This is the holding page I designed for JustGo Music which has just gone live. The CSS isn’t mine, and was done without my sign-off, so it’s not been picked to death for detail ; )

A logo for a Valentine’s Day feature on Last.fm. I’m not very romantic and chintz makes me nauseous, so I wanted to avoid the cliches on this logo. As this was for a music site, I felt the Ziggy Stardust lightning bolt was a better representation of love than the typical Clintons Cards heart shape. I knew I’d found the right solution when someone commented “it looks like a heavy metal band logo!”.

The font is set in Eagle Black. The colour came about by chance… When you add a colour overlay to a layer in Adobe Photoshop, the application default colour it always applies is #ef4836 (M: 87% Y:84). I’ve always like that colour and wanted an excuse to use it.

Last.fm Best of 2011

I’ve been working on a refresh of the “Charts” section of the Last.fm site, including a new filtering options for “Hype”, “Top Artists” and “Top Loved Track”. This first launch only includes filtering by date, a later release will include “genre” and “location” filters, so that you’ll be able to can see the best “electronic” music or “black death metal” in your home town. Have a play at last.fm

Last.fm artist charts wireframes and user flows

Nice to see my newsletter design, one of the first things I did for Time out, is still going strong aftr 4 years.

I’ve been checking the reviews for the Time Out Travel Guide apps I worked on last year. It’s good to think of someone using a product you’ve designed and even better that it’s helping them have a good holiday. Dubrovnik, London, New York, Paris, & Zagreb

iTunes reviews

Berlin – Take full advantage
This is a great app and successfully navigated us to some top spots in Berlin over Easter. Currently free, which is an absolute gift – take full advantage. By Sazzle_81

Paris – Discovered a new Paris
I have been to Paris hundreds of times and have even lived there, but I discovered a completely new side to it this weekend through this app. We followed the editor’s picks and used the what’s nearby part of the app and we had the best weekend ever! Next time I will plan more and use the bookmarks to organise each day. No Improvements necessary. By Dysynni

Berlin – Absolutely essential
We used this app around 10 times a day instead of getting charged for data raoming and it was brilliant. I would have paid for this so can’t believe it’s free. If you’re travelling to Berlin, why haven’t you downloaded it already!!! By Tom Hughes

Barcelona – Absolutley indispensible…
Almost flawless in execution, this app is all you need if you turn up to Barcelona without a guide book or any clue what to do.

We spent 6 days there and filled them with things we found on here. The user interface is superb, the ability to bookmark and then view on the map was genius, and all without using any data allowance.

Only occasionally was the GPS slightly off and one or two places weren’t quite where the map thought they were, but overall it’s the best and most useful city guide app that I’ve ever used. By Doug Bryson

New York – Amazing
It made my trip to New York much easier when wandering around. Offline map, great restaurant recommendations, nice photos. I am totally getting the London and Paris guides. Please make a Lisbon one. By syt8

“Inspired by Graham’s logo design, we have created a small heart meringue” Marie-Laure Preynat – Director at Easy Gourmet Ltd.

My part in the project was to: create a set of wireframes, work out the userflows, provide UI and marketing assets, and follow up with QA and bug testing.

Features

• Festival compatibility – find the best fesitval for you based on the artists you listen to.
• Recommended line-up – picks out the artists you listen to most in each festival.
• Sort by location – people travel for festivals, your ideal festival may be on another continent!
• My List – plan your summer festival season and save festivals you’re interested in
• Friends – see all the festivals your friends are attending.

Read more about it on the Last.fm blog

Comments from around the web

With the addition of their new Festivals app, 5 years of Last.fm data just became even more useful for me bit.ly/ettmpZ – @MattHurst

Last.fm Launches Amazing New Festivals App — t.co/egA2wjr #music – @Acecentric

Awesome new #lastfm smartphone application recommends music festivals according to your musical preferences t.co/EcleOJF – @Florianmaganza

Last.fm aims to making choosing which to attend easier with its new Festival application – Mashable

A new logo for catering brand “Easy Gourmet” for their new deli counter opening soon in Balham, South London.

Easy Gourmet Catering’s new CMS site is live. I designed and developed the site, as well as creating a new logo and brand. Still some holes in the content, but it’s good to get it live to let Google start indexing.

I started what I though would be the slow process of switching the DNS with the current host (the mammothlyg expensive Netbenefit) only to find things happened super quick. Then had to migrate 8 pop email accounts and set up the necessary forwarding the client was using – which meant learning how to migrate pop email FAST! Always a good way to learn
The design and build of the site took 2 months and was completed in January, however putting the content has taken much longer. Easy Gourmet had great help from my friend Michael, who is an excellent editor and travel writer. However, this kind of content is quite personal to the business and needed a lot of involvement and consultation with the client, Marie, and running a successful catering company keeps her very busy.

Better SEO

The most exciting part of this project is the SEO opportunity. The old site was poorly structured and not at all optimised. I did an audit of the 40 most likely customer search queries in Google for page rank (e.g. Wedding caterer”, “Catering London”, “wedding reception catering”). I found only the exact company name “Easy Gourmet Catering” returned a page 1 listing, and that was compromised by a competitor with a similar name in the second position. For all the other search terms there was no listing at all. The new CMS structure and some basic copy alone should give this site a decent presence in search results, but with Michael’s rich copy and some “white hat” optimisation tricks of mine, I think this site will start to be SEO competitive. Google generally takes between 7-14 days to re-index a change on a site; there is an unconfirmed theory that Google is slow to react because it “sandboxes” changes.

Easy Gourmet Catering is a successful business now, even without the aid of natural search listings, woth this new site it should explode! If, that is, people really choose caterers from the web, or if it’s more of a word-of-mouth reputation based business.