French Waiter character illustrations

I recently did some rather fun visuals of a character that had been nicknamed 'Happiere' - he's a French waiter that was to be used to promote travel to France for one of our clients. As the job has not been picked up I'm unable to say more for confidentiality reasons.

Original concept for the French waiter



The waiter was required in a variety of poses to be used on print, web and point of sale. He was a fun character which I hope comes across in the following sketches. These are purely black and White but would have been developed to include colour later on in the project. I started these using my favourite medium - a blue leaded pump pencil which I then inked in and then scanned into digital files so the designer could manipulate the various elements of the sketches, such as forced perspective.




Anyway I hope you like them.

A few helpful website optimisation and analytical tools

Your website nowadays is probably one of the most valuable real-estate that you as an individual or company owns. The development of the web and it's accessibility on a variety of different platforms and devices combined with the explosion of social media means that you have to work that little bit more clever than you used to.

A website isn't just a site that's built and forgotten about, it's a sales tool that needs to be kept fresh, optimized and promoted using a variety of channels available to you. When you commission a website you have to think long term - it's cheaper than a brochure but it carries your 'brand' to the outside world so it's important that your site is as optimised and integrated into everything else you do effectively and you don't get worried if your web programmer/designer wants to review your site in 3 months. This is normal, in the digital world trends change daily and a 'review' is a good time to see what pages/content are performing well and what's not and to then adjust elements accordingly.

Here's a few pointers on website builds and third party integration

• Make sure your 'on-page' content and tags are fully optimised for the topic or service that page is promoting. Web copy is not the same as brochure copy. It's important that you develop your content using the 'keywords' you want to drive traffic to your site/page for. Web copy should be much shorter in length - people scan websites, so grabbing their attention quickly is vital
• Make sure the site is using clean coding practices and the programmer is adding key metadata to your site.
• All images should have 'alt' tags and 'title' tags used accordingly to aid usability.
• Place a contact form or email sign-up form to  collect users who are interested in any email campaign you might send. WuFoo offers excellent integration with Mailchimp to make data gathering and broadcasting as simple as possible.
• Once live, submit your site to the leading search engines, local directories and put yourself on the map - using Google Maps. Also ask your programmer to use Google's Webmaster tools to create a sitemap and validate the site.
• Ensure your site has Google Analytics installed and that you have access to the monthly reports
• If you're a new business consider starting a Google Adwords campaign (remember to integrate to your Analytics account) to help promote your company. Google often offers £30 or even £50 starter amounts for news businesses or individuals starting their first Adwords campaign
• Place a contact form or email sign-up form on your site to collect users who are interested in any email campaign you might send. WuFoo offers excellent integration with Mailchimp to make data gathering and broadcasting as simple as possible.
• Consider creating an amazon associates account so you can strategically promote either your own media or media that you would recommend your followers, - you even get a small percentage of every sale that's made through your unique link.
• Start a Twitter account and feed this into the site. It could be a good way of offering 'web -only' offers or promoting your service(s). It's important to have a social media strategy in place as without this you could be jumping the gun and not having clearly defined goals with which to evaluate your social media push. If you're running twitter consider an analytical tool to help you evaluate it's impact - I recommend Crowdbooster, and at a basic level it's free! To schedule your tweets try Tweetdeck.

These are just a few of the points to consider and are by no means all encompassing but hopefully they give the un-initiated a few things to bear in mind.

If you're interested in my digital work take a look here: http://bit.ly/nMYOow

Here's some of the useful resources I've mentioned:
http://crowdbooster.com/
http://www.adwords.google.com/
http://wufoo.com/
http://www.mailchimp.com
http://www.tweetdeck.com/
http://www.twitter.com/

Cooking on gas! My latest website

Website design and build for Simon Morris - a gas safety, servicing and installation specialist

It's been a busy couple of months and I'm pleased to say that the website for Simon Morris - a local Norwich based gas safety, servicing and installation specialist has been performing really well. His smgassafe.co.uk website might be small but it's been carefully optimised to give him a great online presence.

View the site at http://www.smgassafe.co.uk

Google Analytics Blog: What’s happening on your site right now?

Google Analytics Blog: What’s happening on your site right now?: The web is getting faster, and not just the speed of the pages, but also the speed of change. Before, it was fine to build a website and mod...

An interview with Meg Park on character design

A great insightful interview with Meg Park on character design - MEG PARK INTERVIEW: BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE CHARACTER DESIGN BLOG

Samphire Coast book signing in Holt

Me with Robert Greenfield (right) author of Samphire Coast at The Holt Bookshop

On Saturday I spent the morning in the lovely Norfolk town of Holt at the book signing of Robert Greenfield's first book 'Samphire Coast' which I was lucky to have been asked to illustrate the cover and some b&w chapter inserts. It was the first time we had met in person as the entire project was run via email apart from the initial phone call when Robert introduced himself.

I admit to being a bit nervous and excited at the same time to see the book in print for the first time and to meet Robert.

The Holt Bookshop

The Holt Bookshop is situated in the lovely Appleyard Court and is your typical friendly town bookshop. You instantly felt relaxed walking in and it's a lovely shop to browse. Robert was set up on the left as you walked in - he was obviously enjoying the morning and he was surrounded by the prized copies of his book. I walked up and it was funny as he didn't initially recognise me but when I explained who I was he instantly got up and gave me a handshake and hug. We talked for a while (I was lucky as it was early) and he enthusiastically explained to me that the book is doing really well and that he's hoping to get more reviews on it by the local and national press - apparently he's also getting praise for my illustration work. Robert is a really great chap and I thoroughly enjoyed meeting him, it was just a shame that Michael and Barnaby weren't there as well.

Note: I've heard from Robert since Saturday that the book signing in Holt broke all records for the store and they instantly sold out of their copies at which point Robert had to leave some of his, so they would actually have some in store! If that's not a good enough reason to go and buy a copy yourself then what is?

To find out more about Robert Greenfield the author of Samphire Coast, which features my illustration work go to http://bit.ly/qU70OO

To order your copy of Samphire Coast by Robert Greenfield click here http://amzn.to/oc6DKs

Hacking out with Pakefield Riding School

Pakefield Riding school website design

The Pakefield Riding School website that I designed and built is now live. My brief was to completely revamp the site visually and integrate social media into the site content. This included expanding on their existing photo and text content and structure their key information in an easily navigated structure.

As with any website the work is ongoing and it's hoped to add further content to the site soon and send out their first email broadcast.

You can view the site at http://www.pakefieldridingschool.co.uk