Another infographic I created for First 10 to illustrate Inbound Marketing. Again it’s the folks at First 10 that came up with the idea and sketched it out, I just picked some nice colours and fonts then plastered them on top to make it look presentable.

I know I know, you thought you’d learnt everything there was to know about Inbound Marketing from that last diagram they came up with. Well you were wrong – that one didn’t show you how funnel-shaped it could be did it.

I’m sure it can be other shapes too, pyramidal maybe, but I’m reliably informed it prefers to spend most of it’s time been an upside-down cone.

If you want to be scientific I beleive you’d say it’s natural state (if you saw some Inbound Marketing living in the wild for example) would be ‘inverted-coniform’, but I might have just made that up.

A flow-chart infographic I created for First 10. The idea for the diagram is 100% their work, the execution of it is where I got brought in.

If you don’t know everything you ever wanted to know about Inbound Marketing after looking at this flow-chart for 60 seconds, just give up and admire the colour pallete and the subtle use of texture or something instead. I do.

But if you find you find your intrest piqued and you’re aching to learn why the Google pac-man is eating a slice of Bing pie, check out the Smart Insights blog where they’ll be using this diagram quite soon, I think.

One of a collection of marketing infographics I’ve been creating for First 10. They’re the brains behind it and came up with the idea, I just took their idea and made it look good.

Before I was asked to do this I didn’t know the people of the world even needed a Marketing Growth Wheel, but apparantly they did. To be honest I’m still not entirely sure what it actually is, but at least I know what it looks like now – circular, colourful and covered in words like Tactics and Factbase, along with the lone acronym “KPI’s”, which I think stands for Kangaroo Pouch Inspector, but don’t quote me on that.

If you want to find out more about KPI’s , along with lots of info about on-line marketing, take a look at Dan’s post on the Smart Insights blog, or check out the First 10 website.

I’ve finally found some time to throw together a showreel using various bits and pieces of work – some of it’s old, some of it’s new, but it’s all created / modeled / rendered by me.

Despite watching it through many, many times on my pc before I hit the ‘Upload a video’ button, after I’d uploaded it I remembered a few things I’d have liked to put in it but completely forget – so expect an updated version of it some time soon. Probably.

Software: After Effects, 3D Studio Max, maybe a bit of Photoshop

Music: RJD2 – Ghostwriter

Another recent project I’ve worked on with Andy Shillito.

Our Agency came up with the concept of a 3D globe based on an existing logo shape, with different areas of the globe representing different aspects of the business.

They handed us a a concept sketch (see the image at the bottom of the page) and we were asked to bring it to life.

This is a recent project I’ve been working on alongside Andy Shillito.

Digital Welly needed a complete 3D house and garden to use in an Flash game about energy saving. It was a fun project to work on because we were given free reign when it came to the look and feel of the house. We were told what items were needed as clickable hotspots in each room and that there needed to be an overall house view for navigating through the game, but then it was left to us to get on with it. The images I’ve shown are the ones I created – Andy worked on the bedroom and the bathroom.

For the most part the images you see are straight out of 3D Studio Max, but they’ve all been colour corrected in photoshop a little.

An informational animation I did late last year – to go on the homepage of the products new website.

The original idea was just just to have a reasonably simple Flash animation explaining ‘how it works!’, but in the end they wanted something a little more polished.

However the deadline and the budget were still the same, so it’s a little rough around the edges, but it’s still a fun little piece.

Music: Josh Woodward
Story board: Mark Daws
Everything else: Me

From what was looking like a nice steady run up to Christmas holidays the last few weeks have been pretty busy, and it looks like I’ll probably only get a week’s break before I have to start up again in January. And let’s be honest, a Christmas break is never that relaxing anyway.

I thought I’d have a nice easy time of it, find some time to record some of the After Effects and 3DSMax tutorials I keep meaning to get around to and put my feet up while playing on the Xbox and playing in the snow with my girls. Not so. But never mind, I’ve had some fun projects to work on so really, it’s all good.

Most of the work I’ve been doing has been with Andy Shillito, and thanks to Skype and Dropbox it’s been a seamless process, almost like we’re in the same room, but without the need to make each other cups of tea.

I know I’m a late-comer to the Skype party, it’s been around for ages, but I’ve never really had a need to use it before because good old MSN messenger did the trick, but Skype really is a fantastic piece of kit if you want to work remotely with someone. Plus, it’s free to talk to someone for as long as you like, and who doesn’t like free?

A short 3D motion graphics piece I did for Brass in Leeds – 13 seconds of video that needed to bring to life some existing design elements from an offline marketing campaign.

The initial unravelling of the text was done in After Effects using masks and animated strokes, then the 3D ribbon animations were created and rendered in 3DSMax with the path deform modifier, and a good old bit of trial-and-error.

Modelled in 3D Studio Max and rendered with V-Ray

My entry for GSG 5 second project – Primitives

Made in 3D Studio Max and After Effects.

Loads more info here…
greyscalegorilla.com/​blog/​2010/​09/​five-second-project-primitives/​

Other entries here…
vimeo.com/​channels/​primitives

The idea was to see to what extent I could create a seemingly ‘detailed’ scene using just boxes, no real 3D modelling and really basic lighting.

Nick Campbell of Greyscalegorilla has done a 20 minute breakdown of my submission to one of his 5 Second Projecs (Primitives) to show how much difference a little colour correction and a few effects splashed on top of a basic 3D render make. Check out his video below and go read his blog post here.

It’s always been my intention to do these little videos (hints and tips etc) myself, but I never seem to get time – so in this case I’m more than happy for Nick to break i down for you. Thanks Nick!

Keep your eyes peeled though – I’ve hopefully got some time coming up where I plan to record a few After Effects and 3D Studio Max tutorials myself, and I’ll keep putting up some After Effects project files for everyone to download because that’s one of the best ways to learn – picking apart other peoples work!

Nick’s 20 minute breakdown of my file

My original submission

Anyone who sheds a tear of joy for happy childhood memories any time they hear the phrase “Eye of Thundera, give me sight beyond sight!” should recognise the inspiration behind this.

This is another Grey Scale Gorilla 5 Second Project – Retro

Other entries here…

80′s kids cartoons, I salute you.

Here’s a useful snippet of code I used recently to make sure the a navigation link was highlighted if a sub-page of a section was been displayed.

First we use the get_post_ancestors() function bring back an array containing the ID’s of all the current page’s parent pages.

$parentArray=get_post_ancestors($post->ID);

But seen as there can only be one parent page anyway (I think!?) that array only contains one value, which you can retrieve using…

$pageParent = $parentArray[0];

So now we’ve got…

<?php
if ($post->post_parent)	{
	$parentArray=get_post_ancestors($post->ID);
	$pageParent = $parentArray[0];
} else {
	$pageParent = null;
}
?>

…where $pageParent contains the ID of the parent page. You can use that ID however you want. I used it like this to set a class="active" on an <li> tag so I could highlight it in the site’s nav…

<li<?php if(is_page(68) || $pageParent==68){echo ' class="active"';} ?>><a href="<?php echo get_permalink(68); ?>">Nav Link Text</a></li>