Steam skate

Steam Skate
Uploaded by crawley

This was a film made by Tim Crawley for his DVD magazine called insitu. The three skaters are Jack Rowles, Jay McKissock and myself. The driver of the steam car is Grant Gould and that car is his own which he built from scratch!
This was a really fun film to make. Enjoy.

Bye bye navbar

After a little searching I've found the solution for getting rid of the navbar. I found it here at this gentlemans blog. Perfect.

All new blogger

So I decided to move my blog over to the 'all new' google blogger that is now out of beta. It seems as if they've got some nice features now e.g. the introduction of tags, which I will think about getting into. The first thing that I didn't like though was that my little snippet of CSS to hide the top blogger navigation bar seems to have been disabled.
I was using this CSS;
#b-navbar { height:0px; visibility:hidden; display:none }
But this appears to no longer work. If anyone knows of a new fix then please let me know.

Updatable content

It's getting more and more difficult for me to keep the main Someplace nice site up-to-date with my recent work. Therefore I'm going to try to post more snippets of work up here. I am also going to try out some new design ideas here before I try them on the main site so be prepared for some layout and colour changes in the coming days.

Oomph widget 1.1

The Oomph widget now includes it's own icon (for the widget menu) and clicks through to the Oomph website. Download it here.

Oomph widget

I've been working recently on how to creating widgets for the Mac OSX dashboard. I've discovered that the main languages used are XHTML, CSS and JavaScript so I was able to pick up the basics quite quickly.
I've managed to create a widget for Oomph. At the moment it's just a logo but I'm hoping to add RSS functionality into it soon. You can download the widget here.

Processing

Yesterday I downloaded the Processing software once again. This is something I used to use a lot when I was at Uni but I haven't played with it for a while.
If you're unfamiliar with Processing it's basically a tool for teaching programming to designers and artists. Well actually it's so much more than that. It is extremely easy to get your head round the language and start making 'sketches' within a very short space of time.
I'm hoping to get some of my sketches up in the play section of Someplace nice very soon.

Dark ages

This is a map of dark ages Britain that I built from my creative director for a war game he is running. It was interesting to see what England looked like back then.

Update to SPN

I've updated someplace nice yet again. The site just wasn't working for me anymore and I was unhappy with the secondary navigation.
The new site is a lot simpler and lets the work take the focus.

Alone Illustration

New illustration finished and up in the 'play' section of someplace nice. Based on a photo I took during the filming of 'Triptych'.

someplace nice v.6

Someplace nice version 6 is now live. New work is up and has now been divided into 'work and 'play', the latter including experiments and illustrations.
There are still some tweaks I would like to do on the site, e.g. there is no image replacement for the main navigation. Also coming soon is an archive page that will contain all the previous versions of SPN.

Oomph website

The oomph website is nearing completion now. We are just finalising the copy on the services page, which also has a nice little piece of functionality programmed by myself in Flash. Stand by.

URL

The Someplace nice blog is now hosted on a better URL with the rest of my site. The new URL is http://www.someplacenice.co.uk/blog/
In other news, the new site should be finished very soon and will include some more playful experimental work aswell as some new commercial work I've been involved in.

I Live Here

An illustration I've recently completed.

FlashObject

I've just discovered a really neat and standards compliant way to embed Flash using javaScript. This guy Geoff Stearns has created FlashObject, which allows you to embed Flash so it will validate in XHTML strict, but also add content under the Flash that will display if the viewer doesn't have the right version of Flash player.
I'm now in the middle of testing it to use with the Oomph site.
Read more here.

May 1st reboot

I'm now deep into the redesign of Someplace nice ready for the big May 1st reboot.
This is a very good idea for those designers who need deadlines to work to. I love redesigning my site but unless I have a deadline it seems to drag on for ever.

Flock

I've been experimenting with a new browser called Flock. It's designed to be a community based browser, so has full intergration for blogging and Flickr. Worth a look.

loose the www.

Searching through one of the design forums I visit regularly I came across this site. It seems like quite an good idea to me. Don't we all get annoyed having to put in the www. each time you type in an address?

Favicon generator

You can now create favicons from image files quickly and for free, here. This is a great little tool for saving time and effort.

Berserker than thou

Yesterday was the opening night of the exhibition 'Ere mate!' at Detour in Bath. I'm showing some work and the exhibition also includes work by James Bihan and Chris Jones.
See photos here.
Here is a direct link to my piece.

Microsoft issues 'Eolas' update

Everyone at the studio is panicking. Microsoft issued a patch for IE6 a couple of days ago which affects how Flash is interacted with. Basically you not have to 'activate' a Flash section of a site in order to interact with it. This is very bad news for Flash banners, of which we do a lot. The patch was issued after Microsoft lost a legal battle with a one man firm called Eolas which has a patent on how media is viewed on a browser.
Read more here.

Welcome to someplace nice

Hello.
Welcome to Someplace nice. This blog will contain thoughts, links and rantings about graphic and web design.
Enjoy.