So, I’ve been meaning to write this post for a few weeks now, but as I haven’t had the details sorted out by now I chose to keep things more quiet. But, on the 30th of March I chose to step down from my position as Head of Design at Orange Bus. It’s been almost three years, I’m the longest serving employee (who’s going to beat me?) and it’s definitely been tough times and fun times. But, it was my first ever encounter with the professional world after university and I feel like I could do with some experience elsewhere.
I’ve not actively been looking to move on, but when the opportunity arose I felt like it would be stupid not to explore it more. So, on the 24th of May I’ll be taking on the role as Lead UX Designer at Cravens Advertising. It's a new position where I will be forming my own role, just like I did at Orange Bus when I first joined the team. I’ll be bridging the gap between the digital team and the creative team, and for a design hybrid like myself that’s pretty ideal (some might say sickeningly ideal!)
At Orange Bus we're strict about following best practices, and in my day to day workload that pretty much means perfect mark-up and optimised graphics.
I've covered the importance of using sprites rather than separate files for web graphics before, and we follow this practice on all the sites we build. For me it's not all about making the download-time faster for the user (although that's a must!) but also a unique timesaver - it makes the maintenance of the site, and the build of the site (not to mention browser compatibility) much much faster. It never fails, a client will ask for minor tweaks when you think you're ready to launch a site, and for me to be able to open one file to alter all the graphics is much quicker than going through an endless long folder of small 1px files is vital.
So, after spending quite a bit of time branding the company I work for, I quite fancied getting the work out to people in the industry. I used the material I had spent hours and hours polishing to make a desktop wallpaper for this coming month, and sent it over to smashing magazine, and GOT IN! Very excited that the orange bus will be adorning fellow artists' computers around the globe.

* With a little help from Thesaurus