eireknits.com & irishknittingkits.com

Eireknits and Irish Knitting Kits are part of the Crana Knits group, owned by the redoubtable Rosaleen Hegarty from Buncrana. Rosaleen's brief was to create a knitting tutorial site with instruction through video supplemented by text and detail images, along with a sister site to supply the necessary yarns and patterns.
I carried out the design, photography, html and css coding and the videos and server-side processing were undertaken by my colleagues Pat Campbell and John Conaghton respectively, both from LYIT.

same place, different time

The cold weather stayed with us for a few weeks. The roads were bad, so I didn't venture far. Instead I revisited the same scene a few times under different conditions.
What a difference a day makes!

EOS 5D MkII, 24-104mm, f20, 25 seconds ISO 100
EOS 5D MkII, 24-104mm, f16, 1/30 second ISO 100EOS 5D MkII, 24-104mm, f20, 30 seconds ISO 100

photography : south donegal

I spent a few days shooting around Glencolmcille in south County Donegal.
The weather, miraclously stayed reasonably fair and I got some great pictures.
The area is ruggedly beautiful, with some great locations such as Sliabh League, Maghera waterfall, caves and beach, the dramatic Glengesh pass and the pretty villages of Kilcar, Carrick and Ardara.

I'll definitely revisit the area again.

You can see some samples here.

inkwell 2.5

The observant among you will have noticed a change since your last visit.
I designed a new stylesheet for the site, which is, I think, an improvement on the previous incarnation. It's a stylesheet change rather than a root-and-branch rebuild, hence the 2.5 rather than a 3.0. I also took the opportunity to tweak the html a little here and there. The site is now fully both css and xhtml compliant.

inkwell 2.0 & web standards

After teaching the importance of standards compliance for many years, I decided it was high time to practice what I was preaching, so here it is, the new shiny Inkwell, designed with standards in mind.
For those of you still stubbornly sticking with Internet Explorer 6, more fool you. Although I disapprove of sites which proclaim “best viewed in Firefox”, the simple fact remains that IE6 and indeed IE7 are not yet entirely standards compliant. Having said that, I have endeavoured to make the inkwell experience as equitable as possible for all.

inkwell 1.0

I registered Inkwell and started the Inkwell website in 2001 as an academic exercise initially. I had been teaching web design since 1996, (anyone remember Adobe Pagemill?) and graphic design since 1993, and finally decided it was time to buy my own domain. I designed the first iteration of Inkwell using the cutting edge techniques of the day. That is, sliced images and nested tables.
It seems horrible to contemplate now, but this approach was the only way at the time to create a website that began to approach the level of control a graphic designer used to working in print expected.