DSC00658, originally uploaded by Tim Tim Tim.

Inspired by “The Science of Sleep”, we convered my car in cardboard, drew odd slogans and ventured into the city to catch the sights.

It took about 3 hours to completely cover the car, and was quite a gruelling process, since we had to cut sections the same shape as parts of the body work, stick it with masking tape to the car itself, and then a mixture of masking and parcel tape to the other cardboard around it. I never envisaged having lots of white bits all over it holding it all together, but the final product did look quite funny. It was important that everything was taped down securely as we didnt want any air to get under the cardboard and rip it off if we went a little too fast or the wind caught it. Read more…

SEO is now a critical requirement for any website. Without consideration for SEO, a site cannot expect to compete for vital search traffic. While important for any webmaster, SEO is also a minefield of information, some good and some bad. Not to mention that the things you need to know are hardly ever all in one place.

The following is a list of the 60 key things you should consider. Most are built into any modern content management tool, but some are not. Any SEO consultant will only go through a list much like this one and investigate to what extent your site meets these obligations, there is no other mystery to it. Read more…

As a precursor to my London-based craft afternoon, I played a game of snout or escalator. It is very easy to play. All you need is a load of random pictures. Some of snouts, some of escalators but preferably plenty that are neither. The trick is to get people to try and apply some kind of reasoning to their decision about whether the picture depicts a snout or an escalator. Without them even knowing it they have been creative.

I was initially a bit worried that no-one would want to play, but pleased when they did. It just goes to show you can come up with any old rubbish these days, and if presented professionally, with a serious learning point of some kind behind it all, people will lap it up. Great.

While working on a big media portal, I redesigned and added functionality to their content management system. This was a big achievement that really transformed the way the editors were able to publish content and so I was inspired to show the client what I had been built in a special presentation where  built the whole system out of cardboard. The highlights of this are above, and the whole presentation is at the end of this post. Read more…

Last year was a busy one creatively and so I was pleased to be recognised at the end of year Christmas bash with an award for “Most Creative Consultant”

Sadly I wasn’t available to collect the award itself and so with the help of the Dutch Ship, I produced a short acceptance speech.

It was a slightly complicated affair that involved the creation of our own green screen used to film the speech itself. Needless to say the excitement of the final product was so great the speech and delivery itself was poor, but the quality of the end 20-30 seconds more than makes up for it.

The soundtrack is a song called “Superheroes of BMX” by Mogwai, a suitably spaced out collection of drones, perfect for a big corporate bash. The overall effect was created using Adobe Premier by layering a series of images/video and the key-framing the spaceman object around Flash-style.

Note inparticular the out of proportion head, the spinning earth and stars, the clever de-masking effect  and total lack of eye contact throughout, except perhaps the smirk before the horrendous end sequence.

Screenshot of Event Tracking from CircleCube Blog

One of the great new features of Google Analytics is the ability to track events. This opens up fantastic possiblities for tracking user behaviour using ajax, flash and other widget-like behaviour on your website.

Although many websites do not necessarily have such advanced features, one feature that almost all websites have is forms. Tracking the behaviour of forms can reveal much about a users behaviour. Do they spent ages on certain fields? Which fields are most popular? How long does it take to complete a form? Read more…