Colin Grist - Website Designer, Developer and General Rambler

Olloclip

After being way overly impressed with my friends Olloclip 3-in-one photo lens for the iPhone I went and bought my own! Sadly it wasn’t as cheap as I was hoping at $69.99 and then having to pay £17.00 in tax was a bit of a kick in the nuts, but I was glad to finally

Icons, Icons, Icons…

No, not the celebrity type, the graphical type! – Yes, the new, highly anticipated iconography book by the very talented Jon Hicks has been released and I was there as soon as the book hit Five Simple Steps ready for ordering! At almost £40 (with postage) The Icon Handbook certainly isn’t cheap but according to

Tattoo

So after probably three years of deciding whether I wanted one or not, I finally got ‘inked’ yesterday! The design I decided to go with in the end was to represent the proposal of marriage, which I made on my recent Caribbean Cruise with my girlfriend and her family. I had a good idea of

Brave

The new film from Disney • Pixar is looking pretty, pretty sweet.

Google Chrome Text Opacity

Came across a very strange bug today when checking out a website in Google Chrome. White copy on a black background was not appearing, I could select the text and could also see it in Chrome’s Element Inspector. I changed the color to ‘yellow’ from ‘#fff’ in the Inspector and suddenly the copy appeared but

Caribbean

Phew, I’m back from the best holiday of my life – a two week Caribbean cruise! On our Royal Caribbean cruise we stopped at some wonderful spots such as Mexico, Jamaica, The Cayman Islands and Haiti. Whilst we were out there I surprised my girlfriend of 8 years and popped the question! Thankfully she said

Gowalla 4.0

Off the back of my original post about Gowalla, the team there have now released an updated version of the app and it’s absolutely beautiful to look at! The update is stunning from a design perspective especially that loading animation when refreshing your lists, however I do feel the app itself has taken a direction

Portamento

I’ve been a big fan of The Drums, ever since I saw them support Florence and the Machine a few years ago, their debut album ‘The Drums’ was also brilliant and was definitely my album of the summer that year… Now their second album ‘Portamento’ has just been released and well – it’s just as

Xbox Fall Dashboard Update

As reported by Games Radar, the fall update for the Xbox Dashboard is upon us, and I have to say, it’s looking rather beautiful. It features a much cleaner design and is apparently much quicker than the previous dash (thank God!), I’m really liking the look of it and it seems to fall much more

Must… resist…

…the urge to somehow get ahold of this fully functional Pip-Boy 3000 from the Fallout video game series, There has been versions of this created before, however the screen is normally simply a sticker, this however has a fully realised Android App built in that replicates the in-game menus – brilliant! Screenshot from Fallout 3

Games I loved and nobody else seemed to…

I noticed something about myself recently; that some of my favourite video games of all time are also some of the most disliked games by reviewers and other games over the years! It’s a shame really, those great memories I had in some games, wasn’t experienced by a lot of others due to bad reviews.

Now this guy…

…this guy (Madeon) is awesome, also check out the music video for this track with some rather good dancing here.

The Manual

The Manual, a new journal that takes a fresh look at design on the web is a project that started on Kickstarter by Build Conference organiser Andy McMillan. I backed his idea for a new snazzy book with interviews from popular artists from around the world around 5 months ago, and now the book finally

Gowalla?

Well I’m trying and I’m trying but I’m just not ‘getting’ Gowalla. Gowalla is a location-based iPhone/Android app that allows you to ‘check in’ wherever you go; its successful, especially in the US where it has thousands, maybe millions of users. You unlock pin badges for meeting certain types of challenges such as ‘check in

The Duel

I recently borrowed a blu-ray called Halo: Legends from a good friend of mine, Legends is seven anime stories based on the world of the video game series Halo. Overall it was pretty good, some really nice animation and some good stories to tell, but my personal favourite has to be The Duel, which chronicles