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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Once again working with nice people at One/Fifty Consultancy. This time Harvester wanted to launch a new salad, but needed the punters' he;lp in deciding what should be in it. So I built a fullstack HTML mini-site that allows users to vote on the combinations they want to see in their new salad. We gave them a selection of choices rather than free range - none of this "Boaty McBoatface" stuff happening on our watch!

During the voting period the users, after choosing the best new salad combo, get their vote tallied up in the leaderboard which shows the real-time current combination.

As with any modern media agency, One/Fifty Consultancy like to get lots of analytics to show the ROI to their clients. Luckily I LOVE adding analytics for everything I can think of. So the client ended up with a nice analytics page to show the users' 'funnel', page loads, votes and sharing to socials. The app is, obviously, fully responsive and works on all devices, including iOS and Android.

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Toby Carvery wanted to spread some positiveness up and down the country by sharing stories of normal people bonding over the Sunday roast. Originally commissioned to create a space where users could upload their own "roast stories", the project simplied to be more focused on the 3 curated stories.

Another quick turn around of some solid HTML for One/Fifty Consultancy. That brings the number of little projects for them to about 15 (I think). Which I think says how nice they are to work with as well as how I'm able to help them out each time they need a quality site and a quick turn around with zero drama.

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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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Working once again with the talented people at Barley, I built a classic but modern corporate website for Elite recycling solutions, a major UK recycling firm. The site is kept visually interesting with various calm animations of headline text and images as the 'hero' of each page, along with boxouts and snippet style content and animated info-graphics, using dynamic data, in the page's content. Obviously all mobile-friendly and reactive to various screen sizes in a graceful and relevant way.

Most of the site is updated by the client via a bespoke CMS build. Which feeds everything from the latest news section, team latest team member's profiles, the dynamic animations, all the site's text content and each sections' keyword and page description for a little SEO help.

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The creative director from Lovers (London) really wanted rich, textured, organic and layered animation - ideally suited to video. Unfourtunatly we didn't have video banners spots available, so I had to use all the tricks in the book to get the CD's lush vision squeezed into serveral formats at very small filesizes. It worked out well in the end and the files don't waste a single byte!

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I seem to have an X'mas tradition of making some fun little "cracker pull" games for 3 popular restaurants in the Mitchells & Butlers' stable: Toby Carvery, Harvester, and Stonehouse.

Working for the 3rd Christmas in a row with the loverly people at One/Fifty Consultancy to bring a little X'mas cheer to all the customers in the form of a little cracker game that gives them a new restaurant voucher each week and also an unlimited amount of cheesy festive jokes!

As this is the third year running these games (and I love making analytics KPIs) we can get some insight in the user habits when playing the games. Each year the games surpass 2 million vouchers claimed which obviously make the user and the client very happy. I’m not as happy as I can see most people are there for the vouchers and no where near enough come purely for the X’mas jokes! …although I may have skewed the analytics on this one 😉

The games are embedded in the restaurants’ app from where the user gets to play against their friend to win the voucher …or just sneakily play it alone to make sure you get the bonus! I developed the game play, animation and also the backend API that saves which users have won that week to make sure no one gets too greedy.

The game also then jumps off to a holiday competition from Jet2 Holidays and also branded filters for Insta and TikTok.

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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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I developed the brand new Mr Organic website. Fully responsive HTML5 built with superfast React.js. I created a bespoke Wordpress backend. The site stays alive thanks to the live instagram feed, and client updateable What's on section. The site includes several sections including recipes and news sections, where it was important that the client could update themselves. To aid the client with the updating process I also created over 30 tutorial videos to teach Mr Organic's people how to use the custom features of the CMS to update their site. I used aggressive browser caching, data caching and various other workarounds to get around the client's seriously slow hosting environment.

They sent me a basket of organic goodies. ...they didn't last long! Yummy.

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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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SEI Healthcare needed their specialist patient simulation project updating with a new look and content. Doctors go to the site and test their knowledge in specific disease areas through multi-patient quizzes, based on a multiple choice format. Hopefully the physicians learn a little along the way thanks to the heavy emphasis on feedback to answers, references and peer stat review charts.

