April Update

What a fast month! It’s hard to believe it’s already the end of April. I haven’t been working on too many projects this month, but the ones I have been working on were pretty important.

The biggest project this month has been the next update to my iPod UI project: adwaitapod. This has been a major undertaking, rewriting the entire thing from scratch. But it’s been worthwhile. The massive gains made with compression, efficiency and so on have made enough room to add a wide range of new features and still come in smaller than the last version of adwaitapod. I took the chance to take a proper design-orientated approach, rather than simply copying the GNOME desktop design, I used their principles to interpret the user experience of an iPod and make it as user friendly as possible. I’m immensely happy with the results so far. The last few things to do involve writing documentation and creating some promo materials, which I’ve commissioned a friend to help with. All things going well, adwaitapod 3.0 should be out next month!

I also completed my first paid work this month! I reached out to Sam on fedi after they made a post looking for a designer to make a logo for their project Beyrl. I was mostly interested in using it as a chance to gain experience working with a client and designing icons/branding, but we were both very happy with the results! I’ll put together a proper page for this project after I deliver the end product.

A major milestone this month was the submission of my final college portfolio. I’m still looking to complete my degree in Design, so hopefully by this September I’ll be back in college again.

Lastly, some small changes and updates to the site this month. The colourscheme was changed slightly to be less yellow, and improve reading contrast. I also updated the Bee Encyclopedia with the newly captured Early Mining Bee, we’re in peak bee season right now so I’m hoping to capture some more species that I haven’t managed to yet!

Things have been slowing down (thankfully) but hopefully sometime next month I’ll begin my migration over to a better SSG, I also have a few websites to design and build for friends over the summer that I’m very much looking forward to! Till next month - Dook.