After six months of searching I’ve finally found a new job but was very frustrated that there was no where to find design jobs in wales. The usual design job boards rarely have anything in wales and the generic job sites don’t seem to have many design related jobs.

This week I decided to do something about it and set up designjobswales.co.uk

Posting and applying for jobs is completely free. I’ll also be tweeting when new jobs are posted on twitter so please follow me and retweet.

The initial design for this project was produced by Phillip Close at closeupmedia.co.uk and we then began the task of turning the design into a full featured shopping cart system. The client also requested additional functionality for the site and after meeting with the client to discuss their requirements we set about designing a solution.

The first solution was the “what goes with what” utility on the site – the client wanted the visitors to the site to be able to find the perfect wine to match a certain food. The solution we came up with provided a user friendly interface to the food/wine matching database which returned a selection of wines to provide a perfect compliment to their meal.

The client also wanted to offer customised wine labels, perfect for a gift or a special occasion. Inknpixel provided Wine 2 Dine 4 with a solution that allowed their potential customers to input a message, choose a label style and actually see a representation of how the label would look.

The client was more than happy with the solutions provided by us and has kindly submitted a testimonial.

Visit wine2dine.co.uk

Today sees the launch of the website for Pure-Finish.com, designed and built by us at inknpixel.

The brief included the initial design of the companies logo and identity and then to carry that through to a website aimed at their existing and potential window cleaning customers. Inknpixel came up with a clean, uncluttered, modern design which also portrayed their business is a run by a friendly, husband and wife team who provide a personal service to its clients.

The site was produced using clean, hand-coded CSS and HTML with elements of Javascript and PHP for the form submission and is designed with accessibility and web standards in mind.

However, by comparison, describing what constitutes a bad design is easy. Its so easy, sometimes, words are not needed, a picture or a link will suffice.

Below are some of the worst examples I’ve come across.

wayfarersgolf.co.uk

This one really doesn’t need any explanation, just click the image and see for yourself. Notice how the designer has not included the usual link to his website at the bottom of the website, no for this masterpiece he deserves more – there are two whole pages on his clients website just to advertise his services.

wesellcoffee.com

First thing your presented with is a very large picture of their factory – not terribly interesting. But it gets worse, the entire website is set in uppercase, in Times and the paragraphs are centered. Any one of these three ‘design’ elements would have been bad enough, but all three together are unforgiveable.

mjmjoinerycardiff.co.uk

Flash for the sake of flash, things don’t line up and what is the blue to black gradient with a circle in it supposed to signify?

mangohouse.co.uk

Note the scrolling flash gallery that takes about two minutes to load and there’s music! Thankfully, a redesign is in progress.

freemap.com

Animated spinning globes and background textures that wowed people back in 1995 don’t have the same impact now.

Do you know of any websites that surpass these for crappiness? Leave a comment.