York's new immersive VR entertainment destination, obilViaR, needed a website to match the excitement of its virtual reality experiences. Tasked with bringing the vibrant vision of web designer Lucy Rigley to life, I developed a bespoke Laravel website with a focus on creating an overall feeling of depth and fluidity, mirroring the engaging nature of the virtual reality experiences offered. This vision translated into the incorporation of smooth, airy animations, designed to captivate visitors and hint at the fluid nature of virtual reality itself.

As always, it is easier to create a database to ensure a simple dynamic management of games and experiences. Despite a rapid project turnaround, the site seamlessly integrates a third-party booking system, providing a smooth and efficient user journey from browsing to booking a VR adventure. The obilViaR website serves as the digital gateway to York's only dedicated VR experience, inviting both first-timers and seasoned VR enthusiasts to discover the immersive fun that awaits.

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Stadler rail needed an easy to use system for keeping track of the running condition, defects and cleanliness of their rolling stock.

Using my OnSight reporting system as a base, I developed a bespoke PWA and SaaS system that allows the client to keep track of all their rolling stock in one digital place. This gives the employees a very user-friendly way to input data as they repair and clean the rolling stock. It gives management a clear overview, along with graphed KPIs and historical tabled data, of the state of each carriage. The system also gives some BI perception of where potential bottlenecks occur over single carriages and the whole stock.

The system is fully responsive and works on all devices, including iOS and Android for the front end reporting and any higher resolution displays for the admin backend. The system has been running for over 3 years now without any hick-ups or complaints and we are excited to further develop it's remit in the future.

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ACCA, the global body for accountants, have hundreds of designers working around the globe on various branded work. To help keep this brand consistent, I was tasked by Barley Partners, the brand guardians, to create an online space where the latest brand guidelines could be quickly updated and distributed to all the locally based designers in each region.

Barley are great to work along side and gave me a long-leash in the functionality and UXD of the CMS - as long as it was clean and up to their standards, everyone was happy - especially the final client, the brand manager of ACCA. Very happy clients is always the goal :)

The system is a versioning content resource management system (CRM), as such it keeps a track of each new upload item (digital brand guidelines, video assets etc) and versions each new update to existing items. Each user’s download is also tracked so the system can show users that are new to them and give ACCA a real-time overview of who is missing the latest update or hasn’t downloaded the files they should be using. This all helps keep the brand’s voice consistent on a global scale.

Thanks to the success of the initial system, the client commissioned a further phase of the project. This second part is to facilitate the automatic sending out of emails to sets of people on the main email list (the designers around the globe). So I built a bespoke email system that allows the client a simple but flexible CMS for building branded emails that can then be sent out to groups of people as needed. For instance, if the email is to inform video operators that there are some new assets they may want to use, we\’d only send this to the relevant people. As I quite enjoy tracking analytics to gain some business insight, I added the ability to see who had opened the email and the ability for the client to add tracking to any part of the email, normally a call to action button saying “download the new assets”.

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Core systems was developed from a very exact client brief that had everything they needed to digitally run national civil engineering contracts without a hitch …well, more importantly, with a system that can handle the unknown hiccups that would inevitably crop up on such large projects.

I designed the front end to be clean, simple and most of all: user-friendly. My user experience design always puts the users first; this is a working tool and not a pretty marketing campaign. I built the front-end in a mixture of HTML5 and javascript for realtime interaction with the API backend, built by an off-shore company.

The system is very comprehensive, covering the whole scope from start to finish of the contract. From client database, proposal, baseline timetable and costs forecasts and digital contracts before the work started. Once the on-site work was underway the system tracked every aspect of the job digitally, it is important to have a perfect trail of documents for this type of work for transparency and audit reasons, as the end clients are often public or govt. bodies but also when managing projects with budgets into the millions, you need to be able to see where the cost has gone. Included were a daily work diary to log all workers’ hours on-site, a ‘change request’ system with various automatically generated impact assessments and dynamic graphs and tables clearly showing costs and time efforts.

The system has a real-time summary overview and can generate more in-depth weekly progress reports, giving the managers an invaluable oversight week on week, to help them spot and solve problems before they become large issues. The system also has to handle the raising of invoices and tracking of payment against each change request and timetabled payment, this was logged per instance but also I generated the culmative data into tables and graphs for user ease - designing a user-friendly system is about putting the correct information in front of the user just as much as it is making sure they can navigate the system with ease.

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Developed for the Royal Institute of Great Britain. from some of my game concepts. The InsideOut website is designed for 11-14 year olds to help inspire them to science. I created 3 games for the site, Human Cannonball, Energy Quest and Flick the Flea.

