About The Journal
Photo by: Sebastian Mayer
A list of my designs throughout the years, from websites to games.
Sony Eyetoy Product site
Published 18th of Oct, 2004. Stored under Design
This was a pitch for Sony’s newly announced (at time of writing, Jan ’05) “kenetics” game, providing gym workouts for users. Obviously both our marketing team and our creative team at Babel wanted to win this project, unfortunatly it didn’t work out that way – however I think the 3d demo was very strong and if we had won the pitch then the creative team and myself would have made one of the best websites Sony had ever seen… (!)
Many thanks to James Tindal and John Godwin.
If you are using an Intel Mac, you will not be able to see the above Director plugin, as Adobe have sadly not yet released a version of the director player that works on Intel Macintoshes.
Atari Global Site
Published 12th of Jul, 2004. Stored under Design
Atari asked us to pitch for the new global website (for the second round) but again closed off the pitch after we submitted the designs. The Atari global website was later made inhouse by Atari’s team in America, and looks suprisingly like the above images…
Transformers online marketing
Published 15th of May, 2004. Stored under Design
When Atari ask for banners, it is because the ones they have are shit and they know that much better can be done. Much better was done! Initially this was just a localisation job but because the banners were so utterly shite, they asked me to come up with a new Art Direction.
Babel Media Homepage 2004
Published 9th of May, 2004. Stored under Design
Considering this was an internal project, we didn’t come off too badly! I spent about 6 months on and off making the site, which was finally put live at the end of 2004. The map thing on the top left was borrowed from a website made back in 2000 for a quake3 mod I ran called GTP.
Atari Homepage Pitch1
Published 21st of Oct, 2003. Stored under Design
Wow! Lot’s of work put into this classy looking website pitch. It looked like myself and Tom Jackson had hit the nail in the head with loving smiles and emails of joy from Atari Europe.
“tumbleweed rolls by”
We finally found out that the project had been put on hold and they didn’t want a website just yet. (we were later to re-pitch with another website design that fucking rocked! Which the American division of Atari stole and still use to this day, nice!)
Play Parker Games
Published 9th of Sep, 2003. Stored under Design
Hasbro came to Babel looking for some translations and came away with an excelent walk through guide with original illustrations, animations and all in 12 languages to boot. Sadly this wonderfull site didn’t ever go live, because Hasbro pulled the plug at the last minute after a corporate restructuring.
We still got paid though, which was nice!
check out the archive below for some animation fun.
Kirby Microsite
Published . Stored under Design
“Think Pink” would have been an innovative title for this glitzy yet seemingly droll and probably mind numbingly boring game. Here I made the cut down version of the American website in various European languages, tricky work because of the differing lengths of (German) words.
Furifuri Homepage
Published 19th of Jun, 2001. Stored under Design, pixelart
Above showing the sprite sheet for a website I made.
The website can be launched by clicking here, or in the archive below.
Furi Furi are based in Tokyo and design characters for promotional items and games, they aslo have a thiving toy business. While I was working for Furifuri, in a department called DV4, we handled web work and flash animation. This department was disbanded in 2002ce.
wcrs london
Published 28th of Apr, 2001. Stored under Design, pixelart
Made just before I left for Tokyo to work for Furifuri, this is a design for the WCRS homepage that ran for about 2 years. (since 2001)
I remember we had an insane amount of problems getting the menu to work, as transparent effects were not really cross browser compatible at the time. In the end we found out that internet explorer and netscape on the PC could use a directX feature, while the Mac (on which we developed) could use PNG alpha, with a bit of Javascript serving to move it around / identify the platform.
PNG alpha has only just been supported on the PC, some 5 years late!
Utah Saints Homepage
Published 28th of Oct, 2000. Stored under Design
Another Echo deal with Kleber, I was responsible for another Echo website. Joy! Because this time it was for my personal heros, the Utahsaints!
It was the usual story for Echo, they have a daft old website that hardly works and need a spanking new one, to beat the shit out of an old image.
The Utahsaints had been missing in action for quite some time, until they hooked up with some other people who had been missing for quite sometime, to release a plethora of singles, a tie-in with a Japanese game, and much more besides (these guys go on tour for years, not months).
The sites image was cocktailed by myself, a little less extreme than my original intentions, and directed by a guy called Dorian, who left Kleber some months later to pursue other interests. He set-up Kleber with a guy called Chris, who still owns the company to this day.
