Today is a good day. I have a new full time job! And it's the best job evaaar!
My head will be in the clouds for a while.
Incidentally, it turns out that the woman in the video is Simon Pegg's Mum. Great! (thanks to typecub for that!)
Time flies eh? I've not posted for ages now.
So. What have I been up to, I don't hear you cry? Well. The good news is that I've been pretty busy.
Firstly, I've been working with Brighton based design studio Yard. They've had a number of projects which I've been involved with and it's been great to work with their clients who include So Connected (part of the Selfridges & Co), Luxury Briefing and Blink eyebrow bars.
I've also been working for Mosaic, a full service agency. Working in-house at their central Brighton based office is great, giving me a change of scenery with some friendly faces.
I am also working with music promotion company Music House once more, overhauling their existing content management system and developing a long term digital download service for users of their music promotion service.
Along with a handful of other projects, I'm well and truly being kept busy at the moment. Expect a site update in the next few months with a portfolio update and examples of work. Hopefully.
Little Big Planet, the PlayStation 3 video game that I've been waiting a long time for, finally came out at the end of last month.
I've teamed up with Spaff and we've come up with some great ideas for the growing community, so we went ahead and made our own community site. We've just finished the first phase of it and its online now at www.littlebigplanetoid.com.
Since recently deciding to leave my last full time job, in disgust at the companys behaviour, I'm a full time freelance designer - so its been easier to squeeze this in amongst my new projects lining themselves up at the moment.
The design of Little Big Planetoid was done quite quickly but its always nice to flex out ideas with personal projects. The number of 24-bit PNG's is almost silly, but it looks quite nice so, well - screw those IE 6 users, eh?
My recent TK Page Title module for Expression Engine has come in really handy during the development of the site. Infact, it's led to me refining the module further.
Anyway, if you're interested in the game, then head over to Little Big Planetoid, they'll be lots more content heading on to the site in the coming months. Oh, almost forgot to mention its sister site, which I also designed and built recently, Little Big Fans - kind of a web-ring for fan sites of the game.
It’s been a while since I popped a WordPress blog on to my site and starting posting, but a few things have niggled me about the site and its design, so I wanted to tidy things up a bit.
Here you go then, tomkiss.net revamped. A little. I’ve uninstalled WordPress and switched over to Expression Engine, which makes life a bit easier.
Apart from a massive, spanking image of my face on the homepage, there’s not much new on the site apart from the design. Anyways, I’ve still got some tidying up to do for those people using archaic browsers, so if you notice anything I’ve missed, then please feel free to pop it in a comment and I can fix it.
Toodly pip-pop!
Last week saw the arrival of the NCsoft billboard in central Brighton. The advert, for NCsoft, is up for 4 weeks at the top of North Road, which means it's up there during the Develop conference in Brighton.
This will be my first ever billboard, woot. Well - I say 'my' but the adverts' graft is essentially a 2 man job. Various ideas came up from discussions in the team, Will (fellow designer in the team) and I then developed suggested ideas to pitch internally.
The 'reflected worlds' creative got picked. Will and I set out to find a decent location for a shoot, which we then did the following week with Mat (our in house photograpy chap) and some suitably looking "Brighton" people.
Then the Photoshoping began, I got the initial composition sorted, tidied up all those horrible rusty railings along the seafront and made that water look a bit more inviting and all sorts of other tweaks. I passed it on to Will who did a fine job at sifting through the amends and perfecting the image to its final state. Done. Sorted.
I'm quite pleased with the end result. Will and I actually took some video clips of passers by to guage their reactions. Probably not the best idea that, ahem (it really is easy to forget what the average person knows about 'online games'). But still - the advert does what it set out to do: tell people that NCsoft are in Brighton and make online games. Woohoo. Pats on backs all-round.
Keep an eye out for the Bling Gnome we hid in there ;)
I've just finished work on my second version of Crawl of the Dead!
Ever since the site launched I have not been pleased with it, so after a few months of hard spare-time graft, I've finished version 2. Or "2.0" if you like. It's got some general improvements to the design plus some new features.
CrawlOfTheDead.com is a social networking site for Zombies. "Because zombies need friends too..."
If you're a zombie, get yourself over there!
I recently had the chance to spend a week in Korea as part of NCsoft's 'Global Stars' program. Aha - That overtime did pay off!
It was an absolutely great week, spent enjoying the food & drink, discovering Seoul, visiting the G Star games expo, and generally learning about Korean culture. Here's a few photos from the trip...
Seoul - Lots of tall buildings, you find yourself mostly looking up...
...not all buildings are tall thankfully.
Thought this was cool. A little service area for your Nintendo DS, complete with clearning solution, screen wipes and dust blowers.
Life is THIS happy! Korea is full of cute things, this is part of a booth at G Star.
The inevitable booth babe shots. These gals are promoting upcoming NCsoft title, Aion.
Pretty feathers.
They start 'em young in Korea.
Percussion freaks!
Wow, the XBox360 has a Karaoke title!?
The upcoming game Punch Monster had some of the cutest characters I've ever seen.
The toilet was a new experience. No longer is there just a button for 'flush'.
It's been a while, well - over a year now, that the old server I was on died in a terrible accident. I lost lots of data, precious data and those precious websites I had sitting on it. Eventually, new hosting was sorted out and slowly, one by one, I've been adding sites to it, some new, some old.
Well this one is old. Old but classic. RandyHands.com! How could I forget about RandyHands?! It provided such entertainment back in 2005 when I, er, got it up. And it's back on 'tinternet once more. Yay!
Enjoy. Enjoy and post pictures of your hands in compromising positions... :)
Discover Guild Wars is flash based promotional site for the Guild Wars trilogy of games. I set about designing Discover Guild Wars at the end of 2006; the project later expanded in to a two-man team project which was great considering the amount of work to be done. I’m quite pleased with the results, the original designs didn’t have to change too much and with Flash supporting Blend modes and layer styles, it makes life alot easier. Anyway, Discover Guild Wars is available in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Polish. Nice.
I learnt a few things too. Mainly, that this mctween class is awesome (nice one Marek).
And never, ever use shared Library items in Flash. They’re an utter pain in the arse.
The European Exteel website, is one of the smaller projects I’ve worked on at NCsoft. It’s a teaser site for a mech game, Exteel. But oddly, this site is one of the most pleasing pieces of work I’ve ever done. I think perhaps due to it’s scale, I’ve managed to complete everthing to the standard I’m happy with and at the same time not had to compromise my design too much through the amends process.
Maybe it’s the use of Pin Light blends and those awesome hexagon patterns that makes me like it. Or the BIG ROBOTS.