With Christmas only a few days away, I thought I would give my friends over at Soak a shout out, as they have created a brilliant Christmas microsite. It’s great little site that allows you to share your dream Christmas and potentially win a Harrods Hamper too. The design is a wonderful 50s treatment and some of the jQuery effects on the panels below the map are perfectly executed. Well done guys.

I’m guessing most people will have at least heard of Call of Duty by now, well Black Ops give you the opportunity to create your own playercard (emblem) instead of having to pick and choose from ones created by the developers. So what did I decide to create, the Foursquare Super Mayor badge of course, below I’ll show you how.

Firstly you need to reach Rank 10 to unlock the playercard Emblems.

Then you can buy some layers in the Edit Playercard area, three will let you create the Super Mayor badge.

Then you can browse the shapes for two circles and a crown. You can then play around with the positioning, colour and scale of each shape and move them up and down layers to create different badges.

Once you have created the playercard emblem, you’ll need to reach rank 16 to be able to buy the Gun Emblem add-on for your weapons to get it to appear on your gun.

I also choose 4sq as my clan tag, which at rank 19 you can get scratched onto your weapon.

Related post: How to survive a re-tweet by a popular twitter user

The examples are for istockphoto.com which is my stock library of choice.

Use the free images

Stock libraries release a select number of images for free to show off the quality of the images in the library  and tempt you to step up and buy some. Istockphoto have a few free files available for each week, if you are clever and set a reminder to download all of them each week and store them locally you can build up a good collection, even if the image isn’t what you want at the time of downloading, somewhere down the line you might need it.

They have a free Photo, Vector, Video, Audio and Flash each week, be sure to check the “more free stock photos” panels too, for images you might have missed.

Note: The free images are normally downloaded by loads of people so will turn up in other designs and might make your design less unique.

Submit designs to design spotlight

Istockphoto has a section called Design Spotlight, where people can show off what they created using their stock images. This is a great way to show off your design skills, get them critiqued and also build awareness of your agency and the client you did the work for.

You also get 5 free credits in return for every accepted submission, which you can then use to buy more stock files.

Become a contributor

The final way to reduce your costs and get stock content without using any real cash is to become a contributor and submit photos, vector illustrations, flash files, video clips or audio soundbites. These files once vetted by the istockphoto team (they don’t accept any old crumby photos) will be available for purchase online by other users. You then make a cut of each sale and these earnings can be converted into credits to buy stock, or withdrawn if over $100.

This is Baker, he’s the Smash Skates cat. I was inspired too create a logo for Smash Skates based around their cat, which also lead to a few illustrations I created for a handmade zine I gave Ash (Smash Skates owner) as a birthday present.

The thing which hasn’t gotten as much press is that many websites are now showing very few adverts, as they were mostly created in Flash too, with some campaigns having basic fall back GIFs for the few non Flash users. This perhaps shows how little attention users pay to them nowadays.

However the commercial people behind many sites have begun to get worried and are looking into how to create their Flash adverts in a non-Flash format, the holy grail seems to currently be something from Adobe called renderFXG, which is a javascript tool which can render their FXG file format in the browser using the HTML5 canvas tags. This is the ideal solution as ad agencies can continue to use Flash to create ads then simply export them in a slightly different format.

The other option you have with existing tools is the dominant format from the pre flash days, the good ole’ fashioned animated GIF. Which is an art form unto itself, trying to create a good looking animated advert with a 256 colour palette whilst keeping the file size below 100k, can be pretty difficult.

Whilst Adobe beaver away at a solution and as HTML5 is still a draft standard, the animated GIF seems the only good compatible short term solution. So perhaps it’s time to brush up on the Photoshop animation skills again, or even see if ImageReady will still run on that old Mac in the office.

So this is my desk and where I edit my photos, write blog posts, design things and beaver away at code, on the evenings and weekends. I’ve finally got it almost the way I want it in the lounge, with a bookcase of books full of inspiration and near the stereo (which was playing The Kinks when this was taken).

A few apps have appeared on the iPad recently that render your content in a new layout, either via an RSS feed or by scraping the page in someway.

The two stand out apps are Pulse which is a rather nice RSS feed reader which displays content in a better way than the usual list of title tags and descriptions.

Whilst good for the user, depending on how your RSS feed is set it it may allow users to read your content without any need to visit your site in it’s usual template, which may contain adverts. It does have a link to view on web but its not a default setting.

The other app is Flipboard which takes content from your Twitter and Facebook accounts and presents it in a magazine or newspaper style dividing the page into blocks, with images cropped to fit, pull quotes and snippets from links. You can also use it to follow specific twitter accounts. It also accompanies the content with relevant responses from Facebook comments or twitter posts with the same link.

Flipboard is a little with regard to encouraging users to visit your site as it tends to cut content short to preserve the layout on the page, and has a prominent Read on Web button.

I’ll be interested to see what new way to show content someone comes up with next.

Back when I was a scanner operator, before the days of everyone having a digital camera and broadband, you had to scan all the photos of houses for the property pages in newspapers. This was a mind numbing task at times however my iPod got me through it. I still stick the headphones in when I need to block out distractions and get on with it. Above are some of my favourite albums to get me through work.

Skateboarding has been a huge influence on my life for more than ten years now, the biggest influence has always come from the Girl and Chocolate Skateboards family (also known as Crailtap). Above are so links to the photographers, designers and artists from those companies.

However the most impressive of all so far has to be Disney’s Toy Story digital book app, which is like one of the old books with the sound board that you used to have as a kid. It allows you to either read it to you, read it yourself or even record your own version for playback. Some pages allow you to colour the pages in, allowing for multiple touch so more than one set of little hands can play at once. Click read more to see some screen grabs.