I also get this feeling with 24, they just want to continue the success and so have dragged out the story line just a bit too long. One thing I do admire from these US dramas is the quality, I think they have really raised the bar on production quality for TV. Shows like Lost, 24, Heroes, Fringe and Flashforward all have a really high standard of production. This really makes the stories so much more believable and immersive. In the UK the best channel for Drama’s like these has to be Sky1 and they show most of the good US dramas like Lost, 24, Bones, Fringe and Lie to Me.

And I have to say I am quite a fan the new logo, it is rather clever in my opinion. The D and W form the shape of the police box that Doctor Who is well known for. Not only that but the typography is rather nice too, it has a more mechanical appearance to it which I think suits Doctor Who.

The old site was quite image heavy and as you can image was therefore covered in compression artifacts. The new site takes advantage of all the new web standards by having transparencies and some really well though out use of typography. The new site has a very grid like layout and the whole site seems to have a better quality to it.

While mentioning the new site on Twitter Jonathan Davies @ed me saying:

@rmaspero Don’t you find the font size a little large and the lack of continuity between pages odd (on the DW site)?

But I find the larger font size helps focus on the content and tends to offer a better hierarchy system for titles and sub titles. I also feel there is continuity between the pages as similar design elements are used all over the place. The site seems to have been made up of a set of basic bricks which to me makes it feel consistent, but to others I can see how they ever changing arrangement and size of the bricks could make if feel incoherent.

Choosing gifts for a “Geek” can be hard work, so we tend to actually tell our family what to buy and where from. But that doesn’t mean we still don’t have problems choosing what we really want for christmas ourselves. I am going to try and help by scouring the internet for gifts to delight all geeks around the world. My list contains some obscure but cool gifts and some more obvious ones.

1. The Book Arc – this is a laptop stand similar to the mStand and Griffin Elevator, but this holds your laptop sideways leaving you more desk space.
2. Films – Either blu-ray or DVD’s are great ideas, my personal favourite for this year would be Transformers.
3. A Seagate 1TB USB hard drive – In general any hard drive is great for christmas as the size of our personal data is forever growing.
4. Opteka .35x Fisheye – although not a great fisheye it is said to be great for the price point and ideal for new photographers wanting try a fisheye out with splashing all the cash.
5. Airzooka – this marvellous childish toy shoots air at who ever you aim it at, totally ideal for family gatherings.
6. Incase Laptop sleeve – sleeves are much smaller than laptop bags, and these incases ones look great with a plain design.
7. XMI X-mini II Mini Speaker – These mini speakers put out some serious sound for their size and after getting one for my birthday would recommend them to anyone.
8. TV Box sets – any TV series you love tends to be a great present.

Hope this helps.

For my A-levels I am taking Maths, Physics, Economics and DT, they all sort of point to engineering but that is not really something I want to do, but we will see. People often think that I would have a lot of work with those subject, but I find I don’t as I am never really set essays which makes the work easier to deal with.

My birthday is in just a few days and I thought I would share with you what I want for my Birthday.

• Eye TV DTT
• Flickr Pro Account
• XMI X-mini II Mini Speaker
• Nikon D90
• Windows 7 (when released)

But the most exciting thing to happen this week is the announcements that in the UK the iPhone will be available on Orange and Vodafone as well as O2. So hopefully, depending on pricing I will be able to get an iPhone on Vodafone. I think that with 3 vendors selling it we might see some aggressive pricing and that is better for us.

For the past two weeks I have been on holiday. We spent the first week in Sri Lanka and the second on an island in the Maldives called Ohuveli. During the first week we toured Sri Lanka visiting tea factories, botanical gardens and did even some white water rafting. Then we flew on to Male the capital of the Maldives, from there we took a 45 minute boat ride, but due to the fact we smashed into a corral reef at 1 in the morning and destroyed the engines of the boat it took us an extra hour. Finally we reached the island where we received special treatment for the mishap.

During my time away I had the perfect opportunity to test the ruggedness of the Canon PowerShot D10 we purchased for the trip, but most importantly I was able to really test its underwater feature set because of the wide variety of water based activities there are in the Maldives. In the Maldives it is hard to do anything that does not included getting wet due to the simple fact you are on an island surrounded by water.

