Whether I'm making an application/site, doing an illustration or working on a video piece:
I enjoy the creation process, refining ideas from that vague concept to producing/directing the final polished project. I have a strong illustrative background and am addicted to code, from making digital playthings to full blown web applications.. I love to find new ways of doing things.
Over the past few years i have been toying with designing T-shirts and hoddies for my family and friends, and with my move away from London i am hoping to have a bit more time to dedicate to making some nice designs to put up on MY SHOP.
I have been using the awesomely brilliant Spreadshirt for a while now, they offer great quality clothing (and some great name brands) printed with custom designs, i especially like the flock option! They seem to print each shirt to order, my first hoody i made 4 years back is still going strong so please do go and check out my shop or Click here for printed t-shirts from Spreadshirt.
Just had a great evening at dotbrighton being one of three speakers for the evening.
I talked through what it was like working in a newsroom, deadlines and story telling - but i think the thing that really intrigued the audience was my insanely excessive use of divs in my interactives! hey, they degrade well ok?
I helped to make the Flash on the beach conference mobile app this year with the guys from Jadehopper. I did the design and illustration, plus the mapping component - with @plo doing all of the backend and caching stuff, and @niqui dealing with the front end dev and CSS. It was a real priviledge to see people using our app around the conference and it seemed to impress.
On another note, John (the event organizer) has announced that this will be the final year of the conference called 'Flash on the beach' as the name doesn't really fit what the conference is about any more; It has moved from a flash focused event to a broader design, code and inspiration conference with sessions ranging from terminal coding to after effects demos to design theories. Whatever the next incarnation of the event is, i look forward to attending as it is always the best coference of the year!
Royal Television Society Award for Innovative News: World Cup Twitter Buzz Data Visualization | CNN International
A standout entry in terms of engaging viewers online, the winner demonstrated an innovative way of
illustrating trending, and extending the news story.
This year I joined CNN International's digital Senior Editor and Sports Editor on stage at the Hilton Park Lane to collect an award for our 'world cup twitter buzz' which was a great honor, and a project i had a lot of fun building with colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic.
My first proper foray into the world of mobile apps. Working with the awesome Jadehopper team, i helped structure the app and designed the layouts for the various targeted devices - tablets, mobile phones, portrait, landscape etc.. We had some including including a live twitter map and i illustrated various things around the app including different splash screens for each iOS device (at the time these are the only devices to support them).
The main point of the app was to show schedule/speaker info and that it had to work offline as people would be travelling from abroad and not have a data plan here. Paulo achieved this with an offline manifest and webDB - all of the conference data was cleverly polled from Lanyrd.com.
Recently completed site done for a very talented photographer. With the front-end made entirely in flash, and a PHP/mySQL admin system so Matt can upload new categories/images whenever he needs to.
A personal site to track my rail nightmares that has evolved in to a web app for everyone, targeted at smart phones.
Are you a regular commuter?..Want to keep track of your delays, cancellations, the stupid excuses given and vent your spleen whilst hauling your sorry self about on the Souths' wonderful railways? This is the site for you!
A very minimalist site for the creator of hubculture.com, allowing people to offer resources to be traded with ven(hub's own currency) - The main lift with this site was the submission form, which is very long and needed to be thoroughly validated(in-line, as refilling out that length of form would be tedious) - the turn around time for this project was very small(under a week) and i also had to build the scripts to handle database storage and an admin system to approve submissions.
I created new interactive headers each month for this project to reflect the current topics on offer on the site (all future tech based) - each element had its own Easter egg that the user may or may not find.
A map using the Nokia maps API, and also utilising their new heatmap feature.
I decided on a different style of presenting the content linked from the map, and decided on a more illustrative style for the map pins (and it gave me a chance to draw some animals!).
This was a difficult one, not really to build, but to conceptualise the range of data.
When i was given the initial spreadsheets of data relating to female members of the workforce throughout the world i had a bit of a brain freeze..
The glaring thing about some of the numbers for different countries was that they started around the thousands and went up to the hundereds of millions! Now showing that on screen is a little impossible - so i decided to make a viz that zoomed.
A visualization showing unemployment rates, GDP and debt figures for all of the 17 Eurozone members (countries that are part of the single currency).
I particularly like fiddling with the way the to views of the data animates between each other, and the seperate ability to sort the data in graph view.
This interactive was designed from the ground up to work on multiple devices - initially in a page on the CNN.com Davos special report, but will also be used on a large touch screen for TV broadcasts and possibly on tablets around the actual event.
Details the world's 10 most populated cities and their annual carbon emissions. There is currently no standard approach by which cities measure their carbon output. The figures represented within this chart are drawn from cities' own inventories, the methodologies for which vary from city to city.
