Angry tree Blender Illustration

Found this lurking in my dropbox, a quick and simple model of a tree character

Fabrikam logo ideas

Fabrikam logo ideas

August 5th, 2011

A selection of logo designs for Fabrikam – a tech support agency

Woodgrove logo design

Woodgrove logo design

August 5th, 2011

A logo for a bank, designed using Illustrator

Blender 2.5 Particle video

I’ve had a quick play with the improved particle system in Blender 2.5, and I’ve found it much better with the new UI.

The joy of CSS3

The joy of CSS3

October 29th, 2010

I’ve been looking at CSS3 this week, particularly the webkit implementation of it, and I’m amazed. This is going to be great for progressive enhancement to sites viewed in modern browsers. I had no idea it was possible to keyframe and then trigger animations within CSS.

Silverlight 4 theme brush packs

Silverlight 4 theme brush packs

October 12th, 2010

Back in March I released my award winning free Silverlight 4 theme, which provides control styles & templates, and a set of brushes to customise the look. I am going to create brush resources so you can quickly change the app, the first is a light coloured theme

DocVek Website

DocVek Website

August 27th, 2010

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.

DJ Irk – the hardliest-working man in no-business

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.

Blueyonder Website

Blueyonder Website

August 27th, 2010

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.

Blender 3D Kitchen model

Blender 3D Kitchen model

July 21st, 2010

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.

Character modelling in Blender 3D

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!

3D Character rigging and animation

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.

Blender 3D Nodes and Dupliverts

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.

Mix10 – 10 things I’d like to see announced

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 [...]

Free Silverlight 3 skin!

Free Silverlight 3 skin!

March 9th, 2010

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.

Free Silverlight 4 beta skin!

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.

Display Google Docs spreadsheets in WordPress Pt2

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.

Google Docs as a lightweight CMS Pt1

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.

Witty Twitter Silverlight Skin

Witty Twitter Silverlight Skin

February 2nd, 2010

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.

Technics 1210 3D blender model

Technics 1210 3D blender model

November 27th, 2009

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 :)

Free Silverlight and WPF loading spinners

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!

MSN Music Flash Promo

MSN Music Flash Promo

November 21st, 2009

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.

Helix Stone Carving Website

Helix Stone Carving Website

November 21st, 2009

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.

Vigilante Bespoke Website

Vigilante Bespoke Website

November 21st, 2009

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.

XAML Ninja Website + Branding

XAML Ninja Website + Branding

November 21st, 2009

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

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