Saturday 18th October
BBC
It has been a crazy last week and all change on the design front as I have just started work at the BBC as a trainee designer in the interactive department. It looks set to be a really exciting year from what I've seen of the things going on here at the moment and I will get the chance to sample several different sides of the work they do (journalism, radio and vision). This also meant moving to London last weekend, which in fairness couldn't have gone much smoother, helped by the fact I have an awesome place to live.
In other updates on this here site, you can see two new arty attempts on the Painting page. There is a brand new film-inspired T-Shirt design, in the shape of the star of Tropic Thunder, which is also the biggest and most complex stencil I have attempted. And I have given a bit of an update to the external website Links page, something that will be ongoing as I try and put a few more of my interesting bookmarks that have accumulated up there.
Thursday 2nd October
Brusseldorf
A couple of weekends ago I took a jolly to the continent with a couple of friends in my 206, which meant a night in Brussels and two nights in Dusseldorf with other stops in Belgium. We had an entertaining time with many-an-adventure: getting lost in Brussels; getting directions during a drug deal; eating a kebab as a sit-down meal; cheesey Eurodance with a hen party; the hotel-vending-machine-beer festival; meeting Monika Gradzki; almost running out of fuel and almost missing the ferry. I even made t-shirts featuring our trip name within a Union Jack in German and Belgian flag colours (modelled by Gregs on the left). Plenty of photos were taken, mostly of the Facebook variety but some more arty/obscure ones are on the Travel page.
Saturday 13th September
New T-Shirt Tags
I've finally made some new tags for my hand-printed t-shirts to replace the A T-Shirt Everyday ones. The idea's quite simple/obvious (as they had to be yellow squares really) and these ones tell you which design you've got and which edition out of 10 it is, as well as the instructions, so they should actually be useful.
Thursday 11th September
Film Reviews
Due to the fairly large number of films I've been watching recently in my current in-between job status, I've decided I should do something constructive with them. So I've started writing film reviews on Lovefilm again (which I haven't done for ages) but rather than write a long essay (of which there are plenty of really good examples out there) I've decided to try and crack the short review. But rather than just a short summary of the film's plot or a star review, I wanted it to be actually useful and so I worked out how I describe films to friends in a few sentences. It fit this kind of framework:
Comparison (It's like such and such a film...) + Unique Point (...but with added something) + My Opinion (highly recommended etc)
Those three pieces of information are usually enough to get across to people what kind of film it is so they can decide if they'd like it without resorting to obscure things such as genre (with so many cross-genre films out there a comparison to another film is probably better) and without giving too much away. If you want to read them go to my Lovefilm Profile. I'll aim to update regularly.
Wednesday 3rd September
New T-Shirt Shop Running!
In the last week I have renovated my t-shirt project somewhat from the banner of A T-Shirt Everyday and its great central idea but one that turned out to be a tough concept to maintain. It was also (as is often the case with my ideas) quite ambitious: not only a new t-shirt everyday but unique and hand-printed ones at that. It is now down to just a top 5 of fairly unique (only 10 of each produced) hand-printed tees which you can visit by following the link on the T-Shirts page. And as I envisiged on my last blog post it now looks like an integrated part of this site.
On top of this I have also put a selection of my better photos I took in Japan onto photobucket and linked to them for from Travel. Not quite so many as the China collection but they're all hi-res and free for whoever stumbles across them to download (as plenty of people seem to be doing via Google Images anyway) – embrace it I say.
In the meantime I've been making the absolute most of my Lovefilm account and I'm getting through a film a day at the mo. Recent recommendations: Overnight, Keane, Hallam Foe and In the Shadow of the Moon (whack those names into imdb to find out more). Ones I'd recommend you avoid: Paranoid Park and Beowulf.
Tuesday 19th August
Back in the UK
I have been back from my month-long trip to China and Japan for two weeks now and have just about sorted my photos from the first leg of the trip. To view the choice China shots head to the Travel page, where there are links through to the albums hosted on photobucket. I've also updated the Painting section with a small canvas I've just done, based on part of this journey.
