A few dusty drawings

I found some old sketches in a very old and dusty portfolio of mine, hell I thought I'd just share and throw them up here on my somewhat outdated blog.

Anyway, something special about just using a simple pencil instead of Photoshop etc.

Scarey M

How to turn a coffee bean into the leader of an alien horde of unspeakable power

Back in 2009 I was looking for an idea to create a type of alien character for the Blake's 7 Audio Adventures - Series 2.  Inspiration can arrive in the smallest of ways, this time I was in Starbucks one day and it arrived in the form of a single little coffee bean.  Below I have tried to stitch together some sketches of how the idea came about and a sample illustration of a CD cover for the series.

Many thanks to B7 Media for use of their logo and authorisation to publish the artwork

How good is an Android phone for photography

I recently tested out my Android phone to see good the photography can be.

I live in a town in Scotland called Linlithgow where we are lucky to have some beautiful landscapes. I took some pictures with the phone of Linlithgow Palace where Mary Queen of Scots as born.

Hope you like them, pictures where taken at 9am in the morning, later Summer

D

The Linlithgow Peel with a G1 Android Camera Phone

I started recently to take some pictures as test of the quality of my G1 android phone. I live in a small town called Linlithgow in Scotland, which posses a beautiful palace and loch where Mary Queen of Scots was born some 600 years ago.

Around the foot of the Palace is a Loch. You can walk around the loch area (2.3 miles), of which I took the following pictures of at about 9 in the morning in late summer.

Hope you like them.

A Design on Sports

These are some example images from a project I worked on a while back for the sports retail industry. The 'The Medal Collection, Golf Balls' was for the company Dunnes Stores of Ireland. The brief was to develop a classic identity that could be used across of number of golf related products. To my surprise, the client invested circa £45,000 in golf goods branded with this design based on a powerpoint presentation of the designs. Nice!

The second image was for a company who wanted to develop a range of bottles for different sports. They had already developed the product, which was promoted in Computer Arts Magazine in 04.

We took their designs, reshaped and built a unified branding across the various sports.

scareymonster@googlemail.com

My Designs for Blake's 7 Audio Adventures

I just want to throw in some nostalgia for any of you 70's kids whose children
love the new 'Doctor Who' but you LOVED 'Blake's 7' and like me get strange,
puzzled looks from them.

Here is one of my latest designs for the revived Blake's 7 - which with B7 Media I have been
working on for nearly 4 years now - If you want to find out more about it please
visit the following site, that I did for B7 as well as the designs.

We had a few 1a.m.'s with this project but good fun all the same.

Fans love it, which is the main thing.

www.b7media.com

Have Fun!

Scareymonster

The Context to Performance Reporting in Government

Reporting on performance across the government sector has traditionally been an internal process of providing static indicator reports of current state against baselines and targets to senior managers and elected officials. In parallel, there has been an external process of providing reports and data to a central government agency and an auditing body. Content of performance reports has often been driven by the reporting specifications of the central agency – as such the content and style of reports reflects the needs of this audience but rarely those of others.

However in recent years the situation is changing fast. There are increasing pressures on government bodies worldwide to demonstrate the effective use of public resources. There has been a widespread emergence of performance and results-based management approaches with renewed emphasis on results-oriented business planning, accountability and performance reporting. Agencies are now seeing the benefits of implementing these performance management practices.

How have these developments impacted on performance reporting? Internal reporting is becoming more sophisticated with the use of hierarchical scorecards to present a balanced view of performance tailored to different stakeholders. Visual markers and traffic-light colouring are often used to highlight underachievement and exceptions. Externally, public agencies are being actively encouraged to make their performance reports available to a wider citizen community. There are many challenges to this process not least how to present information to users in a way that is engaging, relevant, understandable and useful in the context of expectations that are rapidly becoming more sophisticated.

The context within UK government is covered in more detail at the following page, please visit for further details > Peformance Reporting and Mapping

Article Keywords - performance reporting, performance mapping, performance map, performance dashboards, performance analysis tool, statistical data presentation, statistics visualization, performance measuring, performance indicator reporting, data presentation methods, interactive reporting, performance mapping tools, development statistics software, performance mapping charts, area profiling

ARTICLE SOURCE - http://www.instantatlas.wordpress.com