On Holiday we took 6 Cameras but 3 of the cameras acted as our primary cameras. My Nikon D50 was one of the most used, then there was the Canon PowerShot D10 which we used mostly in the Maldives for all sorts of water based activities and finally there was my step mums which was used as the basic point and shoot. We could have used the Canon D10 as a point and shoot but it is a bit bulky to go in a pocket. After importing all the cameras in to Aperture I have nearly 600 photos. I created a set of smart albums to divide the photos by day and by which camera they were taken with, this helps me work when and by who they were taken making organization much easier.

I arrived back at 11 o’clock in the evening of the 26th to discover that Snow Leopard has been given a release date of the 28th. Being a giant Apple fan boy I instantly went to Apple.com and bought Snow Leopard without even hesitating (which is odd as I am not very impulsive). I am preparing for Snow Leopard by clearing my spear hard drive so I can do a back up with SuperDuper. I am planning on doing an erase and install to help clear out my machine, but it will require a lot of work and time in order to get back to a fully function computer.

Happy New Year to everyone, and I hope it is a good one. I spent my New Years Eve up in London watching the fireworks, I took some photos and will be putting them on flickr soon. I decided that instead of writing two separate post about 2008 and 2009 I would write one, talking about what I hope to achieved in 2009 and have achieved in 2008.

Web Design

Throughout 2008 I have discovered a new passion for web design, and have learnt some great skills such as CSS and Javascript. I have put all this into practice by making wordpress themes; one of which is free to download and use, Straight Corner. I have also redesigned my website and rewritten it from the ground up. In 2009 I hope to learn some PHP and further my knowledge of Javascript. A great resource I have started to learn from is CSS-Tricks.com, I would recommend you check it out.

Photography

Last year (2008) I bought my first lens and tried out the world of HDR. I also bought Aperture to manage and edit my photos in. I took over 1431 photo’s in 2008 and run the first RMPC. This year I hope to re-run RMPC but this time bigger and better as well as take over 2500 photos.

rmaspero.com

rmaspero.com has had its first birthday and has become more of a personal blog for me rather than a tech blog. I hope to continue writing on a weekly basis but as I near my GCSE’s I fear I will not have time.

Every year as Christmas approaches I am always asked by relatives what do you want for christmas? For me and I think most Geeks it is a hard question, as no one ever seems to know what a Geek want for christmas. So to help solve this problem I have decided to post my christmas list and then a list of some other ideas.

My List

• Nikon AF 50mm F/1.8 D Lens
• Nikon D90
• USB cell batteries
• Hancock DVD
• iHome IH8
• Heroes Season 2 DVD

Ideas

• Photoshop CS4
• iTunes Gift card
• Aperture
• CSSEdit
• Hard Drive for backup
• Textmate

I hope these are some helpful suggestion, I did a similar post last year which you can read here. If you are into photography Charlie Styr did a great post on some photography ideas on theapblog. If you have any suggestion please do share.

1st James Bayliss

2nd Stanley Ching

3rd Nicholas Fairclough

Well done to you guys for winning and some great photography there so keep it up.

The runners up are Lynette Chung, Timothy Brumm and Chris Leigh, well done to you guys as well.

Next Year

As RMPC is annual I have already began scheming for next years edition, with some cool new ideas of how to do things and make it more exciting with more content. I will also be working on a new site design so on the 15th November I will be taking down the site so this is your last chance to see the entries.

If you have any suggestion as to what I should add leave a comment or email me.

Initial Ideas

For my initial ideas I write down 3 or 4 keywords that I would associate with the company and what they do. I then uses these Keywords to create a base for the logo and it also help me evaluate if the logo sends the right message. I learnt this from a graphics designer Andy Higgs he has a great keynote on logo creation.

Development

The next step is to review the logos and choose my favorites or the best fitting. Then see if I can add to them or vary them, possibly from something that worked in other logo ideas. I sketch these ideas out and review them again.

Final Idea

I then select the best idea from the pack and digitize it. I play with font placement and colour combinations. For this logo I started with pure red, blue and green as the colours for the waves because they are colours used to create images in projectors and TV’s. I then tried a few modifications of more modern and softer colours.

After this the final idea emerges to be the best variation.

The business card

For the first step I created a few shape and layout variation and narrow it down creating modification where necessary much like the logo process. A great site for inspired business cards is businesscard24.com.

Conclusion

I hope you learnt something about how to design logos and business cards. If you have any suggestion for changes to the logo I would love to hear them and if you have any suggestion on how to improve my process I am open.