Welcome to Blackspike.com

I was asked to look at designing a Silverlight skin for Witty – a WPF Twitter application for Windows. This project never ended up happening, so for anyone interested, I’ve attached the source and Illustrator files.

Since the sad news of the end of Technics 1210’s, I thought I’d upload a model I made of one when I started learning blender. The materials are rubbish but the arm model was pretty cool

Here’s some free spinners I’ve been making with Blend and Illustrator that you can use as indeterminate loaders for Silverlight or any WPF app, all that needs changing to suit is the storyboard trigger. Enjoy!

A cool flash/jQuery mashup to expose cheap albums on the MSN Music website, lots of animation and vibrant colours, this was a fun mini site I built at Nokia Music.

A quick site and business card for my housemate, the talented stone carver Tom Brown. I wrote a php script that loops through a directory for images and thumbnails and some jquery to make a lightbox, a very primitive CMS system in a couple of files.

PSD to HTML, this was a build only job from artwork supplied, this is a tight site heavy on jQuery with some bullet proof HTML/CSS too.

My partner in crime at Conchango went solo this year and needed a web presence and some branding work, this is the site I built him, Wordpress as a CMS and a shuriken style ninja logo. Check the live site here blogs.xamlninja.com

A website for my friends at Wildfire bookings, a hip hop PR agency in Bristol. The supplied photos were awful, so collage was the way to go, and pretty successfully to I reckon.

PDC08 – Microsofts Professional Developers Convention is where they bring out all the big tech news, like Windows 7 and its new touch awareness. Microsoft hired Conchango to build an app for Tescos using WPF to take advantage of the native touch capabilities.

Breakbeat superstar producer and DJ asked me to design him a logo and website, something a bit different. So I created him this site www.smithmonger.com, I cobbled together enough php and flash to create a primitive text file based cms system which was cool at the time.

Awesome band Smerins Anti Social (catch them when you can) called in design hero Radim Malinic of Brand Nu to do the artwork and me to build their new site. It looks fantastic and was a joy to work with graphics this good.

As worthless as it comes, here’s a theme I made when Silverlight Beta 2 came out. Of course, Silverlight 2 turned out to be incompatible with Beta 2, so I threw it away. For posterity, you can download the source below. Maybe grab some XAML out of it I dunno.

The biggest Silverlight piece I have ever built – and one of the biggest Silverlight 2 RIA’s ever made was a fantastic, global project to work on. It took all the live and pre-recorded Setanta sports feeds and displayed them in a fantastically rich web browser app.

This WPF app scours your hard drive for indexed content and displays it back to you in a variety of interesting ways. Fully touch friendly and with 6 different themes, this app will be great when it launches…

At Conchango, some bright spark came up with the idea of making an Agile/Scrum planning ‘game’ on our Microsoft Surface so that spring planning would be less of a chore.

Now this is an old site (look at the tiny fonts!) that I designed and built which got me a job and quite a few free nights out so all is forgiven.

Early last year I entered a redesign contest to win a free trip to Mix in Vegas. You had to take their HTML page and without touching it, totally redesigning it using CSS and images only. I really enjoyed the challenge, both designing and building it, and was happy with the final result. The judges weren’t too happy and I lost :/ Oh well, here it is anyway.

A mate of mine is a verified eco warrior (worrier?), and has left for the states to champion the rights of the planet. To do this, he needed a logo and a clean website, so I designed him one and built him a Wordpress theme and site.

We launched our own white label music store at OD2, and as well as designing the store for multiple platforms, I was asked to produce some concepts for branding as well, eventually the internal client picked the weakest one of course, but it went into production nonetheless.

The music download stores I designed at OD2 were interesting in that each store was rolled out to web, TV (via mediacenter) and mobile – each with device specific constraints. This particular design covered all three well and won the international internal design competition.

Before Nokia bought OD2, the digital delivery network started by Peter Gabriel, I used to be the lead designer and it was my job to design and sometimes build the storefronts for clients such as MSN, Coca Cola, Oxfam and many others. This was the last one I designed.

When I worked as lead designer at Nokia Music, the key project was the iTunes-like WPF app codenamed ‘Euphoria’. I was responsible for designing and building the front end with Expression Blend. It was a huge project and I learned so much, and it kicked me into the Windows design sphere.

My good friends dad, John Neusinger needed a brochure to sell his exquisitely hand made wooden furniture, and a small brochure site. A great example of cheap and simple design which is low maintenance, long lasting and cost effective.

This was a Proof Of Concept Silverlight 2 app I helped build for Microsoft/National Rail. In just 3 weeks we created an app that would track all trains on the network at any time, and display their status and position on a map in browser.

This website was for the talented artist, Jo Conlon, who wanted a blog to promote her exhibitions, and a shop to sell pieces online. Rather than using zencart which would be overkill, I created a Wordpress theme and the wp-ecommerce plugin, giving complete control over her products, gallery and news.

Ah, iKeyring.com. A pet project that my old housemate and I started around 2004, when we were sitting in a pub trying to work out how to make some cash on the side with virtually no start up money. Both of us being designers, and me with dev skills, we decided to use the open source php/mysql shopping cart, Zen Cart.

My good friend, the incredibly talented VJ/DJ Cheeba has been bugging me for a site for ages, so finally I whipped him up a custom themed site using Wordpress as a CMS and blogging platform. See the live site here: djcheeba.com.

A friend asked me to build her a full ecommerce site for her ethical goods business, so after my success and experience building my own zencart site, ikeyring.com, I thought I’d build hers with it too.

A couple of posters for various Bristol bands, PressPlay and DJ Cheeba