I was lucky enough to work on the Emma Watson official site along with my colleges at great fridays, Manchester.  I worked on the front end,  XHTML slideshow & dynamic page scaling/re-sizing.

The site was greatly received by all the Emma fans with thousands of messages in the first few days of going live. Although the site is primarily XHTML we submitted to FWA and after a week of public voting, Emma Watson has made it to the public short list! Very exciting stuff,  for more info view the site on FWA here :)

This years good friday was made a little bit more special when I got my first ever FWA photo of the day!

For any one who doesn’t know about the FWA photo of the day site here is a some info from the site:

“FWA has been showcasing creativity online since May 2000 and has reached over 50 million visits to date. FWA photo is a dream showcase for us and we hope you will join us in enjoying one amazing photograph every day of the year”

The first was the Sh! Awards held in Leeds and organised by the media agency Brahm. The competition was open to all students in North England University’s. I was chosen as a finalist and required to give a 60 minute presentation and Q&A session with some well respected, new media experts. A week later I was at the awards night, for some celebrations & to collect 2nd place in the Digital Media category. The award was for a collection of work from my final year, including my final year project – The Photo Guide and my photography project Poverty of the Mind.

Me presenting work at the BBC North Design Awards 2009

The second awards night was the Northern Design Awards sponsored by the BBC. Over 3000 students from University & Colleges across the UK entered and I was chosen as a finalist in the Digital Media category. My project Poverty of the Mind wasn’t a winner on the night but I enjoyed attending such a large event, presenting my work and socialising. I also managed to sneak onto BBC 1 news!

There’s a video of the evening on Youtube, check it out.

Finally I attended an awards night at the University of Huddersfield where I picked up 1st place for best use of Visual Design again for my Poverty of the Mind project. I also won second prize for technical achievement, this was for a destop application mashing up web services – build with Adobe Air.

Using a series of five images for a online social experiment titled ‘Poverty of the Mind’ to raise awareness and offer support to people with mind poverty. The images use a minimal and saturated style manipulated to look like scenes from an office workers bad day. The style is consistent throughout the series. The expressions and negative body language of the main subject helps to show his state of mind and feelings about his current work situation.

Real life content from the social networking site Twitter has been dynamically overlaid onto the images to give a narrative and help people connect with the subject. I added icons to add extra value to the images and re-enforce his thoughts in a quirky way.

Filler images and lines have been used to connect the series and keep the flow between them. A few common themes including time and repetitiveness are also used to connect the images.

I have kept the project simple and focused on a story in an attempt to raise awareness of what can be a tragic situation for those involved, I hope people can draw something positive from my project either on a creative level or a reminder to peruse their happiness and not to get stuck in a job they don’t like.