Jaz Design

I love inspirational images. Love. I read a lot of blogs and galleries every morning (slowly being documented here!) and figured I needed a place to put all of my favourite images that I find. If you’re interested in a bit of daily inspiration, but not an overwhelming amount, check out my tumblr! I am using a default theme, time is short right now.

I’ve also added a tumblr widget on the right here, and a flickr one (when I redevelop my site I’ll find a better one!)

ETA: I’ve actually stopped using tumblr. The servers are constantly down, and it’s a lot of effort to add things to it. I’ve started using vi.sualize.us because it offers a similar functionality to Delicious, but for saving and sharing images! View my visualized here!

As for the tumblr widget, I’m using it to display my flickr photos for now because I couldn’t find a flickr widget I liked

Something I didn’t learn whilst at university was the importance of being a part of the design community. Reading and commenting on blogs, browsing galleries, doing tutorials – unfortunately for me I missed out on this, until I graduated. I don’t remember quite how I discovered the rich world of design online, I’m just happy I did. I advise anyone and everyone to read at least one thing a day, just one thing! Stay up to date with trends (and learn when to avoid them), share and learn about new techniques, find out how things are affecting the industry – the opportunities are endless. The galleries offer inspiration and opportunities to promote your work… I don’t think it can be denied that at least having a small amount of awareness of what’s going on is important.

These are a selection of the blogs that I have stored in my Google Reader that I check in on every day. I hope you find something you like after the jump!

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On Saturday the 1st August some friends and I went along to the James May Lego House build at Denbies Wine Estate in Dorking. I mean, how could we not go? James May is attempting to build a life sized house out of Lego for his Toy Stories series. How many people have wanted to do that? I know I have.

After queueing for three and a half hours, we unfortunately did not get to play with any Lego. We were dedicated to our cause though, despite being told many times we were in the “danger zone” and felt that the organisers did their best – 2000+ people showed up for the 600 places.

You can see a selection of my photos from the day here. There’s some cute pictures of kids with Lego and James here on the Mail website.

More details about James May’s Toy Stories.

If you were one of the ones who queued, regardless of if you got in or not, there’s a Facebook group for you.

I’ll post if I hear of any more news on what build stage it’s at. We’re hoping to go back and view it in all it’s glory!

Before I got my apartment I knew I wanted a balcony. I didn’t know why, I dislike going outdoors much, there’s always a risk of spiders, or bees, or being active. I think I knew that living in a town centre was going to wear on me, despite my dislike of going outdoors often I love nature. When I was living in Portsmouth the lack of green and trees used to drive me bonkers.

The view from my balcony, with a very very long lens. You wouldn't know I was in a busy commuter town centre would you?

As it is, our apartment just overlooks the central park, so I see trees from my balcony, and the hills during winter (see photo). There’s still flats directly opposite, but the nature’s there. And, we have a balcony. I was lucky enough to be given some plants, some grown from seed and so all very young. This terrified me somewhat, but I was amazed at how much I enjoy looking after them. I’m not doing brilliantly, but I really enjoy going out to the balcony, watering the plants, checking them, not knowing what to do when I find something wrong… ahem.

If you’re living in a small apartment, don’t have a garden etc I highly recommend just getting one little plant, herbs will gladly live on your windowsil and you can use them! I find tending to my plants very grounding and enjoyable, and I know very little about it.

More pictures of my little plant family, and Fuzz Lightyear (because he’s amazing) after the jump! To note, some of the photos are also on my flickr and you can visit them by clicking on them!

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I’ve been on a flickr uploading spree. This is pretty much my year in pictures thus far (up until May at least). I’m thinking of having a flickr cul actually, there’s a lot of pictures on there which I don’t think represent my best. I’m also beginning to accept that I’m not on the ball at all for Project 365 this year!

I’ve been testing a lot of our sites in IE8 the past couple of days. Today I noticed that the little broken page icon that appears next to the address bar was missing from the IE8 welcome page. Now I found this to be curious as as far as I’m aware (I could be wrong here, let me know if so!) the only thing that prevents that from appearing is if you’re already running in IE7 emulation mode. I checked out their code with the new Developer Tools (virtually Firebug, but I’m not complaining). Lo and behold, the Welcome to IE8 page has the “emulate IE7″ meta tag!

I thought I’d check out Microsoft’s actual website… (you can view the full screenshot here)

Visit the website to see for yourself.

This boggles my mind! Standards for everyone eh?

Inspired by something someone said at work about photographing everything you eat I’ve decided to keep a food diary in this way (starting with a week and seeing how it goes). I feel that this will help me to realise just how much crap I’m eating, and make me think twice before having that second or third cookie.

We also likened it to what they do in the weightloss TV shows, where they take all the food a person has eaten in a week and dump it on a table. I imagine looking through my photographs is going to be something like that!

My CC blog for yesterday is up here: http://caloriecount.about.com/users/jaz_desig n/307162.html

I don’t know how successful it will be, but it can’t hurt. More awareness of what one is eating can only be a good thing. I know I tend to mindlessly eat, not enjoy my food and not realise how much I’ve actually eaten. Seeing is believing they say!

Just before Easter the Mister and I spent a week in Mallorca. It was beautiful, a fantastic chance to relax and take lots and lots of pictures and try the beautiful Mahon cheese. There’s an album of these pictures on my flickr! There’s also an album of sandcastle pics on facebook.

In other photography news, I finally finished my black and white film I had in my SLR and now have those to upload when I get a minute (mostly photos from The Great Snow and a day in Brighton). I’m also planning to sit down and sort out my Project 366 photos (though I think this year didn’t start out so well with that as last year).

Week 1. Click to full view!

I love post-its. I use them whenever I can and stick them everywhere! I thought I might try something, really out of curiosity for me, and keep my post-its each week. Some things here might be clues as to what’s on the horizon.

I have to say, there’s nothing I love more on a Sunday than a big mug of tea and PostSecret. Yes it’s been around a while, I’m late to the party. I love art, and I love psychology. PostSecret is these combined, we say art is an expression of a feeling or emotion, these postcards really are just that. Each beautiful in their own way, some very depressing, some uplifting. It’s quite an emotional rollercoaster for a Sunday morning, but I still love it (plus the tea ballances out the really bad stuff, as we all know, a cup of tea is the answer to everything).

For Valentines the Mister got me one of the books. Yes there are more secrets than you could ever want to read on the website, but I still love books, and I love this book. It’s a coffee table book really, one you can go back to. Some artistic inspiration, some things to ponder. If you love the website and it’s message, you’ll love the book. Click here to find out more.