Herts Business Expo

10 Mar 2011



Just got back from the Herts Expo and I am completely knackered! It was a great day, exceeding all expectations in terms of attendance, business passed, speakers and enjoyment.

I had volunteered to help raise money for Comic Relief by selling packs of materials (paper, plastic cups, straws, string etc) for the frankly extortionate price of £20, that people used to create cars to race on our specially made racetrack. Little did I realise that this would result in me being dressed from head to foot in what can only be described as a condom costume (but was apparently supposed to make me look like a car mechanic) and harassing people as they tried desperately to avoid eye contact.

I shall look more mercifully on ‘chuggers’ from now on!

We raised about £400 for Comic Relief in the end, which, while really quite impressive, would certainly have been larger had the Expo been less darned good. With so many companies and so much business being passed in the room, we could hardly expect people to spend their day manufacturing small paper cars to race on our track. Frankly inconsiderate planning I call it.

But well done to Katrina Sargant and Karen Birch of the Business Club for organising a Business Expo against which all future events will be measured.

Tangled - Disney's back!

9 Feb 2011

In all honesty I've been completely dreading Tangled.

When it started production 8 years ago it was called Rapunzel and seemed like Disney were no longer ashamed of their fairy story roots. They had my favourite animator of all time (Glen Keane) in the director's chair and although it was CG, they really seemed to be trying to achieve something different with it.

Fast forward to a few days ago, and I was a nervous wreck of anticipation (ok, that's an exaggeration, but I did go through at least one finger nail). They'd changed the name to 'Tangled', demoted Glen Keane and pushed back the release date about a billion times. It seemed like they weren't sure about the appeal of the film, and that's never a good sign with Disney (Treasure Planet anyone?).

But it's actually a damned good film. It's funny, it's sad, it's beautiful, and it's memorable. It sits with the greats as a classic Disney film. And I don't mean that it's a film made by Disney, 'Tangled' is actually a Disney film.

And I can't give it higher praise than that.

Sure there were a couple of negatives; the music wasn't great, certainly wouldn't stand alone without the film like scores from Aladdin or Lion King; the ending could be considered slightly Beauty and the Beast; and the hair changes length from shot to shot with wild abandon...

But who cares?

Disney's back, and that's the best news I've had in a long time.Tangled review

Website review: Caloo Fitness

8 Jan 2011

Another website finished, another happy customer :)



Caloo Fitness are a Hertfordshire based Company who provide outdoor fitness and gym equipment. They approached us to design, build optimise their new site, which was to be bright, memorable and to reflect their product and company ethos.

The first thing we did in this instance was to pick a strong colour scheme that we felt really represented the company and product. Once we had that, a lot of the rest of the design fell in to place quite quickly. This was followed by the wireframe and final design. We always offer unlimited tweaks on all our designs, because we have no intention of ever letting a Client end up with a site that they're not delighted with, but in this instance there weren't any!

The concept for the design was 'serious about playing,' and we captured that through the unusual and fun layout, tempered by an easy to use navigation system and intuitive structure.

This site is to be the central hub of the campaign we're working on with Caloo, consisting of social media (blog, twitter, youtube), newsletters, and SEO. It's been very gratifying seeing the wonderful results that the new website has already created, and it's wonderful to work with a company who are so ready to listen to the advice of their web designers and take time to make social networking work really well for them

Happy Christmas!!

15 Dec 2010


Every year we like to create a Christmas card for all of our Clients, friends and anyone who seems in particular need of some festive cheer.

This is always a fun opportunity to spend some time in Photoshop without worrying too much about what happens, and this years design was a sort of long and drawn out experiment. I didn't really go in to it with a plan (other that than to draw attention to Aaron's hilariously bad ice skating skills!) but played around a lot with the composition and colour balance.

I did try to film myself creating it like last year, but the darned computer crashed halfway through!

Smile for London

4 Dec 2010

It's very rare that we get to create some animation for the sheer fun of it (and believe it or not, creating 24 images for every second can be the most amazing fun one can have by oneself!) but when we saw the brief for Smile for London we decided to have a go. And it only required 10 seconds, or 240 drawing - pah!

It's a competition to show animated films on the underground, to brighten up the drudging boredom of commuting, so we decided to create a film entitled "what do commuters think about?"



This was created in After Effects, with artwork created in Photoshop.

We know that we've got through the first round, which means a fancy soiree in that there London town for the final, which probably means we should go get a haircut...