misstrablog

I absolutely love this wee emotive campaign for Tropicana orange juice:

We’ve been busy the last 2 or 3 weeks working on a refresh, not a complete redesign, of the Goals website. Having had a lot of different designers working on it previously it was important for me, having to stick largely to the inherited site structure and layout, to make the site look different from what was there before without it imapcting massivly on the build time. Having done a bit of research into the site usage what I’ve come up with is a brighter site, with a  better heirarchy of content and a tidier stylesheet.

I’m working on a number of further improvements and exploring a couple of ideas we have to, as goals say, “take it to the next level!”

www.goalsfootball.co.uk

Right… I’m well aware that I’ve pretty piss poor when it’s come to blogging on my own site but it’s one of my NY resolutions to get better organised and get things done so in an effort to extend that to all facets of my life I thought I better give this blogging malarky one more go before I chuck it from my site.

As I say to clients.. there’s nothing worse than having old, out of date content on your site. So time to start racticing what I preach.

Wee idea I had for a branded mug for Peach.

A while back when Scottish Power rebranded it occured to me that there’s a certain ammount of irony in a lot of energy company logos. Being that energy and oil companies in general  do fair bit of environmental damage it’s interesing that their branding since the turn of the millenium has focused on appearing “green.”

Take BP’s logo for example:

.. a nice wee flowery green and yellow helios representative of eco-friendliness. Not representative of a company that has twice been voted in the top 10 worst companies in the world for environmetal and human rights abuses.  Notice also the similarity between the BP logo and the Green Party of Canada logo:

BP were recently shortlisted for a Greenwash award which is awarded to companies that appear to be green but aren’t.

Scottish Power doesn’t share the same noteriety as BP in terms of human rights abuse and is working hard to improve environmentally, investing heavily in refurbishment and it’s hydro electric plant and when the rebranding took place the change refelcted that.

Gone is the hi-tech diamond:

and in it’s place a new funkier and green-led set of leaves:

There are many others:

Swalec/Scottish Hydro

Lisa Jack shoots Obama in his freshman year in 1980.

Sometimes if you need to do a bit of work and you’ve not got a lot of time, things like Photoshop Shapes or Brushes can really save some time. It can be painstaking to draw splats of paint for example but take on seconds to create the same effect from a nice set of brushes. Naldz Graphics has put together a set if 30 useful (some more than others) sets of custom Photoshop Shapes.

I recently updated my own website (this one you’re reading now!) for the purposes of showing off some of my portfolio. I also made the decision to incorporate a Wordpress blog as part of the website rather than, as I had previously, my website only being a blog. This time I decided for the first time not to just use a nice theme I found and modify it slightly to give it my own stamp, but design it myself from scratch.

Another wee change I decided upon was that I would use a modal windows to display work. Modal windows are basically windows that overlay the page, or float on top of the page your on. There are a few advatages of using them, particularly when showing off larger images. Load times are quicker if because you’re only loading one element – the image. Initially I opted for the very commonly-used Lightbox but have since changed to Fancybox. Both run off JQuery library but the main reason for me to go for Fancybox over Lightbox was to enable me to add rich content to the overlay such as flash or video or even just  HTML.