Freelance Graphic Designer in Brighton, UK - Jack Hooker

Graphic Design by Central St Martins students

Jack — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 14:58:38 +0000

When I was working in Oxford Street recently I randomly discovered a pop-up-shop which had on display a variety of collectable items designed and carefully handcrafted by the second year graphic design students at Central St Martins. Here’s one piece I purchased because I liked the concept. It’s a pack of Marlboro cigarettes which are much more healthy than a regular pack because they’re so short.

The project was called 1/12 because the students were requested to make 12 items to investigate manufacture as part of the design process. Some of the other items were a bottle off pills – each one contained a positive statement, champaign flutes cast in concrete, some illustrated tattoo transfers and some illustrated picture books which I think were screen printed.

Interview with Computer Arts magazine

Jack — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 17:00:11 +0000

Less than a week after launching my new web site I got a call from Computer Arts magazine. They asked if I would like to be interviewed in their September 2011, self promotion issue, in the inspirational projects section. Good timing. Here’s the interview…

Standing out From the pack

“I’ve collected over 100 business cards over the past two years,” says graphic designer Jack Hooker. “When I look back at them, the people I remember most clearly are ones who’s cards are a little different.” Hooker applied this philosophy to his own self-promotion efforts, producing a Jack-style business card.

The idea was born during a session of cards: “My sister is a Casino Manager so there were always packs lying around the house,” he recalls. “I don’t know if the card alone has won me work but people usually remember my name and I get lots of great comments about the design. Plus I’ve been busy with work so it must have helped my self promotion. I plan to incorporate some tools of the trade into the design, such as a ruler, mouse, pencils and so on,” he adds.

Hooker created the Jack Pack when he left university. A fold-out pack with a small booklet inside, the self promotional project reveals some of the values he holds as a designer, including communication, ideas and originality.

“It would have been a bit overkill to give out The Jack Pack at networking events, so I created an illustrated business card instead,” he says.

Using alternative, free fonts on the web

Jack — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 14:25:35 +0000

There are many different ways to use non standard web fonts in web pages. I’ve tried a lot of these ways in the past and have found that some techniques are better than others. Here’s one way of going about using alternative free fonts in a simple step by step guide. I hope this post will help others by demystifying the process.

To complete these steps you’ll need an understanding of HTML and CSS and have a site already set up with some

tags and a separate .css file for the layout of your site.

Font squirrel

For this example we’re going to change all the h1 elements to League Gothic.

Go to http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface
Find League Gothic and click ‘Get Kit’
Open the .zip file and rename it ‘type’
Place it in the root directory of your website
Find the file stylesheet.css (in the file you just renamed ‘type’)
Copy the code from this file into your main .css file
In this css you just copied, make sure all the paths to the fonts are correct by adding /type/ just before all the lines which read League_Gothic-webfont. For example: src: url('/type/League_Gothic-webfont.eot');
Now in your main css file type h1 {font: 'LeagueGothicRegular'}

Bingo. Now all your

elements are displayed in League Gothic.

Installing MAMP and WordPress on a Mac

Jack — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 15:05:35 +0000

My internet went down for a few days recently. I needed to find a way to work on some WordPress projects locally without internet connection. Here’s how I did it.

Download and install MAMP from here www.mamp.info and WordPress from here wordpress.org
On your Hard Drive Go to /Applications/MAMP/htdocs and unpack the WordPress.zip folder in here
Go to /Applications/MAMP and Install the dashboard widget by clicking on MAMP
On the Mac widget you just installed click on the button that reads ‘Open start page’ which will take you to http://localhost:8888/MAMP/
On this page find the line: The MySQL Database can be administrated with phpMyAdmin – click on this link
Create a new database and call it ‘test-site-1′ for example
On your hard drive find /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/test-site-1/wp-config-sample.php and rename it wp-config.php
Open this wp-config.php file and change the settings to:
define('DB_NAME', 'test-site-1'); define('DB_USER', 'root'); define('DB_PASSWORD', 'root'); define('DB_HOST', 'localhost:8889');
Go to http://localhost:8888/wordpress/
You’ll be prompted to enter the details of your WordPress site

Hey presto. You’re all set up to work on a local WordPress install.

Credits

Thanks to Chris Coyer for posting this #86 First Moments with MAMP
Michael Doig for posting this Installing WordPress Locally Using MAMP
and to Nick La for posting this Installing WordPress Locally

HTML5 For Web Designers by Jeremy Keith

Jack — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 12:00:08 +0000

Most regular human beings have no concern about what goes on behind a web page. Talk to them about HTML5 and their eyes will glaze over in a matter of seconds. I can understand, I have the same reaction when people talk about women’s clothes shopping or medieval Dutch poetry.

As a web designer with a background in art and design I get really obsessive about the way things work, how they look, how easy it is to use them and what kind of process happened to get a great outcome.

To me, HTML5 isn’t the most exciting topic in the world, but it’s a necessary part of the job as a designer and front end web developer. We should know the difference between a class and an ID selector in the same way a carpenter should know a Dovetail from a Birdsmouth joint.

Jeremy Keith does a great job in this book by breaking down 900 pages of dense, heavy going HTML5 spec into 85 pages of enjoyable, easy to read content.

I purchased the book from Amazon. On the day I received it I saw the author walk past while I was on my lunch break in Brighton. I took the opportunity to stop him to get the book signed. I think he was quite surprised because he put it in his journal here: http://adactio.com/journal/1691/.