A major requirement was also that it worked fluidly on mobiles, tablets and desktops (see second half of video walkthrough for the mobile site). The site needed to be a modern single page app that interacted with the API seamlessly.

From the client's designs I built the HTML front end using bootstrap, jQuery and javascript, along with a little php to write my own missing parts of the API. The site is live and public facing but requires a log in, which you can get for free but only if you have medical credentials (most of my work in this sector is top-secret and cannot be shown, so it is refreshing to be able to have this piece in my portfolio!).

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The Post Office had a need to train their new staff in all the complicated ins and outs of manning the Bureau de change. I was hired by the Nottingham agency SpinningClock to code a responsive HTML5 game. The game... er I mean learning tool makes use of HTML5's canvas, preloads each level as needed and enhances the experience with some nice smooth animation.

The rich media experience had to be just as useable as an iPhone app but in the iOS browser. The website obviously is perfectly fine for all modern browsers on pc and Mac too as well as Android mobiles and tablets - basically the Post Office wanted employees learning all the time, wherever they were ;)

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Working once again with the nice people at MediaCom I created a custom YouTube front end to EA Sport's FIFA channel. The videos, thumbnails and copy were all served up from MediaCom's back-end via XML which also controlled the tabs. All-in-all leaving EA with an easy to update and flexible custom channel which they update constantly.

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Viglen are overhauling and updating their site to the latest HTML5 technology. I was tasked by the good people at Studio Montage to create an interactive classroom makeover app in HTML5, canvas and javascript. Which shows the users how to integrate the latest ICT into their classrooms.

We had a choice of 6 classrooms to fill with all sorts of posh products, all accessible via the animated menu. The user simply dragged and dropped their chosen products into the scene, scaling them as required.

Once the user is happy with their prefect classroom, they get to save it for future reference. Or they can print or email the room to their IT dept. to get the ball rolling with a big hint ;)

The website works on all flavours of browsers supporting HTML5.

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This luxury property site (with simple html fall back) was crafted over 2 years with a 'high quality' ethos always in mind. The site runs off a CMS for most content and a bespoke XML doc for the more complicated portfolio sections.

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'Chris Moose' quiz (say it in a Scottish accent to get the pun ;) was a quick little quiz I coded for the Scottish agency JamHot. The questions are from a big XML set of varying degree of difficulty and all the text was updateable by the client at any time again via XML. Chris Moose has a lot to say so I got the chance to dust off the animation skills for Chris when he is giving feedback and talking. The quiz also has a PHP/mySQL high score system, which I built to complete the package.

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Once the user has followed a link from a placed YouTube video, they are granted access to Mi5's computer system giving users the chance to become a 'spook'.

I helped design the UI and the mini-tools. I built it in a slick manner with sliding and semi-opaque windows so the user felt they were peeking into classified documents in order to find out who they could trust.

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The Vulcans need to recolonise the planet, you are put at the helm in charge of selecting the perfect place for the construction and surveying that needs to be done on the planet's surface. Once again working with people at Harkable and this time with a great illustrator called Guy Warley, I used my developer skills to create the game application and good old fashioned animations (I'd almost forgot all about character walk cycles and smoke effects! It is a refreshing change to be utilised as a freelance animator as well as a freelance developer). A new mission was released each day of the month. My application build was nice and dynamic so handled every new day easily thanks to a nice back-end that talked nicely with the game. As play progressed over the days the landscape built up as the levels progressed - remember that mine we built on level 15, well it is now up and running and looks great. The user can drag around the map or just use the mini-map to click to that position. As the terrain develops my code takes into account the areas where you can and can't build or prospect anymore - there is no point trying to land your ship in the water or on the side of a mountain!

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Virgin media wanted to point out to everyone that they are better than Sky. They wanted to show, in an engaging way, all the breadth of content and cool stuff they have like video on demand and pausing live TV.

Virgin wanted it to be better than the 3D video fly through that Sky have (which amused me as I made the Sky one a year earlier!). This was a short turnaround project, just under 3 weeks, as Virgin had a two stage launch plan. But thanks to the great people at Spike/Elvis and the freelance creative art direction from Jim, we managed to do near enough everything they wanted for stage two but by the stage one deadline.

