Ginger Jam

Latest Jam

  • Cooking with Witches

    Cooking with Witches

    Cooking with Witches would be an excellent idea for a Nigella/Vampirella cross-over book or tv series. For now, it’s just available as a print at Society 6.

    Cooking Small Boys

    What’s for tea tonight?

    You don’t want to know what’s on the plate this Halloween. Don’t peak at the title of tonight’s frightful cook book. And don’t dare look in the kitchen where tonight’s guest chef is busy boiling up a trick or treat.

    Another manga-studio’d rendition from last year’s spookathon, I spent far too long trying to decide how much colour to add to this, see below, before deciding on the limited red and black. Which is really the only choice for a halloween cooking composition.

  • Igor Loves to Dance

    Igor Loves to Dance

    Igor loves to dance is another experiment with Manga Studio. It’s such a great tool for inking. This is a pre-halloween treat too, with a tee-shirts and other goodies available on my society 6 page.

    Here’s a couple more daubs as I get to grips with Manga Studio. I’m at a stage with it where I keep finding more features that  make me slap my forehead with frustration – of course that’s how you do it!

    It’s a weird combination of photoshop and illustrator – where neither works as you expect. I’m  also having some trouble with fonts – if anyone out there knows why the line height on some fonts is enormous, and knows a workaround, please let me know!

  • Designing burnley.gov.uk

    Designing burnley.gov.uk

    burnley.gov.uk is the main website for Burnley Council, where I work as part of the Graphics team. We’d always wanted to play a greater part in the design of the site and over the past 10 years or so had been frustrated in this ambition, until 2013 when a move away from a proprietary platform allowed us the chance to work, alongside the Council’s IT and Communications departments, to create the current website.

    With many in-house users providing content, and a new content management platform to get to grips with, this was  a challenging  and high profile project. The site also incorporates self serve pages which required their own styling.

    We worked hard to incorporate photography into the main navigation as well as come up with a suite of icons for the book it, apply for it section in the header. The use of photography adds a human element to what could be a dry, information only site, it is important that the site is approachable and friendly as well as easy to navigate and useful.

    A site like this holds a mass of information; indeed an organisation like this is a mass of information that can be ordered and re-ordered in numerous combinations. A large part of the task of designing burnley.gov.uk was to come up with a structure that could be agreed upon throughout the organisation and make sense to the public. There are five main sections, catering for the main users of the site (residents and businesses), visitors, news, and council ‘stuff’ like councillors and ward information etc. Additionally there was a need to push the self serve pages, where residents can Apply, Book, Pay and Report. Links to this appear not only in the header but also as a sleeve over the top of the advertising carousel, giving it constant prominence over anything else we might be promoting at the time.

    What did we do?

    It’s tricky to narrow down who did what in a project like this. The graphics unit suggested a structure for the site as well as devising the look and feel of it. Once agreed we provided all the css for the site as well as javascript for drop downs and other interactive tweaks. We also helped with custom content creation and queries to display information such as the councillor information pages.

  • Pointme

    Pointme

    Looking for arts, sports and heritage in the Burnley area? pointme is Burnley Council’s website for all that. With listings for organisations and events, fun things to do and community activities.

    Completely bespoke, pointme is built with lashings of open source goodness, like php, mySQL and jQuery. We designed pointme from the ground up, including a back end interface for users to add and edit their own pointme profiles. pointme also brings in listings from burnleymechanics via an RSS feed, so that there was no need to duplicate the work already done on that site. In turn, both pointme and the mechanics feed event listings to burnley.gov.uk

    pointme features a reductive search, which shows all the live results on the site until you start to type and then, letter by letter, the list reduces. It searches not only what you can see on the screen but also hidden values. For instance, typing a day of the week will show events that are on that day.