After what’s been over 12-months work I finally launched the new Barnsley Hospital website 5 days ago:

For the full inside track on the launch check my post over at the Evolve blog which details some of the new features and what had to be cut in order to launch on time.

I’ve been working on this one for quite a while now, check it out over at The Evolve Blog.

Screenshot

Looks like Gmail is jumping on the recent Google design changes:

New Gmail header

Old Gmail header

About Time

These changes are actually pretty significant and its happening all over Google. And based on what I’ve read about how Google used to operate its design methods I find these changes both refreshing and fascinating, see:

I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that. I’ve grown tired of debating such minuscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle.

Douglas Bowman on Leaving Google, March 2009

A while ago I did a re-design of my personal website and drafted an illustrator to come up with the avatar image you see in the header. Now, the problem here is that the above avatar looks VERY SIMILAR to a freebie character file you can download on the Envato Tuts+ site causing it to be re-used over and over and over again in other peoples work.

Its not me

Since moving to the new avatar hardly a month goes by when someone doesn’t pick up on the similarities between the freebie avatar and the one I had commissioned. Case in point last week when a Mark Wilkinson posted on twitter that he had found my doppelgänger while browsing a CSS gallery:

Of course, I set Mark straight and went about my day but I’ve had a niggle in the back of my mind that this thing is starting to piss me off so let me try and explain….

My own fault

My avatar image was drawn by digital artist Scott Jackson who originally drew the freebie Envato file and also wrote the tutorial on its use. It was because of his previous work that I commissioned Scott to draw out my new avatar and I even asked for it to be BASED on the work he’d done for the Envato tutorial because I felt that with a  few modifications I could get something that looked a bit like me.

I think the original email to Scott went something like:

Do me an avatar (mascot) that looks like the one at Tuts+ but make him blonde with blue eyes and a v-neck sweater.

Hardly the most challenging brief, but it worked

By hiring Scott to do the work I knew I would get something a little similar to the Envato character because that’s what I wanted and I suppose I should have known that 100′s of other sites would adopt my avatars brother as their own mascot and lead to this confusion. Its a testament to Scott’s skills that a throwaway piece of work he did for an old client (Tuts+) has become so popular.

FYI Scott also did all of the illustration work on Wonder Themes.

Living with it

I like my avatar, I really do, so I’m sticking with it – even if at a fleeting glance it looks the SAME as the Tuts+ freebie that is being used all over the place.

And see, it does look like me:

That’s me on the right at a recent BarCamp

So if you see the famed freebie character (AKA LinkGuy) being used out there on the web don’t assume its me, it probably isn’t