Happy clients come back again :)

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What could be better for Christmas than a personal video from Michael Bublé? How about two videos!
I worked with Harkable on this video mapping Facebook app. The user gets to give Michael a present to unwrap; a photo of themselves or a friend. Then a 'good' ending or a 'bad' ending is chosen depending what reaction you would like from Mr Bublé. The good ending will make every Michael Bublé fan happy as he kisses your chosen photo which I (after brushing off my video motion tracking skills) magically motion tracked into the picture frame on the video in real time.
A nice little twist, which is a testament to Bublé's humour, is that you can also have an 'unhappy' ending. I won't give it away but needless to say Michael is not happy with his photo present, but it a great way to tease a non-Bublé fan, ...if you can find one.

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I was asked to build Respect Care's new website from the smooth designs by a great freelance digital art director & designer called Manu. Based on a Wordpress backend, with lots of custom bits, so the client can update whenever they liked. The front end is a highly responsive HTML5 site with smooth css3 animated transitions to add that little bit of softness to the experience.

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We are the people movie is about the state of education in Britain. The site is a massive 2D parallax of 'paths' which the user follows around. I coded the movie's site to a short turn around. It has quite a few talking heads with people like Richard Branson and Henry Winkler ('the fonz' oh yeah).

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Marks and Spencer wanted a easily updated image viewer and links for the homepage. The 'hero image' viewer sits in prime spot on the homepage and is updateable via their CMS. There is also a video player version.

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UK fishermen are not getting a fair price for their catch, Greenpeace, working with the agency Zone, decided to highlight this by allowing Facebook users to star in their own sea shanty. The experience is a pre rendered video with the user's name and profile pic seamlessly overlay onto the footage. The personalisation included a shop name, the user's profile pic blended into the pub scene and even a personalised tattoo motion tracked onto a moving arm.

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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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Working once again with very nice people at Yomego design agency I created this Facebook app for Tesco. The player gets to play the part of unsung heroes that pack your online delivery by grabbing the items from a conveyor belt of products for 4 customers at the same time.

Each level gets faster and harder which would be OK if it wasn't for the random punctures and heavy traffic! Strangely addictive and I'm still not sure why, but then again I don't understand shopping either ;) Statistics time:
-100k plays in (just over) the first month
- the average user playing 16 times
- nearly 200 players playing the game for over 6 hours (100+ times)
- 1 player has played over 1200 times, that is nearly 3 days worth of game play!

With so many people playing such a 'sticky' game it is a good job we tested thoroughly before turning it out into the wild.

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Working with the guys at yomego Scotland, I built a nice little user generated content viewer. All the user's competition entries can be filtered by location and then the app selects a random selection of entries from that location to display. Some are videos, some are images, some portrait and some landscape - the app handles them all.

Thanks to yomego's Facebook API, we also were able to use the app to view the user's Facebook photos.

The client needed to place the project on different sites at different sizes so it is nice and scalable to fit any size that gets thrown at it :)

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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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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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I produced 4 children's games as part of Channel 4's 'What If?' website, supporting the TV show of the same name. The games taught basic maths in an entertaining and transparent way.

The What if? website was in support of Channel4's What if? Children's TV program.

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I've made 5-6 versions over the years of this project to show off Warner Bros' back catalogue of children's DVDs. Each time adding a little here and there, sometimes adding a game or a little piece of interaction. The latest version got a conveyor belt and robotic arm and user controlled mood lighting, ...I can't quite remember why now.

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Drayton Manor have a new ride opening - the Ben 10 Ultimate mission ride - and they wanted to tell the target audience about it, well any of the audience that are over 1.2m tall. So I was hired by my friends waste creative to make a mini-site in the Ben10 flavour with the usual info about Drayton Manor and a nice little 'being on a roller-coaster while shooting at baddies' game. Can you guess what the new roller-coaster ride is like? ;)

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Working once again with Waste Creative I coded this little mini-site in super quick time time ready for all 15 languages and 100,000's of fans wanting to know about the latest in the Ben 10 line - the 'ultimate alien'.

