2008 has been an incredible year for me, with this blog helping narrate that story. Although I’ve been far less active on my blog this year I’ve pretty much covered all my highlights. So without further ado here they are in a chunky link-baited end of year post:

I saw the last few sunsets of 2007 over the African bushveld on a private game reserve and brought in the New Year with friends in Cape Town.

In February I had my first ski experience in the beautiful resort of Livigno, high in the Alps of Italy. One of my favourite holidays of all times! Refreshed I then settled back into my design work and began my first collaborative project with Adii on a premium wordpress theme called Gazette. Not realising this was going to be one of the biggest turning points in my freelance design career.

How this video clip has only received 222 views astonishes me. Magnum has to be one of the most legendtry jack russels in the whole entire world. His owner’s commentary is way up there too, South African boytjie slang at it’s best. Together they form a cinematographic masterpiece.

Quoting a client for a project is never a fun task. Crunching numbers, trying to figure out how long a design is realistically going to take you, pushing your diary around to find an open slot, deciphering how easy/difficult the client is going to be and how much feedback they are going to bombard you with, and then sitting on the “Send” button nervously for a few minutes before gathering the guts to send it on it’s way.

Then you inevitablely get a mail back from the client, explaning how they didn’t expect it to cost that much to put a website together. Trying to bully you into dropping your price somewhat, promising you “great exposure” and promoting your services to their “huge network of business contacts”.

Well here is a lesson to be learnt from the Welsh rugby team.

One of my quests whilst in Cape Town over the last month was a few days in the Afrigator headquarters with Justin, Stii and Lester. After a good catch up and a few beers it was straight into the work with the main priority being some tweaks to the Afrigator user interface. Tweaks is probably a fairly loose and understated term for the amount of work that went into today’s launch.

It looks like it may be time for a blog post seeing I have been quiet for just over a month now. I’m currently not freezing cold, as per usual, in my London abode, but enjoying the sun in Cape Town, South Africa.

A little over a week ago I was sipping beer, eating loads of red meat and driving open-top landrovers, without any game rangers or protection, around a beautiful private game park near the Kruger Park. We stumbled across a herd of elephant, twice, had a rhino almost charge us and sat smack bang between a big lion and it’s cubs the other side of the “road”. I should also mention our landrover was about 40 years old and would not start on numerous occassions, including the rhino and lion incidents. We also were lucky enough to see a cheetah, as well as all the usual sightings of zebra, giraffe and buck.

James Nachtwey, one of the world’s greatest photojournalists and winner of the 2007 TEDPrize, received “one wish to change the world”.

“I’m working on a story that the world needs to know about. I wish for you to help me break it, in a way that provides spectacular proof of the power of news photography in the digital age.”

Head on over to Nachtwey’s TEDPrize page and watch his moving presentation, it is worth every second of the 23.41 minutes out of your busy day. If you are too busy to even click on that link just watch it right below. Now you have no excuses…