Mike Afford Media BLOG

Latest news, observations, and the occasional comment

Little Howard’s Big Question – Series 2 (BBC2)

Little Howards Big Question (Series 2)

Little Howard's Big Question (Series 2)

A reminder that the eagerly awaited second series of Little Howard’s Big Question starts this Wednesday on BBC2 at 4.00pm.

Digital compositing for this series is by Mike Afford Media and Made In Colour.

Little Howard’s Big Question (bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00v6hld) is a children’s series about an animated six-year-old boy, and stars Howard Read as his (human!) housemate as they attempt to answer questions about the world around them. This first episode is called ‘Why Can’t I Get Hold of Sawblaind the Municipal?’ as Little Howard ponders why he can’t get hold of the rarest trading card in Purley, leading eventually to a daring heist of the Crown Jewels. read more »

Virtual Studio Sets

Virtual Studio Sets

Virtual Studio Sets

Recently completed – a brand new virtual studio set for Setanta’s iTalkSport show that launched on Friday. read more »

Animated Weather Symbols

Complete set of animating weather icons

Complete set of animating weather icons

UPDATE (July 2013) :

A number of icon sets at my store have been updated to include many more weather conditions and vectors as standard. Unfortunately the animated GIF set mentioned in this post has been discontinued. read more »

Angelfield : remembering my pal

angelfield

angelfield.co.uk

It’s taken a little while, but I’ve just finished giving a little facelift to the Angelfield website. Last night I did a quick WordPress install, customised to serve as a simple comments page in case any visitors wanted to leave a message.

I’d already changed the look of the main site, making it more of a tribute to Brian, who died tragically last September. He was the singer in the band, a fine musician and lyricist, and my best friend.

We formed Angelfield some time in the late eighties, although we’d been playing music together for many years before that.

As well as music, anyone that knew Brian would know also of his love of horses and racing. With that in mind, his family and friends have sponsored a race in his memory.

The Brian Spencer Memorial Chase is taking place at Plumpton on the 9th of May as part of Family Raceday 2010.

According to the Plumpton Racecourse site the Family Raceday is “an action packed programme of family entertainments … with Free Entry for children under 16”.

So if you’d like to have a child-friendly fun day out, remembering Brian and the good times, in the company of old friends (and horses), then get down to Plumpton on the 9th May. I think there are coaches being organised too, I’ll update this post when I find out more about that.

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Election 2010

Election Graphics, Virtual Reality and Swingometers

So, they’re off! The 2010 Election Campaign starts now, and while most people will be wondering who’ll be in No.10 next month, I’m wondering who’ll come out on top in the Election Graphics stakes.

The last BBC Election programme I worked on was back in 2006, and there’s a part of me that misses the excitement of a live election broadcast. Often weeks, months (sometimes years) of work all come together for one almighty extravaganza. A nail-biting marathon of TV graphics where the entire programme is only a power-cut away from disaster.

Swingometer

Swingometer

I notice the BBC has launched its Election 2010 website – and among other things they already have a nice interactive swingometer here with a neat explanation from Jeremy Vine for the uninitiated.

There’s a possible hint of the Election night graphics by way of a branded banner at the top of all of the Election 2010 web pages : party-coloured discs or buttons radiating from a central point.

It’s hard to say whether this is ‘Campaign’ branding, or ‘Election’ branding – I would guess by now that the various departments are all working to the same design guidelines by now. read more »

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The luckiest laptop in Leitrim

I can laugh about it now, but I wasn’t laughing a couple of weeks ago when the pipes burst. I’d guessed we’d frozen up during the cold snap when all the water went off upstairs, but we weren’t expecting later that afternoon to find a ten foot hole in the kitchen ceiling with a load of water pouring through it. Apart from all the great chunks of plasterboard everywhere, it was the fact that the water was pouring down directly on top of my laptop that particularly caught my attention… read more »

Photoshop CS4 crashes when changing font

I recently upgraded the entire Adobe Master Collection on my Macbook Pro to the CS4 versions and earlier today Photoshop started crashing. The horror. It happened whenever I tried to change the font on a piece of text. I was highlighting the text and using the arrow keys to flick through all the fonts in the list, one by one. Several ‘unexpected quits’ later, I’d narrowed it down to one particular font that was causing problems. read more »

Cufón text replacement in WordPress

Tolkien Fonts - cufon text replacement example

Tolkien Fonts – cufon text replacement example

I’ve recently been experimenting with Cufón text replacement, and decided to put it to use on a site I’ve been messing about with. I’d also been converting the whole thing to a WordPress-powered site (more on that later), so it seemed to make sense to look for a plug-in to do the job.

So, the plugin is called WP-Cufon and you can get it at wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-cufon/

It’s quick to install, has good documentation, and it’s easy enough to specify some rules to control the text replacement on your site.

So for example I’ve used :

Cufon.replace('h1', { hover:true });
Cufon.replace('h2', { hover:true });
Cufon.replace('h5');
Cufon.replace('#navbar a');

which replaces the font for h1, h2, h5 headings and any link text within the ‘navbar’ div with a special font of my own making. All of the subsequent styling is covered by CSS. It really is very simple to set up.

You need to convert your font first into a format that Cufon can handle – there’s a Cufon generator that does the whole thing very neatly. It also, importantly, allows you to limit usage to certain domains to protect the font from use elsewhere.

read more »

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