pants racing from beginning to end. I honestly can’t remember a Tour since the late nineties which has been so gripping and action packed. With very in the way of filler in the form of flat sprint stages every jersey has turned out to be an epic competition. I can only hope the Vuelta a España will turn out to be such a belter.
In cycling related art business I am hoping that I will get this VIVE graphic on to a proper cycling jersey before to long. I am working with a company who get artists to create edgy, driven designs that fly in the face of the usual go faster designs cyclists are lumped with. So fingers crossed it will come off…..

Featured on Behance Industrial Design
______ Got a nice email from Oscar Ramos Orozco from Behance telling me my ss-st mountain bike concept was excellent and was being featured on their industrial design portal. This is praise indeed rubbing shoulders with designs from Mercedes Benz, Quicksilver and Native instruments. How cool??

schmO v.5
______So my never ending itch to redesign things has manifested itself into another version of the schmO. This one is quite a departure of designs of old, it uses a nifty javascript called supersized by build internet. Basically it’s a full screen slideshow with navigation, it cleverly resizes the image to fit whatever monitor it’s on. It has drawbacks, most noticeably image degradation on larger monitors but nothing is perfect in the world of internet. Also you have to use title and alt tags to provide captions for each image. I doubt google will like this but I’ll just have to wait and see how it fairs. The aim of this design is to get the my work to the fore and i think it achieves this with it’s minimal user interface. After all my trumpeting for simplicity lately I thought it would be worth practicing what i preach. If you use Internet Explorer 7 or below you will be asked to upgrade your browser on load. This framework quite simply doesn’t work on it so there was no point in trying to make it compatible. Across browsers it has some quirks, Opera seems to treat it quite strangely but it works fine. Safari, chrome, firefox all display it as I would like. The latest version of explorer has it’s bugs, as expected but they don’t affect the user experience to much so I’ve left as is.

Singletrack magazine
______I’ve been doing some mountain biking based drawings / designs lately, mainly because I am obsessed by the sport and I’ve had some great inspiration through it lately. Sinlgetrack magazine have put some of the prints I sent them on the fresh goods section of their site, which is usually reserved for new mtb products. So i’m pretty chuffed.
______Hopefully I’ll get some of these printed or commisioned soon. In the meantime I’m planning some collaborations with photographers to get a series of giclee prints done by the end of the season. If all goes to plan these will be for sale come the autumn.
______As always their are plenty of posts on high-8 covering my mtb exploits.
______Ch..Ch..Ch..Ch..Check it out.
______http://www.singletrackworld.com/2010/04/fresh-goods-51/

On the Behance
______So I finally applied for a behance account on the basis of some press I read about the new beta version. I was accepted and it’s been a bit of a revelation. The system is great, not without the odd bug, but superb none the less (it is a beta version after all). I had poked about it before as some studios and individuals who’s work I really like use it as their main site. It is beautifully simplistic and really makes the most of your work, with an uncluttered, open design. The site is brimming with really high quality and inspirational work, covering pretty much every aspect of the creative industry. There is also lots of good information on how to promote yourself and make things happen, the community has a great vibe of positivity and vision and the fact that it’s free is just phenomenal. Even the advertising that pays for it is high quality and worth looking at. Highly recommended.
______Check out my profile here.
______And the whole site here.

High-8 on the BBC
______Simone one of the High-8 members has stuck an article up on the Beeb website about her first Bothy trip.

Authoring on Creative Boom
______So in a bit of a change of direction I’ve started to write articles for Creative Boom. It’s an online magazine centred around the creative industries. Go check out my first post here. I’ve also been beavering writing a few posts, taking photos and making videos for adventure blog high-8.
______I have to say the blogging phenomenon hasn’t really enamoured me that much until recently. I think the blogosphere is a little more focussed now and forging a path as a credible medium in it’s own right. The initial swathe of pointless witterings that were abundant have subsided (mainly thanks to twitter and facebook).  It is commonly accepted that just over 50% of created blogs are maintained which is all the better for those who are publishing usefull, interesting and inspirational articles.

Featured in Webdesigner magazine.
______I had noticed some hits coming from a conspicuous forwarding link from imagine publishing. I headed over to their site, ah! ‘web designer magazine’ I had sent them an email when i launched the schmo v4. I have to say I had a wee fright when i saw “Worlds worst websites” emblazoned across the cover. However my initial dread was alleviated when I saw schmo proudly covering a whole page in ‘the cream of the web crop gallery’ of the magazine. Here’s a few choice quotes…
______“You can see from the examples of web work that somhairle is really comfortable in crafting stylish and clean web experiences”
______“The dark carbon background and small bursts of neon colour provide quite a sharp and sexy feel to the overall look of schmo.biz”
______So praise indeed. You should be able to make out the rest of the article in the photo above. I also included some recent photos as I’ve been taking a lot of them… Happy days.