221B
I feel like I should be saying ‘not much’ seeing as we live in the zombie apocalypse but actually, far too much is going on. I had hoped to take advantage of some downtime to tidy up my office.
“You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off“. Well, I’d intended to only take the doors off a storage cupboard but then my wife got herself a hammer. So instead, we beat down and ripped out the built-in cupboard revealing some 60’s wallpaper and a portion of the wall set back about two inches. Then we took up the floor and partially removed the ceiling. Of course, as soon as my office was rendered unusable, I received several new projects and two that were on pause restarted. Sod’s law but worse things happen at sea.
The aim is to recreate, to a degree, the main living area of 221B Baker Street (the fictitious Sherlock Holmes residence – now a museum). I’m quite a fan of Sherlock Holmes and Victorian decor so it seems like a good fit. Although I’ve always thought that spending out on extravagant decoration for an office is a bit wasteful, I spend five days a week in my office for up to ten hours a day – probably more time than in any other room – so, what the heck.
I’ve already bought a writing desk/bureau and a captain’s desk and I’m looking to buy a nice wingback chair and a few trunks and cases. With the addition of a skull, some nice gold-framed artwork, a few old books and the odd Victorian curiosity in a bell jar (I have a raven’s skull on some miniature books in a bell jar in our dining room) I think it’ll turn out to be a fitting homage to Sherlock’s pad and a very decent place to work.
Imburse Payments
I’m almost finished with a project for Imburse. They simplify payment integrations for enterprises and those with legacy IT systems. I had started off the project by creating everything in an isometric view. I’d worked on it for quite a while bouncing between Cinema 4D and After Effects – with the latter crashing frequently. Once I’d got it stable and looking decent we realised that it was unnecessary and scrapped the isometric rig opting for a traditional head-on 2D approach instead. Although it can be painful to work and work on a complicated solution and then throw it away, choosing the simpler option is often the right thing to do.
The video will be part of their online rebranding so I can’t show the video until the client publishes it but it will likely be featured in a blog post later this month.
Website redesign/rebrand
LOST
MARBLE
We’re also just about finished up rebranding the business and redesigning our website. The previous colour scheme was based around a few teals and greens. We’ve added a much broader colour palette and started to use Lovelo as our title font. We’ve kept the green/teal marble logo as it was.
Contact Partners
We’re still working with Contact Partners to help provide illustrations and GIFs for their website rebrand. So far we’ve produced around 150 images and looping animations.
The images and GIFs will be used on their website and also on social channels to promote blog posts.
We started this project by creating an animated promotional video that you can see up on the Contact Partners website.
Lost Marbles
I’m working on an idea for a thing. It has marbles and owls in it…probably. It’s set in the Victorian era…sort of (I’ll add top hats and monocles). It might be a bit murder-mystery-ish (I’ll likely add murder and mystery). It’s like a kids show but not for kids… Well, maybe it’s a kids show that’s also for adults?
As you can tell this is very much a WIP that’s still in the early stages.
The basic idea is that it’ll be about two marbles that solve mysteries. Homie and Wotsit…or something less cheesy (pun not intended).
