Bathrooms.com wanted to further boost their online enagement, so Dynamo PR proposed a web-based interactive guide, which would curate the best bathroom maintenance tips from the Internet to help people enhance and repair their bathroom. Dynamo PR commissioned me to design, illustrate and develop the guide.
I’ll be honest: I leapt at the chance. This was an opportunity to expand on my knowledge in responsive design, interactive web systems and comtemporary HTML5/JavaScript technology. It also give me a chance to do some nice drawing of bathroom items.
What? Some of us like drawing baths.
Anyway, through a mix of PHP (page generation based on an array of bathroom elements/tips), VBA (converting the spreadsheet of elements/tips provided by Dynamo/Bathrooms.com into PHP), HTML5/JavaScript/JQuery (the interactive Virtual Bathroom) and responsive CSS (the Tips List), I developed the guide.
Once created, I recorded and voiced the “How To” video to take users through the usage of the guide.
Bathrooms.com and Dynamo PR were delighted with the end results, and hopefully many people will benefit from the one-stop-shop of DIY tips.
This week I was given an interesting creative task: to enhance MiiPC’s social media branding to reflect the fun, safe nature of the MiiPC, along with highlighting the wide range of games on the platform.
MiiPC, if you don’t know, is pretty cool. It’s a funky looking, Android-based PC that has safety for kids and parental control built in alongside a wide range of great apps and games. You kind find out more about it here.
I was commissioned by long time partners and all-round-awesome PR agency Dynamo PR to sort out the social branding.
Using their range of apps, beautiful device and current branding as inspiration, I created a fun, dynamic, eye catching and on-brand design for both Twitter and Facebook, which pleased Dynamo, MiiPC and their followers. Photoshop and I become closely acquainted, as often happens. 🙂
Twitter Feed
Facebook Page
If you’re after social branding please get in touch! 🙂
Rather excitingly, tonight and tomorrow I’m hosting a couple of radio shows on Heat Radio: the #1 station for music and celebrity across the UK!
I’m rather nervous about how it’ll go down, but hopefully it’ll be fine. You can have a listen yourself tonight from 7pm, or tomorrow morning from 6am (if you’re mad) on one of these:
I’ve been trying to improve my people’s-face-drawing skills a bit recently, so decided to give it a whirl on a photo of the lovely Alona Tal from the excellent Supernatural.
Here’s how it went:
The eyes are definitely the hardest part, purely because the tiniest inaccuracy in the eyes and make a face look like a different person entirely. Other areas are much more forgiving, and might explain why the eyes took several iterations and STILL aren’t quite right. But I decided that I should just stop faffing and post the damn thing.
I’ve been enjoying your company of late through the redesign of The Custard TV’s website, but at the end of this process I must plead with you regarding one thing:
PLEASE, PLEASE CAN YOU MAKE “POPULAR POSTS” AVAILABLE AS A FEED?
It would be really, really lovely to be able to hook in (via JavaScript/JSON a la recent posts / posts of a label etc.) to that data so I could actually create some proper custom popular post widgets rather than having to hack around with CSS only with the stuff you provide, or having to use post-creation JavaScript to hack about on the fly with your generated HTML code. And let’s not even talk about your 50x50px thumbnails.
This might sound more like a rant having spent hours trying to source a decent way to resolve this, resorting to simply not using thumbnails at all (if you look at The Custard TV home page, you’ll see why 50x50px thumbnails really wouldn’t work).
It might sound like a rant.
Because it is.
All the best,
Pat
P.S. On the plus side, Blogger, you’ve definitely evolved: I’ve managed to get the Custard TV site looking like a non-Blogger site, in particular the home page, all thanks to your flexibility in terms of template manipulation through HTML and CSS. So… thanks!
P.P.S. It’s not odd to be addressing my posts to blogging websites, is it?
P.P.P.S. Actually, given Google’s latest hardware, perhaps I should tip my head up and address you as “OK, Blogger” instead.
This month has been *busy*, but I’ve got round to doing a little bit of JavaScript coding and have made the super-rudimentary 2d platformer a mere pretty-rudimentary one.
It’s only a test of scrolling about in an environment, and nothing particularly impressive yet – but it’s a start. I intend to expand this further so it’s a proper functioning game, with parallaxed backgrounds, animated foregrounds and – oh – some bad guys and a “win” mechanic.
If you need to make a snap decision then the best decider is not heads or tails, but instead:
“Oh my goodness, how have I been so naive all this time? I had no idea that these two obviously juxtaposed items could be used to determine the choice of a binary decision!”… I hear you cry (or that could be the voices in my head).
It’s rather obvious when it’s presented to you, isn’t it?
“No but seriously, what the hell is this?”
I… it’s hard to explain. My mate Pete was bought the domain as a present at the Dynamo PR Christmas do.
“Why?”
REASONS, that’s why.
Anyway, he wanted to use it as more ludicrous enjoyable alternative to sometimesredsometimesblue.com (yes, that does what you think it does).
So – combined with web fonts, some funky JavaScript to size the text to your screen, Pete saying a particular phrase on page load (or on tap on iOS… grrr) – I made it.
Oh no! It’s come to this, the horrible day has finally hit us… and pop music will never be the same again. Until the next generic, well-produced set of pretty looking people do well in the X-Factor and release some records, that is.
But until then we are lost… for JLS have split up!
Who?
You know, the handsome foursome of Marvin, Alan, Humphrey and Tiberius (I might have these slightly wrong). To mark this momentous of occasions and to once again take some time to think about the existence of the JLS-branded Durex condoms (“Just Love Safe”… yes, it really did happen), I decided to create a cartoon…
(Click to view a larger (a.k.a. readable) version)
Draw? Yes, draw. For Strip Search is the name of a brilliant Apprentice-style talent contest (not a phrase I thought I’d ever, ever utter) from the awesome guys at Penny Arcade: the world’s most popular web comic.
The prize? To work at Penny Arcade for a year, and $15,000.
The contestants? A whole load of AMAZINGLY TALENTED artists / cartoonists.
The challenges? Lots and lots of varied tasks.
The consequence of failure? Well, I’ll come to that.
Here’s the first episode, just to give you a tease:
And yes, you’re right: the theme tune is pretty awesome.
A new episode is unveiled on Tuesdays and Fridays online at the Strip Search web site, and I sat and watched all of them up to today’s over the weekend. It’s really addictive, very very funny in places AND – unlike most talent shows of this nature – the contestants and the judges are all really lovely.
The best part of the show has to be the elimination, which comes once every three episodes (don’t ask) and features the two bottom candidates of a day’s tasks battling against each other to create a comic based on two randomly selected words – in 90 minutes.
It’s damn hard, and it’s made harder because a) they’re on a stage in front of judges Mike and Jerry, the PA creators and b) said judges deliberately try to put them off with probing questions, fake time announcements and… well, I’ll not spoil the fun.
Today, I decided to play along, so following the show set myself 90 minutes to create a comic based on two words:
Mermaids
and
Ukulele
So… here it is:
Be gentle. I only had 90 minutes. 🙂
Next time, Pauly G’s promised me he’ll ask me lots of distracting questions over Twitter. I just hope he doesn’t drink my comic…
Rather excitingly, tonight and tomorrow I’m hosting a couple of radio shows on Heat Radio: the #1 station for music and celebrity across the UK!
