Welcome to Blackspike.com

The one and only DocVek asked me to design and build a Wordpress theme to showcase his absolutely stunning artwork. His flyers, posters and even shoes are all fantastically creative works of art.

I met DJ Irk earlier this year when I was on sabbatical in Chamonix, a great party DJ as well as a top snowboarder, he asked me if I could redesign his site. I both redesigned it and recoded it, this time as a custom Wordpress theme.

This is an html site for the fictitious airline, BlueYonder, to be used for demonstrations of Visual Studio 2010. The site was mostly designed in Illustrator, with bitmaps, effects and slicing done in Photoshop. I wrote the html and css by hand using Expression Web, which is actually not a bad text editor.

Andrew price (@andrewpprice), who runs the excellent Blender tutorial site, BlenderGuru.com has released a new modelling tutorial, creating a kitchen and appliances from scratch.

Continuing with character development with Blender 3D, I’ve seen two amazing portfolios this week, and I thought I’d learn from them by trying to duplicate their work. Still a long way to go before I’m at their standard!

It’s been a long time since I tried to rig a character in Blender, so I thought I’d give it another go. Rigging involves creating a skeleton of armatures (bones) and attaching them to a mesh, so you can animate or pose the object in a fluid way.

This is a test of Blender 2.5′s Composition Nodes, to see how they differ from the 2.49a release. Using a mesh with dupliverts to map the spheres, and animated camera and the displace modifier to create a flythrough.

This is a very simple & specific bookmarklet to hide annoying footer banner adverts on websites – for some reason I find footer adverts very annoying.

I’m missing out on Mix in Vegas tomorrow for the first time in a long time, but here are a couple of things I’d love to see announced. Don’t get me wrong, I love Microsoft design technologies like Silverlight and Surface, but they have a lot of catching up to do to equal Adobe CS4 [...]

This is the much requested Silverlight 3 version of my Blackspike theme – same rules apply, you can use it for any project personal or commercial.

I am playing with Silverlight 4 a lot at the moment, and one of its best features is the new Implicit Styles. This means that I can design a Silverlight theme for all the controls, and all developers have to do is include my supplied Resource Dictionary and all their controls will be skinned.

Following on from my post on how to use Google Docs as a lightweight CMS, this is how to include editable tabular data with custom fields in your Wordpress theme.

I created a website for a friend, who wanted to display a lot of tabular data. I couldn’t find a way to make it easy to update on a regular basis, so I cooked up a simple CMS using a little PHP, jQuery, HTML and Google Spreadsheets. Part 2 will show how to integrate Into Wordpress.

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.