design

New Blog Design Excitement!

You know the deal; you tidy up one bit of the room and end up tearing down the house and re-building it from scratch. No? Just us? OK then. Well we thought we’d tweak the design of our blog a bit, and it ended up taking about 3 weeks of getting seriously mucky with things like jQuery, CSS animation and lots of content re-organising – but it’s done now.

We’ve ditched our flash header (not sure why, but we have), and rolled our own Flickr image thingy, which is a bit buggy, what the hell. Also ditched all the pages for things like our work and made everything a blog post with now just a few categories to organise it all (those little black buttons in the top right). Added a dandy featured posts widget on the category pages so you can jump to just our favourite stuff, and check out the archive page for a Tumblr inspired look.

Apologies to anybody unfortunate enough to be subscribed to our RSS feed for the last few weeks, most of the site had to be spat out again and we couldn’t work out how to hide it from the feed.

Let us know what you think – mainly if anything is broken.

Hoxton Street Monster Supplies

We’d like to proudly present the Hoxton Street Monster Supplies online store. Here you’ll find all your monster supply needs, from fang floss to a range of tinned fear (now in 10 flavours).

The store on Hoxton Street, London (yes, it’s a real place) actually hides a secret door, that (if you can work out the password) leads to the Ministry of Stories – a child literacy charity that hosts imagination flexing events for kids to write fantastic stories (much in the same vein as 826 Valencia with their pirate store in SF, Super Hero Supplies in NY and the Time Travel Mart in LA).

There’s a gang of us involved in The Monster Supplies site, Me n Jas did the design, concept and product photography, UX was by Mike Towber, Simon Pearson built the thing, Alistair Hall directed the art, and Chris Meachin held the reins and ran the whole project. We also designed the launch party for the site, along with some brilliant monster animations from Julian Frost, and monsterous food by Emma Cakehead. Here’s some photos of the party:

Asploding Digital Design

The Design Museum is running an exhibition called Super Contemporary, it’s about the history of design in London. They kindly asked us geeks at Poke to make a map charting the history of the digital design scene from 1994 to today. So we made this map thingy in flash that you control with a proper real world knob that sits patiently under the big old plasma screen in the exhibit. The knob magic is achieved with some help from an Arduino.

Gathering all the data was not exactly simple, we needed to know staff numbers for most of the digital agencies in London (sorry, we couldn’t include them all) for each quarter of each year for 13 years, and a lot of them don’t exist anymore. A lot of favours were pulled, and many painful wounds re-opened. We thought about being respectful about when each company died during the bubble burst… but then thought ‘sod it’ and made them TOTALLY ASPLODE!!!1 instead.

Of course when I say ‘we’ did it, what I really mean is me n Jas designed it and animated some bits, the hard stuff was done by TV’s Chris Boardman. The data gatherer was The Hoss and Mr Zolty was the knob guy.

Here’s some photos of it being installed, and some mild panic of getting the damn thing working.

Waiting for Gorgo, set build and shoot

The shoot for the film we were working on at Elstree Studios finished last weekend (we did the graphic design and helped with the set build), and we’ve just got all photos together of the final set build and shooting for you all to see. It all turned out looking quite splendid.

Enjoy