Blog of website & interface designer, Darran Morris.

I wanted something a bit cooler for my iPhone wallpaper so ran this up this morning. I love dark backgrounds on the phone with just minimal little details. I also have this thing for skulls. Look, I don’t know why, they just look cool.

So here you go, might as well share this with you lot. 3G and Retina display sizes included.  Enjoy :)

Just started using Modx Revolution on a project and it is awesome. Incredible work, and it looks like 2.08 is just out too so I’ll have to get my greasy paws on that.

I had a few issues moving Modx to a new server today. There’s an excellent article on the Modx help site that tells you almost everything you need to know.

If you’re just zipping up your Modx site or copying it and can’t maintain permissions for one reason or another, this can lead to weird problems such as the manager login page not displaying.

So make sure you make the following directories writable by the webserver:

assets/components/
assets/images/
core/cache
core/components/
core/export/
core/packages/

This is just from my experience, so if all these are not necessary, or if I’m missing something, just let me know and I’ll update this post.

Got some squeaky clean new design work up on app-bits.com, go over there and take a look. Been about time I did some updates around here. Each one was a really interesting project, here’s a little more info on some of them.

Pocket Wine has a really clever way of introducing new wines by categorising them in terms of style, then bringing you down a road of discovery. I worked closely with Mike from Wine Paradigm (I designed the site too incidentally!), to design a user interface that represented the information hierarchy in an intuitive way. The colour coding and icon system, keep you in touch with where you are consistently throughout the app.

Mobimaths is an initiative between the NDRC, Trinity College Dublin and GoKnow Inc. It is a series of mobile apps that help school kids get to grips with basic mathematical concepts in an interactive way. Each app was designed to look like a funky and new device which the students use to complete small projects such as measuring angles, distance, working with fractions and more.

Daily Word Search is a cool little word search game that has new word searches every day. Great little app and put together really well.

I have been a bit busy lately. So I sneaked one site up without even letting you know.

Origin Technologies are a programming company in Dublin. They hired me to do a rebrand and create a slick new site for them. Take a look, its over at origintech.ie.

Next up: Science Picture Company. These guys create amazing quality 3D scientific stock imagery. I did branding, web design and HTML/css for their new website. Check it out - Science Picture Company.

Here’s a new site from Poly, it’s called VLAB.

VLAB is an immersive 3-D environment created by projecting onto four screens, everything given that extra dimension through the use of a trendy pair of spectacles.

The homepage takes those awesome red-green cardboard glasses we probably all used to varying effect back in the day. The textures give a tech feel to the site and of course plenty of whitespace to give that airy feeling.

As usual, the site uses the latest and greatest Modx CMS which allows @fredherrera in IADT to keep everything up to date.

So head over and take a gander. I’m pleased with this one!

Sometimes you just have to spend your long weekend working on something because there is no other time to do it! Hence was begotten the new, rather slight, Poly website. Awesome.

Its been difficult these days to find time to put up my new work. I realised that one of the problems was that I had to write three paragraphs on the job I had just done, and I just couldn’t find the time!

Hope you like the new site. Let me know if any creases still need ironing.

Oh and more new work coming real soon.

Finished this insane but awesome site for a bunch of mad people early this year. If ever a country needed to take a lighter look at life, its Ireland at the moment and these guys definitely have their finger on the pulse, creating new hilarious satire every week.

It was an incredibly interesting site to work on. I had never worked on a magazine or newspaper type site before and they have a unique set of challenges for the designer. I will write a bit more on how we worked to produce the site later on. Right now have the head stuck in several other big projects!

Just before Christmas we finished the Affordable Home Solicitors website for Lawplus.

The site is clean, clear and presents the information in an easy to digest manner. Photography and imagery give a friendly approachable feel to the site.

Read more in our work section or visit the website. Enjoy!

So, it’s been a little quiet on the blog front lately, but we have been very busy. Besides working on a big project at the moment, (more to come on this later!), we also just moved office.

We’re very excited about the move. You can now find us in the bustling Temple Bar district. We are in the Temple Bar Cultural Trust building on East Essex Street. Its a lovely old brick building, but its bright and modern inside. Temple Bar makes a big change from the quieter Dundrum, and it really gets us closer to the action.

Hit a weird IE snag lately. It turns out that if you use an image input type in a form, Internet Explorer 6 and 7 mysteriously send back the x and y coordinates of where you clicked on the button!

Not only this, but if you try to read these values in afterwards, it is difficult at best. In fact, we couldn’t work out any way to actually read them in. 

After a bit of searching around, it turns out that the best way to deal with this, is to style normal submit buttons so that they look like image inputs instead. 

Something like this seems to be the best workaround:

input#my_button {
background:url(../pathto/images/my_button_bg.gif) no-repeat top left;
border:0;
}

That’s what we have for now but we’ll be looking around for other solutions.