My Thoughts

I am amazed at how many web design companies there are in Kent, they seem to be popping up all over the place. When I graduated from The Arts Institute in Bournemouth nearly six years ago, and I returned to Kent actively seeking employment within a web design company as a qualified graphic / web designer, I found it extremely difficult to find any position based in Kent. Now the Garden of England is absolutely saturated with web design companies, all you have to do is search for 'Web Design Kent' in a search engine and you can wade your way through over 14 million results.

I am not sure whether this glut in web design companies is a sign that Kent has become a popular area for web designers who have left web design fims in the big smoke and set up business in the Kent countryside, or more to do with locals, who have found that with the increase in web based technology and higher broadband speeds the need to move out of Kent is no longer a requirement. I expect it is a combination of the two factors which has resulted in the overwhelming amount of web design companies now based in Kent.

Whatever the causes, it is pretty evident that a web design company based in Kent, now has a lot of competition. When I started working in the design industry, I was fortunate enough to find employment with Spanner Software who are based in Broadstairs, Kent. As well as web design, Spanner Software offered domain name registration, web hosting and database design. At that time the majority of the companies we were working alongside were based in London, only a hand-full had their offices in Kent.

I remember thinking when I was offered a full time position at Spanner Software it was a miracle to find a web design firm so close to home. I was set on having to move to London or further a field to get a job as a web designer, simply because there were so few Kent based web design companies. If I was to have graduated today and had come back to Kent, I would not have the concerns I did back then, about trying to get my foot in the door of a local web design company, my concerns would be more about 'out of all these web design agencies which will be best to work for?'

My current role as Web Designer at White Gate Design has meant I have been able to further extend my web design skills, work alongside very talented designers and get to work in a picturesque Kent village near Folkestone.

Whether people have decided to move to Kent or have always been based here, one thing is for sure, Kent is a lovely place to be a web designer!

Posted by Dean at 03:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday when my colleague was retrieving some files from our back up tapes at work, it became apparent that one of the tapes was missing from the set. Now I new that one of the tapes had recently broken. One of our drives had decided to snap the tape, so I told him "one of the tapes had recently gone for a Burton".

He looked at me and asked with a wry grin "Why a Burton?". Of course I did not have any idea why it had gone for a Burton, it was just a phrase that my Nan uses when something gets broken, lost or falls over. I had used this phrase rather than saying the backup tape was busted!

This question of why 'going for a Burton'? rather than going for anything else made me wonder about the origins of going for a Burton. I decided to investigate why this phrase had come about. After a bit of searching on the internet I have been able to find that there are various explanations to its origin, but the one I think is most likely to have given rise to the phrase relates to a strapline for a prewar beer advert.

Burton's were a brewery who have now gone out of business, but were popular beer brewers in the yesteryear, and it would have been a popular drink with the men of this period. Therefore it would make sense for a person who was missing from a group to be accused of nipping down the pub for a quick Burton.

During the war as I understand it, "gone for a Burton" was used as a kind of slang term, referring to pilots who were killed or missing in action.

So there you have it, if you have ever wondered about how the phrase gone for a Burton has come about, hopefully this blog has enlightened you.

Posted by Dean at 11:14 AM | Permalink

Well I haven't put anything up for the last few days. It is not because I have not wanted to but I have been a little bit concerned as to how I should use this part of the site. I am torn between two poles of thought. One being the entire x-lab site is based around graphic design and web design so shouldn't this part of the site continue with the design theme? On the other hand though there is a sense of personality that you can express in your blog entries that may not come across if all you deal with is design.

So for the time being I am going to post whatever I want in this part of the site, if down the line I feel it is detrimental to the rest of the site to have a more personal blog, I can shift the personal entries over to a new blog if need be.

So you can expect to read some interesting design commentry with a good spattering of whatever else I want to put out there.

Posted by Dean at 11:02 PM | Permalink

Well it has been a long time coming but on 30 April 2006 I finally got the new www.x-lab.co.uk site up and running. It has got an updated screenfolio, and CV plus some new features including a search facility which allows me to keep track of the experiment pages I have already created plus all the new ones I will be publishing in the future. There is still loads of experimental designs to come!

Another new part of the site is this blog facility. It is currently in its most basic state, I have literally got it up and running in the last couple of weeks and not had any time to get it customised because of the arrival of my beautiful new son and getting the rest of the site ready. It will be getting a facelift to match the rest of the site in the near future.

I intend to use this blog for anything which I want to write about, it may be design led, a bit of a rant about something and nothing or something else. You'll just have to wait and see what comes of it.

Ok. That's it for the time being this is my first blog entry... FIN.

Posted by Dean at 06:05 PM | Permalink