Sufficed to say, this website was a hit! Unfortunately, the Utahsaints were not. I’m not sure what they are doing of late – but rest assured they’ll be doing it in style!
beatles helpgame sprites
Published 2nd of Sep, 2000. Stored under Design, pixelart
Sprite sheet for the Beatles Helpgame.
It was a long time ago when we produced this game at Kleber, it all came about before “habbos hotel” (to claim second place on multiplayer isometric pixel chat rooms, after the legendary but forgotten Mobiles Disco). Not that it did us any good, myself and the programmer slogged it out for three months to make a game that was never publicised and is virtually unheard of. I did all the graphics and a lot of the game design.
The site has long since been offline, but I have linked a fan site in the archive in this post.
Undertones
Published 28th of May, 2000. Stored under Design
A few halfhour interviews, some tiny little meetings, a few cd’s worth of album artwork, I was ready to create a website. It was more of an archive than anything else, with precise information on each and every release… ever, in each country. Basic website precision and the ability to be updated by ‘dreamweaver’, this site was somewhat a walk in the park to create.
But to my shock I later discovered that the Undertones are not rich off thier blinding punk rock carrer. Nope. One of them is dead, some of the others are on welfare, and one recently fixed my step aunties bathroom in London!
Creation records
Published 28th of Mar, 2000. Stored under Design
I made 3 microsites for Creation records before they pulled the plug in 2001. Creation was home to bands like Oasis and Super Furry Animals.
Microsites I worked on were: LeTone, Guided By Voices and Kevin Rowland.
BabyBird (Stephen Jones)
Published . Stored under Design
‘you’re gorgeous’
No really, you are.
Babybird’s most famous song, a legacy that he seems be trying to forget. His latest album is called Bugged.
Echo approached Kleber in the past to produce the Moloko site, and favouring us to do a good job they wanted Babybird to have the same treatment.
We devised a PHP system for the site to run on and I took the artwork and ran with it. End result? A website that meets all the fans needs and more; all the sections are colour coded and are pulled together on the front of the site into a timeline, clever stuff. (edit: kinda like what wordpress does now!)
When we replaced the doddering old Babybird site with our new one some people did complain at the forum (people are always gonna complain, let face it) but after a while they got used to it. You can tell a good forum by how busy it is, if people start to complain or praise down the line then you know its been over designed. Well no-one is complaining now!
Moloko
Published 12th of Mar, 2000. Stored under Design
With hits from new to old, Moloko are not new on the scene, unfortunately, neither was their doddering old website.
When Echo records came to us to ask for the makeover, we at Kleber were delighted to take on what could only be a good project.
I spent several weeks on the design, which seems like such a long time, but I had it down to work on all browsers *with* lots of added features for newer browsers too, the site was then given the php treatment to make it work well. The site also included some trickery to make it seem to take up all of the browser window whatever size it was set at, not just a fixed width… kind of a trademark technique in Kleber at the time.
The site generated a bit of press and won some sort of award I belive… Although whoever gave it, we didn’t receive it, that was the duty of Moloko (the band) who probably didn’t even know they had a website in the first place. I went on to write a few articles for web magazines about the reward scheme on the site (whereby you collect items scattered around the pages to unlock a secret page which held goodies.
Koot
Published 28th of Jan, 2000. Stored under Design
Flash 4 based interview I slapped together for one of the best bands never to make it… I mean, ahem, they sort of made it. I have no clue where they are now. They do still have a website though, but its changed drastically since they were on their old record label.
I’ve not yet found thier album ‘kosmosis’ in any shops, but I hope it got released in the end.
Mira Calix
Published 10th of Jan, 2000. Stored under Design
Was great fun making this. Some of my first flash 4 work. I met Mira and she gave me a special bee badge (edit: which I still own to this day!)
Merz
Published 28th of Oct, 1999. Stored under Design
Now ousted from the mother label Sony, with a different site to boot, this Merz website is old history.
I used to update the old Merz website when he was up & coming. When he decided to release his first album, we shut down the old website to be replaced with this.
A journey of html, art (by the talented Kam Tang), photography and music.
Merz is a talented man, and his music is great. Hell, I damn well put together a great website for the guy too. Chris at Kleber directed my efforts, to create a final product that I could well say was one of the first really decent sites I ever managed to get out the door.