In the next few weeks I will get down to sorting out my T-Shirt project. As due to my absense this whole site hasn't been updated in weeks. Despite what I thought was a great idea in having Unique One-Off T-Shirts (which it was), for feasibility's sake, it will now become a more integrated part of this website, where the t-shirts can be ordered as normal. So no frustrations about a design not being in your size or the colour you want. Otherwise in the meantime I have just finished off a programme for Carn to Cove in Cornwall, which isn't the most exciting work ever but might go online soon.
Monday 30th June
PFA Consulting Website
Friday was my last day at PFA Graphics and the last month saw me spending the large majority of my time designing and coding by far the biggest website I have created: the 50-odd page PFA Consulting site. The vast majority of it is complete but it isn't quite launched yet. However you can see a sneak peak of it to the left. It has a much bigger image-led scope than the current site, if you care to compare. I'm now moving onto bigger and better things, not least of which is travelling round China and Japan for a month. I'm looking forward to some very different inspirations from those places and the photos will be up in due course.
Sunday 22nd June
A New Brand
I have just completed a little logo job for an entrepreneurial new financial business venture, which can be seen to the left. Details about the whole thing are a bit of a secret at the moment but I will be generating more design work in the coming months as they are very pleased with the logo. In keeping with the financial sector I created a monogram combining the e and the r to create quite a symbolic form (almost like the @ icon). One of the other colour variations can be seen in use on the website holding page at everyrate.co.uk (nothing else there at the moment).
Wednesday 11th June
Work Updates
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been tinkering with this website on almost a daily basis – especially in the ‘Design’ section where there are now three more projects online: the PFA Graphics website; Matt Bradley’s logo; and the MTV competition sting. My t-shirt website has also had a slight tweak of name and branding, which can all be seen on my unique t-shirt site along with the latest designs I’ve added.
In other news I now have my visa to visit my brother for some travels out in China, which is coming up in 3 weeks – can’t wait for that adventure. I’m also going to be paying a visit to Japan and started learning some Japanese. I’ve been using Japanesepod101.com and I can’t recommend it enough as what I’m learning genuinely seems to be sticking…
Wednesday 28th May
My new sticky notes have arrived...
In keeping with the yellow square I have been using to brand myself (the only real link back to my previous website), I have got a load of sticky notes printed up with my details on. This is due to my love of the Post-It note in organising my work and life and as such they will be taking the role of my business cards. Of course as soon as they arrived I had to go around using them (see images to the left) to leave my mark. I like the idea of sticking them on windows to effectively 'brand' or take ownership of the view beyond.
Tuesday 27th May
London
I've made a decision on my next move and I'm moving to London. I am now actively looking for a job in the coming weeks. This brand new website is a part of my job hunt for this. Don't really mind where, just as long as they do some really interesting and creative work! Print, web or motion graphics, I geniuinely don't mind. They are all fascinating.
Sunday 25th May
The new website is here...
And you are on it! mattish.com has taken pretty much 48 hours of solid work over a very wet bank holiday but I have finally cracked this most put-off of jobs. I've hand-coded it from scratch too, putting into practice all the HTML and CSS skills I have recently been learning. It's not quite finished yet as there are a few adjustments and tweaks to be made but they will be ongoing over the next week. However it is a much more comprehensive personal site than my old 'mashed graphics' effort, with its confusing name and layout...
Monday 28th April
A T-Shirt Everyday
The new website powered by Shopify has gone live! It's all explained about on the T-Shirts section of this site and of course on the actual website itself. It replaces the temporary blog format it took orginally with the main advantage being you can actually click on a t-shirt and buy it there and then with a credit card! It's my first foray into building an online shop and Shopify have made it quite a pleasurable and simple one.
Unique Handprinted T-Shirts