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

Ah, classic Spaced. This phrase comes in handy so often these days…

Someone even went through the time and trouble of making an internet site for it: www.whataprick.net.
What sort of twisted person does this in their spare time? (25 minutes to be exact)

Well it’s not normally the best time to launch site (late at night, 12 hours before leaving for France) but I’ve just put my latest little project up and on to the internet, www.rotornot.co.uk.

ROT or NOT is a sister site for Crawl of the Dead. It works by showing random zombies who are registered on Crawl of the Dead, and letting internet users rate them. It’s just a bit of fun but hopefully a nice way of attracting new zombies to sign up on to CrawlOfTheDead.com.

Now I just wait for the spammers to hack my code to shreds, they tend to enjoy sites like this.

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!

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.