The InsideOut site was showcased in DIGIT magazine and BAFTA nominated.

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From my original interface concept UI design, I produced an exciting learning tool for 11-14 year olds to learn about the UK and it's places of interest they can visit. The spinning menu and zooming map are an exciting way into the roughly 2000 pieces of database driven content. This flagship application of gridClub.com helped the site walk away with a BAFTA, a BETT and an Emma Foundation award.

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Natural England tasked us (I worked along-side a great digital web designer lucy Rigley on this one) with designing and building a very responsive website for their Humberhead Peatlands National Nature Reserve.

We needed to make sure we organised and displayed the large amount of content that Natural England needed to get across to the users. The site needed to be content management system driven and responsive for mobiles, tablets and desktops without losing the content or context. This was a full service project; from IA, taxonomy, UX design, branding (they previously used Natural England's umbrella brand) to responsive web build (including bringing in the latest news, images and albums from Facebook) and finally web hosting and then even CMS training.

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To help streamline the the day to day business for its employees, Merseyrail tasked me with designing and building an Android app for phonebook look up. There were a few complications to be considered; namely phones don't always have data connections underground where a fair amount of employers are. I solved this problem by running a local couch database on the device. Each month (and first-run) the app checks if it has a data connection and if it does, it will sync with the latest contact data and update it's local database ready for off-line use again. I wrote the API for this and also the backend PHP to query Merseyrail's Active Directory/LDAP employee directory to make sure we had up to date information.

The client also needed bespoke lists of extra contact details beyond the bulk Active Directory numbers, list of station phone numbers, emergency numbers etc. For these I employed a bespoke database for quick access and fed this into the API so all the data came from the single source as far as the app was concerned.

The app utilises 2 factor authentication for added security of the senstive data; utilsing Google Authenticator API as well as generating QR codes for quick scanning. Administering the day-to-day contact details was done via Microsoft Active Directory. But the client needed a bespoke web-based admin interface to curate and update the bespoke lists of contacts. For this I designed and built a the CMS as a single page web app (using mostly HTML5, javascript/jQuery, php & mySQL) with a focus on an easy to use UI to help avoid training costs for the client.

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I produced a cross device mobile application for the nice people in the fashion and textiles dept. of The School of Arts and Digital Industries of The University of East London.

The app scales to fit any screen on iOS and android devices. We have lots of video and PDF content, which is browsable via the app, along with database of FAQs. I also created the CMS and database that powers this app and allows management of the videos, PDFs and FAQ items. The web service chooses the most relevant video size for the device, so we don't waste bandwidth.

The app was designed to be used offline too. Allowing the students to download the content they need, while they are on the Uni's wifi, for later use. So no more having to reply on decent wifi (now there is no excuse to not work on the tube too).

I also built the accompanying support website (no longer online).

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The client came to me to concept, design and build several interactive 'attractor' apps for their latest line of very large multi-touch TVs. These TVs are located in hotel lobbies, trade shows, clubs etc. They play one of the attractor apps in demo mode until a passer-by's interest is piqued and they investigate and play with attractor.

Each interactive had to interesting enough in demo mode but also highly 'touchable' and playful when a user (or multiple users) came to play. The high-end TVs have an nice Android system on-board to run these interactives.

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I designed and built a roster system for Merseyrail that handles their very complicated shift patterns and rota systems for all their stations and support workers. Admin users can easily add new rotas, build shift patterns, add new people to shifts from the LDAP employee lookup system and generate shift sheets for any future week.

Designed with the user at the forefront of the UI and built using HTML, javaScript, php and mySQL.

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Merseyrail had a lot of staff missing out on access to their intranet because they were not in the same place long enough to log onto their desktop machines. The solution was a set of 90+ touchscreens dotted around station break rooms and driver rest stops, that had all the best from the intranet and was a gateway to more in-depth info.

The screens show lots of 'quick bite' snippets of dynamic information; the current weather direct from the MET office, line running status, latest news etc. But also have meatier servings like an LDAP powered employee lookup, 'post-it' note message system for staff comms, latest Merseyrail news stories, job vacancies, commonly needed forms along with the usual high-frequency external links of Google, Network Rail, BBC news etc.

The frontend UI is built using HTML, CSS & javaScript with a PHP & mySQL backend. Fun-fact: I took a photo for each of the possible weather conditions for the weather 'tile', but it was hard to test properly as it only ever rains in Liverpool ;)

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I was tasked with bringing a very well established maths tutoring site up to date and into the mobile age. After an initial period of R&D, I designed and built a flexible and scalable UI with a full example tutorial ready for user testing and demoing to investors.

