Scopa Caffe Cucina and Duke Carvells. Scopa, great traditional pizza, legend Italian hot chocolate – cornerstone of a vibrant Cuba St community. Brothers Leonardo and Lorenzo Bresolin arrived on site May 2006 and together with their father, Remiro, raised Scopa to become a favourite with Wellingtonians and visitors alike. And Duke Carvells, the boutique tappers bar in Swan Lane, Wellington, was opened in late 2008. After the success of Scopa, the Bresolin boys struck gold in a 2911 brick building, deep in the Cuba Quarter. Cuisine says “Duke Carvell’s has the air of a shabby, slightly suspect, gentlemen’s club…” The boys at Catch were asked to design and build two sites that caught the vibrancy and colourful atmosphere that’s made Scopa and ‘Dukes’ two of Wellington’s most popular restaurants! Watch this space for more to come…

Salient. Nominated for a 2009 Qantas Media Award, the Salient website is the online companion to the weekly magazine of the Victoria University of Wellington Students’ Association. This recent release being the third in a long-standing relationship between Catch and Salient. The best yet… we think.

Beacon Pathway Ltd. a collaborative research consortium working to find affordable ways to make New Zealand homes more resource-efficient, cheaper to run, healthier to live in – and kinder to our environment. With design from DNA, Beacon was a complex challenge with multiple layers of content, permission levels and general IA challenges. Catch Design was contracted to build the back-end, which included all xHTML/CSS templates and development using Expression Engine.

Tax Management New Zealand. As the innovators of tax pooling in New Zealand, Tax Management New Zealand make provisional tax payments easier for New Zealand businesses. Their old website was drastically out-of-date and in need of an overhaul. Catch Design was approached to re-design their public-facing website in August 2008, as well as their entire application for accountants and businesses. With a desire to further enhance their Google rankings and public face, TMNZ asked Catch Design to again re-think the site structure and design.

Hurricanes. The Official Website of the 2009 Rebel Sport Super 14 Hurricanes, Team Catch pulled out a lot of late nights and early mornings to overhaul, design and build the new Hurricanes site in a matter of weeks.

And a few others that went live in 2009:

• Creative Peoples Centre
• All Saints Church
• Motu
• It Rockstar (CSS/HTML and Development only)

On Design View, Andy Rutledge has an article titled The Employable Web Designer. Most of it is pretty reasonable, but he says some things towards the bottom that irked me a bit.

It is this paragraph in particular that annoys me:

“As an aside, you may find that there are plenty of job listings where the job requirements are described as, “must be expert with Photoshop and Illustrator…” or something long those lines. Ignore those job listings; they’re placed by inept and sick companies looking for decorators, not designers. Take a job with a company asking for a Photoshop expert and I promise you’ll never be allowed to engage in design.”

As someone who does know Photoshop pretty well, and is pretty sure that all the jobs he has done required Photoshop skills – and were advertised as such – and none of those companies have been “inept” or “sick”, this just grates on me. Perhaps I’m being a bit precious. Perhaps I don’t like being told that my skills are not required, or that I’m doing decorating, not designing.

I also don’t like this remark: “Anyone can learn to use Fireworks or Dreamweaver in an hour or less”. Maybe there’s learning to use, and then there’s being really good at using. I notice he didn’t mention Photoshop as something that “anyone can learn… in an hour or less”.

So, he got my back up, he baited me good and proper. The question is, was it intentional and planned, or is he just a blogger whom I disagree with on occasion?

Here at Catch we certainly don’t skip Photoshop, and most of the reasons why are covered in Jeff Croft’s post – possibly the main one being that we provide polished visuals for clients that they approve before we build it as HTML/CSS.

The inevitable Fireworks vs Photoshop debate comes up of course, and while I believe that neither tool is perfect for webdesign, I am more comfortable with Photoshop’s shortcomings. If I could name one thing that gets my goat in Fireworks, it is that I can’t choose how many colours I can have in my 8bit PNG. Fix that (which hasn’t happened in the beta of Fireworks CS4 available on labs.adobe.com) and I might spend the time getting around the rest of the issues I have with it.

Another discussion that is related I think, and also comes from a 37 Signals post, is Web designers should do their own HTML/CSS. We have quite a mix of designers here, I am more a coder than a designer, Nick is probably the opposite (although I like to leave all form coding to him…), Allan is definitely a designer who knows a small amount of code (although I gather he can make Wordpress work just by plugging it in. He also does a mean cleaner and tea-lady impersonation), while Hamish seems to be an ex-designer and ex-coder these days – goes with running the business I suppose. While we have often joked about making Allan code one of his designs as punishment for doing something so crazy, that is all it is, a joke. Being able to stay top of your game with design, as well as code, is such a big ask these days. Unless you are some kind of superman, I think one would always suffer. However, the more knowledge a designer has about what is and isn’t possible with HTML/CSS the better.

There’s now a number of websites and companies designing their own vinyl cuts to aid with the decoration of your barren walls. Harmonie-interieure mix beautiful vinyl cut typography with printed media to combine a whole new style of decoration. What a shame it’s priced in Euros.

via computerarts