Made with Javascript and CSS3 - the challenge here was getting the divs to act like circles
For a series of Programmes airing about global hubs and logistics, this infographic shows the bulk of commodities going through the port of Hamburg, and the main countries relying on the port.
I also made a map to host timelapse videos that we were provided.
Originally prototyped in flash, I created this using jQuery and Canvas (exCanvas for the oh so wonderful IE) - Data is pulled in from external resources and rendered on page load, so this can be updated easily or even run from live data. I've also implemented secondary navigation using the keyboard to flick between slides/datapoints.
A map and panorama viewer for tourists coming to watch the Royal wedding. I went out and shot super high resolution 360 degree panoramas (using a gigapan) - as this needed to be viewed on devises as well as desktops, i managed to bypass the proprietry software that comes with the hardware by customising google streetview with my own tile sets.
I also had to create a tool to allow placement of markers/photos/videos/links to other panoramas within the gigapans.
I built the core of this map in 2 days - with the brief being to visually show what areas in japan were being hit hardest by the terrible events occurring in Japan in March. This had to be device friendly (including iOS) so i developed a reusable solution in javascript, fueled by XML that is generated by our current CMS.
For the first time i utilized custom styling with the google maps api to make the map feel more like our site, and implemented custom infowidows(the map pop-ups) to fit even more closely with the CNN style.
This is a project that i heavily worked on from concept to development(i coded the viz in as3) and running the app.
It collected all world cup related tweets over the tournament in real-time and every 5 seconds updated the treemap. People could scrub through previous games or the entire competition, to see trending teams, players and subjects.
CNN received an RTS Award for this project and it has received high praise from a lot of sites including mashable.
A data-visualization showing global power consumption, CO2 emissions from it, the amount of each continents' energy that came from renewable sources - and also the population of the region.
This showed some surprising information that we probably wouldn't have noticed with the huge spreadsheets i was pulling data from.
User submitted photos and memories, along with archive footage of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Half of the world's population already lives in urban areas -- and that figure is poised to swell. The United Nations estimates that by 2050, more than two-thirds of the world's population will live in cities.
This Heat map tracks urban population growth over the world from 1950 to (projected) 2030.
To illustrate the trend in modern tect for 'faster than real time' computing - predicting a users requirements before they know it themselves. This Article and image kicked off CNN.com's coverage of LeWeb London.
Read the full story by Andrew Keen here
An infographic for CNN showing the tiny amount of fresh water worldwide that is available for human consumption, and the woefully inadequate conditions that a lot of urban populations in the developing world live in.
Because of my hatred of seagulls, i decided to litter various parts of the flash on the beach '11 mobile web app with brightons own heron gulls, from intimidating splash screens to amuzing ditties when things go wrong.
Hopefully planning on making these into something in the coming months - so keep your eyes peeled.
I also decided to slip in a little avatar that i drew of the conference organizer John, and we made all of the illustrations into a poster, got the speakers to sign it and presented it to him at the end of the conference.
Based on a brief for numerous possibilies of illustrations of kitties for a digital company (hopefully i can unveil the finished product soon) - this little fella was one of the illustrations that was ditched, so i thought i'd color him in and give him a home here.
Based on a data table provided by the palace - this illustration helped to show general grouping of guests and gave a snapshot of the balanced nature in which Kate and William (and the state) invited guests.
Read the full article here >>
A personal project to show appreciation to my great friends - for their help and support over the past year or so. Limited to a run of 13, each printed in a unique color combination, signed, numbered and framed. I gave these to the people in the illustration for Christmas.
A series of illustrations for a 'what type of football fan are you?' quiz. This was the 'arm chair fan', users could download their result as a background or send the result to facebook.
Two illustrations depicting good and bad comments about the nature of 'information' conveyed on social sites such as facebook and twitter to embellish a related article on what people believe based on the amount of people that substantiate a claim compared to their belief in traditional media.
Panama and UAE home to two of the greatest engineering projects of the 20th century
Panama Canal has served nearly one million vessels since opening in 1915
Jebel Ali port in Dubai is home to the largest man-made harbor in the world
Both are vital trade hubs shipping millions of tons of goods every year
In 2009, i worked on some caricatures of Billy for an hour long (docu) show about his tour around Ireland.
The images were used to mark places on maps, and for wipes/transitions.
Various title sequences, promos and color/animations for CNN over the past year or so. My main tools were Cinema4D, After Effects, Flash and FCP. More recently I have been working lot on some personal animations to learn to rig my models and also helping out with visuals for the UK Air guitar championships. You can download my showreel here
Download Video: MP4,
