Here is a Christmas card image I recently produced, the image features a Christmas tree made up of level sensors.

Printed card

A good friend of mine is organising a charity event where he will treck his way to a dog rescue charity in Spain to deliver much needed dog food. To help him promote the event I created him a simple Word Press based blog allowing him to update the site himself.

Here are some 3D renderings I recently produced for PR, catalogue and exhibition materials. The renderings show a range of AdBlue combined quality and level sensors that are about to go into production. The 3D data was supplied directly by the client which I added materials to and set up the shots.

I recently travelled up to Scotland to do some onsite photography. The client needed a variety of things doing including staff headshots, PR shots, product shots and product line shots. I also suggested taking a group shot while I was there. All was completed within the day.

All the equipment I use is transportable allowing me to setup a full studio environment with flash strobes and light boxes onsite.

Here are a few samples from the day.

I recently invested in some new studio equipment to take my product photography to the next level. Here are some samples from a recent shoot I did.

Susan Harriet is a very talented artist from the Midlands who sells fantastic acrylic paintings and prints of animal’s nature and people via her business Web of Colour. Susan approached me when she needed to take her business online and reach out to a much wider audience of potential buyers. Already having designed and built her own Web site she needed someone to integrate a shopping cart system into her design.

ECommerce used to be a costly and complex process often requiring the seller to involve their bank and a third party merchant to handle the transfer of money. The shopping cart system itself also used to be expensive and complex. However now the shopping cart business has become very competitive and there are many low cost, even free, options out there. When it comes to payment processing there are options out there for any size business, in this case Susan decided it was best to use PayPal which is widely accepted as a safe form of payment.

The Web of Colour Web site now holds all products in a database along with stock levels, section details, order details, or status and customer records. All payments are directed to PayPal and a response generated when the transaction is successful or fails. Also customers are notified via email as each part of the buying process completes.

The result is an eCommerce site which effectively runs itself allowing Susan to concentrate on her creative talents while her customers place orders.

WearAboutz is an innovative new entry to the GPS market who specialise in systems that help people keep track of important things in their life such as their car, pets and loved ones. I am very excited to be involved with the branding for this rapidly developing company and thought I’d give an update on that essential first call of branding, the company logo.

As I have mentioned before in other logo articles, I believe strongly that any established company should let their logo evolve and never alienate existing customers. In this case that was less of an issue however the existing logo was off to such a good start there was a lot to work with.

My initial concern when analysing an existing logo is how well it degrades in certain scenarios. Typically logos have to stand a lot design abuse, they need to be clearly read when printed small and one colour in the phone directory but still expand to vast sizes and multiple colours when used in exhibitions, signs and vehicle graphics. My main concern with this particular logo was the positioning of the two words ‘wear’ & ‘aboutz’, while the logo worked in full colour by using two different colours to define the words when converted to one colour there’s the danger customers would read it as a single complex word ‘wearaboutz’. My second concern was the use of gradient shading in the pin which can become a big problem when trying to recreate it as a sign or vinyl cut out.

What I did like though was the pin and the radio waves as this symbolises the products well, you attach them to something and they broadcast their position back to you, however the radio waves used could have been mistaken for a target.
Stage one was a creative dump of four extreme variations ranging from very corporate to friendly and then with some excellent feedback from the team we whittled down ideas and generated new ones. I do like it when a client can give genuinely creative input into a design and feel empowered to get the results they want by working with a designer.

Here is the resulting logo in full colour and shown in two mono variations. I think it’s great when a young company establishes a strong brand identity as early as possible and hope to show more from WearAboutz as their brand develops further.

A couple of years ago I bought a domain name for my girlfriend Joanne, my nickname for her is Joeyanne so I bought her www.joeyanne.co.uk which she was pleased with. She built a little web site about her which contained her CV on as she was looking for a job at the time. After a while she got into blogging and in June 2007 we installed a copy of Wordpress onto her site she could blog away to her hearts content about her profession of librarianship, to make it unique she downloaded a theme on which we put a picture of some books and that was that.

After regularly adding good articles to her site its popularity grew and it became listed in the CILIP (Chartered Institute of Librarianship Professionals) newsletter. We recently analysed the statistics and found she was getting a regular 1500 visits a week. Of course getting lots of hits on your web site suddenly makes you self conscious, and you then want to look good, and when your boyfriend designs web sites for a living you can see where this is going.

Joey put together a very good brief consisting of sites, graphics and layouts she liked, she specified the font and the colours she wanted and handed it to me. The only issue we was she didn’t have any graphics to work from. The challenge for me was to scour the net for good free resources we could use.

Her brief requested a simple, easy to read, two column layout so my core focus was making the actual blog entries easy to read, after all these are the stars of the show. I worked around a centre aligned 900px wide layout.

She also likes icons so I went through my library and picked out the ones I felt worked best, I then modified these to fit in with her new theme.

While I was searching I stumbled upon a lovely bit of penguin clip art, Joey loves penguins so this made the perfect header image.

Another key element was the promotion of her RSS feed which broadcasts her latest posts to subscribers.  Joey has configured her blog to send out new items via email so I made up a little icon for this showing the RSS icon inside an envelope.

All that was left to do was to make a WordPress template from it which was a bit of a learning curve for me but once I knew all the code WordPress needed it didn’t take long to get her site up and running.

Joey is really pleased with the design and it has given her a new found confidence to promote the site even more and the feedback she’s had has been great. I think the ultimate compliment for me was when she explained she needed to move a couple of things around in the layout and was impressed with how clean the code was. I also made her a favicon and an ipod logo.