Panda on a dirt bike

Printed magazine advert for DIRT magazine featuring a panda riding a bike. Lots of photoshop fun to be had, and strict brand guidelines so that it fit part of a series. It is quite attention grabbing and colouful and hopefully brought along some punters.

Printed in Nov 2007

Ajax Multimedia webshop!

Dripping with high-tech features, this new music label offers free previews, podcasts and chances to buy digital songs or vinyl! This one stop site will cater for all your eclectic dance needs. Don’t forget about the secret button!

This new music label that cut its teeth releasing party vinyl has gone digital with a fresh new music website and shop!

Play music whilst shopping for music, previewing any track live. That was the main objective… well that along with high quality music delivery using Web2.0 features such as podcasting and rss feeds.

With a stark graphic style by Vacant Design we needed some strong visual animations as cue points for actions. The Flash-based music player is autonomous and animated as it loads an artist’s playlist or swaps between songs. For those not of a nervous disposition, there is always the secret hyper mode (*top dial on the left) if you find it too tame.

Speaking of the music player, let me mention a few unique features:

• automatic saving of your volume preference for when you come visit us again
• communicates with the artists’ pages so that songs can be selected outside of the music player
• wholly animated to reflect the party music is playing with regards to the volume
• super secret party mode for fast processors

If you would like to attend any events, join the mailing list and check out the news and live pages.

Technical details

⊗ ActionScript 2.0 Custom music player code with intelligent internal music database.

⊗ Flash mx compatible with ActionScript animated GUI.

⊗ Music Player loads XML, RSS and XSPF playlists from the netcast.

⊗ Javascript html music controls and feedback – communicating between flash and html.

⊗ On-the-fly xpsf and xml (atom or RSS) playlist creation with scraped coverart

⊗ Based on the Opensource CMS WordPress. Yes really!

⊗ SEO super optimised with analytical software to determine most important records.

⊗ All Artists and channels have relevant RSS and ATOM feeds.

⊗ AJAX page requests into dynamic html.

⊗ Down-gradeable to simple html shop.

Extreme Graphics

As the leading purveyor in action sports media, I had to do the brand some justice. Being home to over 12 publications and having a need to show all the logos, this wallpaper piece was a challenge! By tessellating the brands and logos and setting them as classic gun metal on black, the pattern was used separately on Factory’s homepage..

I know it is a cliche, but cliches sell!

Seamless Pattern

New logo, old school software

Want music making to be instant and fun again? Try Med. As version 2 is finally nearing completion I have designer a new logo for the product. Made up of musical clefs, staves and punctuation, this is a super-musical logotype!

A logo for a comeback

Back in 1999, I designed some concept products for Amiga Inc. Many became a reality, although dissappointingly none were used by Amiga, and to this day no hardware has been released. However, with the launch of version 4 of their OS, things look back on track.
So, to announce my return to the community, I have done some thinking about the logo. In case you were wondering, it isn’t quite a cube, in fact it is a section cut from a boing-ball.

Future Retro Kitch

Designed as the main logo for the reborn ‘Box Office Poison’ band. Commissioned for the sleeve art, T-shirts and PR material, the logo is sultry and exotic, with just a cheeky dash of kitsch.
Subversively there is a hidden face. Can you find him???

A co-operative freelance umbrella group

Originally designed as a 3D logo by Jim Lundblad, the Shogun Logo is up for grabs as one of the latest bounties. Here is my submission, or one of my submissions. Read more to find out about the many variations of the theme.

Cover art for the Urban Beekeeper

Created for the cover of the debut EP, nothing reaches higher than a giraffe on stilts.

To emphasise this theme I set the giraffe on top of Mount Everest and on the inner sleeve is a pyramid of giraffe.. all on stilts!

Giraffe on Stilts is a highly customised photoshop composite – see below for a larger version with all the detail.

Lock in the cool

Designed as the logo for an ultra efficient cool box, the logo was embossed on the product and used on all the print material.

It was an interesting project, and I kept my thinking very literal and simple – an ice cube locked in a zipper! There were many incarnations for the client, everything from full colour 3D rendered cubes to abstract interlinking boxes.

The Client settled on the original clean style – which incidently was favourite anyway

Turns dreams into music

Ever wondered how your dreams sound? Ever wondered what your dreams would sound like if they had soundtracks? Wonder no longer with the dreamCapturer.

A USB product that accurately predicts your mood in realtime, creating a mood-mapped soundtrack of your sleep from your first dream through to the last.

With musical backing from members of the Hallé and Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, thousands of mood instilling sounds were compiled together to form a database of samples capable of recreating any mood or emotion. From anger to happiness through to more obscure emotions such as ambivalence and angst.

With a fully animated graphic user interface designed in Flash, the dreamCapturer analyses your mood and represents it onscreen with character driven feedback. If you are stressed and your mood is a mixture of anger and rage, the onscreen character snarls and dips his eyebrows, if you are calm and happy, the onscreen character smiles and nods. Of course this is all in time to the music!

How it Works

Connect the dream quilt sensor to your thumb and click the big blue button. Immediately your ‘baseline‘ mood is being analysed. Over the space of a few minutes of constant use, the dreamCapturer learns what your normal mood is and begins the music process. As soon as you are calibrated, the dreamCapturer gets to work every tenth of a second recognising alterations and trends in your mood and looking for relevant sounds in its audio database.

The database is categorised into four channels of audio each with its own specific emotional fingerprint :
the first channel is the percussion where pace and action are described;
the second channel hosts the classical instruments which bring major and minor emotions;
the third is the bass where fear and sensitivity are shaped;
the final channel holds melody sounds and masked audio such as pink noise.

Once the dreamCapturer begins interpreting your emotions, it harmonises the four channels with relevant sounds all set to the BPM set by the percussion channel. If you are having a nightmare, prepare to hear some uncomfortable sounds… of course happy dreams are relaxed and enjoyable late night listening.

Depending on many parameters measured from your body (and not your brain!) the dreamCapturer recognises when you are falling asleep, and when you are awake and does a pretty good job of figuring out how many dreams you had in between! When you log back onto your computer in the morning you can check your emails, and now you can check your dreams-inbox as they are stored in the dream vault.

Technical details

1. USB 2.0 hot pluggable.
2. Uses GSR (lie-detectors) and body temperature to determine mood.
3. Fully animated GUI programmed in Flash. Realtime character representation of mood.
4. Low latency mood capture with accurate mood determination algorithms.
5. Audio samples from bin-aural to classical from well respected musicians, scientists and artists.
6. Save your dreams, banish your nightmares or email them to your friends.