The tutorials are step by step and reactive; they will explain the same point in another way, with supporting animation, if the user didn't quite understand the first time. Technically it had to work on desktop, tablets and mobiles with an emphasis on the varied mobiles in use in schools around the globe. This spawned lots of problems in the design; trying to avoid just going for the lowest common denominator and keeping the highly engaging flow and animation to aid the understanding and retention of the lesson. The UI can work in both portrait and landscape and has a 'split' bar so the user can fine-tune the UI themselves, throughout the lessons, if they prefer the emphasis to be on the tutorial's animation and explanation or the accompanying (multi-lingual) text explanation. Flexible guided learning is key here.

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I love the challenge of visualising massive data sets in an organic and user friendly way. Whether it be a small graphic to show loads of weather information in a single glance or creating dynamic environments that evolve as you navigate a massive database to find that useful set of data out of the 70,000+ items.

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Whenever I get a spare moment I try and make a small program that helps explore an area of computational design. This is design (or art) that is created through the use of interactive/iterated algorithms. These vary from experimental interfaces to 10 minute toys. ...mostly just used to generate nice posters ;)

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I like being a freelance designer and developer as I get to work with lots of nice people, once again with the smart people at Tangent90 I built a local installation that played out over a few plasma screens in the entrance of Selfridges London. The installation took pictures of everyone coming through the door, which then where cropped to a head and shoulders image, which then found themselves 'dropping' into my mosaic of other customer's faces. The mosaic tiles are then colour tinted and make up a larger image of Mr I.am.

Depending which version is running at the time, we either play a promo video every few minutes or (my personal favourite) explode the mosaic's tiles and spin them around in 3D before putting them back in their correct places. For no reason beyond eye candy but, for once, that is what you need to attract the passers-by attention.

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Working with the agency Tangent90, I produced an application that ran on 3 large touch sensitive plasma screens to be shown at trade shows. The project was based around an infinite 'big wheel' carousel of content tiles that then clicked through to a video and some more copy. Users could save details of which content they had viewed for later review.

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Gucci's high standards were evident throughout with the attention to detail in this project. My dev skills were needed by agency Critical Mass to create highlights like the interactive 3D fly through of the 'flora' motif's history. I was also tasked with everything from html to After Effects work when needed.

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Two facets to the same project here. First is a set of banners for Fujitsu's 'cloud' computing solution. The second I had to dust off the old Photoshop skills and produce a mock up of a live projection animation.

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Sometimes it is nice just to do some old skool animation. For the Cabana website I dusted off my After Effect skills and made a 3D animated menu in the style of window shutters. I put this into a little wrapper and made a menu for the homepage of the site. Dotted around the site are little animated drawings. I just couldn't help myself with these anims though and ended up animating a lot of them with code so they were different each time the user came back. I don't like the punters getting bored!

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Airbus only wants the best and most suited graduates for their training programs and jobs. Working with Digital Mosaic's designs, I built this career path chooser which took the applicant on a journey of 5-6 questions and then suggested the best area of the Airbus group to apply to.

An XML based decision maker and some slick 3D tilting and panning makes this project stand out from the usual recruitment tool.

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HSBC wanted a presentation tool to introduce the speakers of a major conference. The tool had to scale and work with 56" plasmas as well as touch screens and had to be updateable on the day by the people presenting it. So I built a presentation that scaled perfectly and was easily updateable via XML at any time, it was just what they needed.

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Fimbling Fun! is a CD-ROM for fans of TV program aged 2-6. I acted as head programmer on this project, making all the technical demos in the early stages and most of the final polished product. This was a lot of fun to work on as the Fimbles are so cute :) I am very proud of being able to name all the Fimbles and their friends without having to think about it.

Designed for young children and released by BBC Worldwide in 2003. It's based on the popular BBC TV series "The Fimbles" and is aligned with the UK's National Curriculum Foundation Stage, making it a suitable learning tool for preschoolers.

The project features several interactive activities, including:

Footprints: Guide a Fimble through a maze collecting objects.
Suitcase: Get packing for your holiday with the Fimbles.
Feather: Tickle the Fimbles to make them laugh - miles too much fun.
Pebble: Draw and create pictures in the sand pit and add animated elements to bring them life.
Shimmy Shaker: Create tunes and get dancing. ...annoy your parents. We didn't use it in the end, but I created a 'dance animation system' that automatically animated between different dance moves in real-time.

Additionally, the CD-ROM includes printable greeting cards, stories, video clips, and music from the show, enhancing the interactive and educational experience for children​

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