I’ve created a lot of 3d maps over the years and it’s always difficult thinking up fresh ways of presenting them. This one for Connoisseurs Scotland uses a similar technique to the one I built for Cairn Energy earlier this year, complete with fluffy clouds.
The idea was to present a selection of venues represented by Connoisseurs Scotland as the finest luxury spots Scotland has to offer, and locate them generally on the map.
This was used as part of an overall presentation for the group to promote Scottish hospitality. Which actually does exist.
There are many factors that will influence a website’s search engine placement. But what the major search engines will never do is produce a definitive list of do’s and don’t's, for the very good reason that poor websites with low-value content could be manipulated by unscrupulous webhosts to achieve higher rankings. Which is exactly what used to happen in the old days.
But a reputable search engine marketing consultant should never have to resort to dirty tricks in order to achieve better results.
With several years’ experience as an SEO consultant, guiding websites up through Google and Yahoo’s search listings, I know all the issues involved in optimisation. I also know all the myths and the ‘things that used to work but don’t any more.’ I have well-documented evidence of the campaigns I’ve run and can see how they’ve been affected by my marketing decisions.
This website has a page one ranking in Google for the following search terms:
Graphic designer Scotland
3d Animation Edinburgh
3d Event Planning
3d Accident Reconstruction
Television Graphics Scotland
Flash Animation Edinburgh
..along with other keywords specific to my industry.
I can improve your website’s visibility through guided SEO Marketing. The best way to begin is with a review of your website, which I do free of charge. So call me now on 01506 650321 or email info [at] funhousegraphics dotcom, and take the first step up the rankings.
If you’re reading this two years from now, you might be wondering what the fuss is about. Html5 is standard isn’t it? Well at the time of writing, Html5 is far from standard. It’s brand new and still has lots of issues. And one of the biggest is – how does Html5 handle video?
An explanation for non-techies. To date, video on the web has been dominated by Flash. But with Apple’s announcement that Flash would not be supported on the Ipad, it became clear they are trying to force the issue on the idea of an alternative.
For people like me who produce a lot of web video, there’s no simple answer as to how to encode clips that will satisfy both the older browsers like Internet Explorer and newer ones like Chrome. At this point, both support Flash but only the newer ones can handle Html5. So you could carry on using Flash for a while, but once they start actively dropping support for it, as in the case of the Ipad, you need to start looking at alternatives.
So the unusual thing about the video above is not its content, but the fact that it will play in any browser you choose, including the Ipad. The way that you see it is dependent on the browser you’re using. If I’m wrong and it doesn’t work for you, please let me know. And let’s see where we are in two years time.
To see how the video plays on your mobile, scan the image below to view this post in your smartphone:
This is a 3d reconstruction based on a court report into a road traffic accident. The details of the accident itself have been omitted.
The scene clearly demonstrates the power of 3d animation in conveying a large amount of information in a short space of time. Court reports are generally commissioned by solicitors or insurance companies and can be forty pages long or more. They are based on many documents including witness statements, physical evidence, terrain maps as well as weather conditions, lighting conditions, road surface and visibility information. Calculations and analysis are made based on the laws of physics and applied mathematics. It is the job of the 3d animator to portray this analysis as accurately as possible.
The ability to place multiple cameras in the scene is a huge advantage of 3d accident reconstruction. Once the mechanics of the scene have been built, driver’s eye views, witness views, overhead views, moving cameras can all help to illuminate the situation.
I decided it was time we created our own range of designer T-Shirts, so I’m proud to announce the launch of ‘Insults‘ By Funhouse Graphics.
As the name suggests, everything we have created for this new online shop is insulting, that is, it’s a small compendium of quotes designed and laid out on T-Shirts, mousemats, mugs etc and utilises some of the greatest putdowns of all time.
Queen Karaoke is responsible of course, and those of you who follow her Twitter account will already know the savagery of her wit. But there are also famous quotes from Groucho Marx, Oscar Wilde and others, and a section devoted to Shakespeare’s greatest insults.
I’ve created lots of flash animations over the years, many of them self-contained websites. But the trend seems to be away from these all-in sites and more towards using flash banners or just bits and pieces of flash sprinkled through a website. I think this has happened partly because flash was always absolutely hopeless for search engine optimisation – the designer always had to put in all kinds of alternate content specifically for search engines – and partly because there is hope that there may be a newer, easier technology on the horizon.
Whatever happens, animation on the web is here to stay and if there’s a better way than flash of incorporating moving elements I’ll be working with it soon. In the meantime, flash is still very much alive and well.
I could show you lots of examples of flash banners that I’ve made but they’re a bit meaningless outwith the context of the websites they belong in. Instead here is my favourite piece which is a little front page insert I created for Internet Karaoke, the online karaoke player. Queen Karaoke is the site’s ‘virtual hostess’ and the purpose of the animation was simply to tell customers they had to purchase credits before singing along. However, beyond the simple instruction to ‘Get Credits’ I decided we could have some fun.
This is a 3d event plan for the International Asian Fashion Awards (IAFA) event to be held at London’s Hilton Metropole. There was a lot of detailed information both for the event space and the stage set elements. The event planners were also very specific about lighting, so I was able to find visual references for the particular lights and simulate the effects. I sampled the carpet and the ceiling from photos on the Hilton website, so that is pretty much what the suite looks like.
This is the new website design I created for Scottish painter Carolynda Macdonald. Carolynda has a serious eye for detail and her most recent paintings, such as the one above, have featured blown-up images of individual pieces of candy with every fold mouth-wateringly portrayed.
The website design is extremely simple and lets the paintings speak for themselves, but I think provides a sympathetic backdrop for these very strong images.
Cairn Energy held their Annual General Meeting this week and had been looking for ways of spicing up their annual reports. As the reports detailed their oil and gas exploration work in the Indian subcontinent and in Greenland, it made sense to illustrate these areas with maps.
There are a hundred ways of making maps, and apparently last year they did it with Powerpoint slides, but this year I created these animated 3d flythroughs for them, complete with fluffy clouds.
Overnight their share price soared by 8%. I reckon it was the clouds that did it.
This is a selection of shots that I treated for Sky HD using extreme slow motion and time distortion techniques which are part of their ongoing promotional campaign.
The technique involves manipulating time by accelerating and decelerating speeds in various ways on specific bits of footage. The shots here are unedited and I’ve just included various clips that I liked. Obviously these were rendered in high definition and are meant to be viewed on a large HDTV screen and not in a miniscule browser window, but you get the idea.
Sadly there’s no way of actually slowing down time in real life.
I'm Greg Moodie, a freelance graphic designer and SEO consultant based in West Lothian, just outside Edinburgh in Scotland. Trading as Funhouse Graphics since 1998, I specialise in 3d animation and search engine marketing for websites.