The site has videos, games, Ben10 facts, favourite alien voting results and even loads of masks you can download and print out :)

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To highlight F-Secure's anti personal identity theft program, I created a Facebook app that showed a video of John dropping his credit card on the floor for anyone to play with. The video then zooms into the card and the details warp into the Facebook user's own name to highlight they may need F-Secure's product too.

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Scottish agency Chunk tasked me with building 3 games for inclusion in Cadbury's new online children's book and activity website.
I created an animal piano game where we get to play follow the leader and copy a well know song or the player can just freestyle. The next mini game was a jigsaw game. But not just any jigsaw game, this one has advanced snapping to groups to aid the building process - just like you would with a real jigsaw. The last game was a nice and simple 'painting by numbers' type game where you colour in the supplied line drawing - no worrying about going outside the lines here :)

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I coded 2 in banner games for the launch of GI Joe the movie. In HALO dropzone you take control of our hero as he jumps high altitude and avoids the sky mines and flak on the way down. In Tank Commander you get a tank to fight your way through the village and out to safety.

A few cool extra touches on these games are the smoke fumes that change colour and opacity based on the revs of the diesel engine and the real physics of the drive tracks. No one asked for them, and it's a bit geeky, but I like it.

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DTP's Summer athletics 2009 and Duracell got together and wanted an online experience to drive awareness of the game's launch and the new rechargeable batteries for the bunny ;)

I coded the 4 events from the main game each with a bespoke game engine and control system to give the player a taste of what was to come on the Wii.

I can't use their name in this quote but: "More fun than the real Wii version!" was heard from the client's lips ;)

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Putting the fun back into insurance quotes online! ;) Quote Exchange wanted a fun way to lighten up the business of the quote comparison world. I coded a little world which allowed the users to explore the offered content while being entertained and charmed.

I added nice little touches on top of the content exploration to make sure the user was there out of choice; little things like the working toaster (jam sold separately) and some movable fridge magnet letters - my record is 4 rude words.

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The M&M's Full colour gaming site was for cross promotion with EA games. So I was tasked to develop 3 games along the lines of EA's finest... but using M&Ms rather than golf balls or cars!

I made 3 little physics based games where the race car's (well M&Ms) track was destructible and the golf ball (er... well M&Ms) has a flight path O'meter and amfPHP highscores tables. There was also a football game where, you guessed it; you kick around M&Ms!.

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...well, 2.5D really. Sky needed to show off their upcoming set of newly added films. They needed to wow the customer. We built a 3D space on the sky homepage where the latest films came flying by. The user could stop a film when something took their fancy and play a small clip or trailer.

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Here the player 'crunks off' (a dance competition for oldies) against the computer or challenge your friend (via email) to compete in a turn based game. Choose your best moves to prgress through the levels and win bottles of Fanta as you go!

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A lifestyle website to give info and aspiration for the 'Elegance' perfume from Proctor & Gamble. The site is in five languages, including Russian. To keep the intial load times down, I make each section load in the background (the progress bars for this load can be seen on the sign-post).

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Polaroids are flung on the floor of a young lady's apartment. The user zooms in and around the polaroids, finding video clips as they go, to explore the 5 stages of getting a cold sore.

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Viglen are overhauling and updating their site to the latest HTML5 technology. I was tasked by the good people at Studio Montage to create an interactive classroom makeover app in HTML5, canvas and javascript. Which shows the users how to integrate the latest ICT into their classrooms.

We had a choice of 6 classrooms to fill with all sorts of posh products, all accessible via the animated menu. The user simply dragged and dropped their chosen products into the scene, scaling them as required.

Once the user is happy with their prefect classroom, they get to save it for future reference. Or they can print or email the room to their IT dept. to get the ball rolling with a big hint ;)

The website works on all flavours of browsers supporting HTML5.

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A rather dark Christmas viral email game where you play the part of a snowman who throws snowballs at other snowmen, whilst trying to avoid smashing the windows! This was a great project where my only brief was 'we need a game to go out via email and you have two weeks to do it in.

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