The weather, I think we would all admit, has been pushing our patience to the limit lately! However, there can be nothing more calming then a good old snowball fight to release those tensions and transport ourselves back to childhood days of playtime in the snow.

One snowball in a Designer's eye later, we decided that this could be potentially harming to CJ (given we're a design agency!) and swapped to snow art instead. What could be more fitting than a massive snow-CJ!

Well done to Simon (funny hat), Rob (massive white coat) and Ben (the other one!) for suffering cold feet, numb hands and much mocking for showing their builders bums! A fine effort I think you'll agree...

We recently launched a new campaign website for WRVS with the purpose of raising awareness of how older people struggle to get to the places they need to on a daily basis without the support of community transport. With the theme of hitchhiking proposed by WRVS, Creative Jar put together a very unique campaign website.

Viral
To coincide with the campaign website, a viral video was shot and put up on YouTube. Together with some willing volunteers and people who use the services of WRVS, Creative Jar shot a video which presented the unrealistic image of older people having to hitchhike in order to get to their destinations. The aim was to produce a quirky way of showing what might happen if community transport was not available for older people across Brtiain. Why not check it out?

Speedometer Flash
As part of the build, the creative team were required to build a flash element in the bottom left of the page which would count the number of volunteers that had registered as a result of the campaign.

To tie in with the transport theme, the creative team produced a speedometer which would count the number of volunteers registering with WRVS. Below you can see a screenshot of the flash showing a total of 23 volunteers. As you can see the number is counted both within the mileage gage in the centre, and also the speed dial (pointer) moves depending on the volunteers. To the right of the speedometer are two call-to-action buttons styled like the indicators of a car. Hovering over them adds some nice moving animation.

404 Page
Though not a lot of people will see this page (we hope!) the team also created a unique Error 404 page (displayed when a page cannot be found). Styled to look like a person holding a sheet of cardboard, carrying through the hitchhiking theme, this visually makes the user quickly aware they are not looking a page within the intended site map.

These are just a few of the outstanding elements which can be found on the WRVS Give Us A Lift campaign website. Why not visit the site, explore and find more for yourself?

Twitter Competition
Alongside the campaign, WRVS are running a twitter prize draw and competition to give away two Flip Cameras a week for four weeks. The first five winners have already been contacted, which means there are a further three cameras to be won. Find out more by visiting the Twitter page.

It's the question on everyone's lips ATM. Answers at: http://www.isitxmasyet.com/

It’s time to blow the dust off this blog and announce some rather exciting news for Creative Jar. Previously this year, Creative Jar launched Phase 1 of Cranfield School of Management's new website and was received with huge success. Recently, as part of the second phase, we were required to build a powerful search tool for the website much like Google – a scary comparison, but a challenge Creative Jar set out to achieve.

Your average search tool consists of a keyword search which displays a generic list of results relating to your search term. Leaving users to flick through link by link for what they were searching. However, the SOM Search uses your search term and returns results in an array of categories; images, videos, documents, website sections.

Directly from this results landing page, the user can watch videos, play audio files and read snippets of content. Alternatively, the user can select to view your standard results page if they wish to do so.

All of this is powered using Cranfield's custom CMS, giving the client full control over their content and their search... a powerful tool for any website – and very exciting for use techies to build!

Check it out and find out for yourself by visiting the Cranfield website!

We recently came across a problem on one of our websites where if a user had Skype's browser plugins installed, all phone numbers would be replaced with their own "widget" of sorts, therefore breaking the layout:

After some browsing and head-bashing, I came across this fix which tells the Skype plugin to not replace any numbers on a webpage. Simply add the following code to your <head> section and the problem will stop occuring.

<meta name="SKYPE_TOOLBAR" content ="SKYPE_TOOLBAR_PARSER_COMPATIBLE"/>

Very handy if you have phone numbers which are quite prominent in the website's design, and don't want Skype ruining it.

We have been working with a client who has a Google Search Box installed in their website. http://www.google.com/enterprise/search/index.html

The guys lucky enough to have been working with this technology are loving it. Digging deep into XSLT - we think we have provided one of the strongest search solutions available on the internet (for an internal search engine).

Stay posted - this isn't live yet.

In the meantime, anyone contemplating adding a search tool to their website should be looking at this. It's enterprise level, so not cheap, but you get what you pay for. And this is awesome! 

I am currently in the process of packing up my belongings to move house - and let's face it, you inevitably will find stuff which you had misplaced about 6 years ago behind a book or in a box deep within your cupboard. One thing I did find was a box of untouched floppy discs and it got me thinking: when was the last time I used a floppy disc? With CD's, DVD's, Memory Sticks and External Hard Drives polluting every computer users repository for file storage, floppy disc's don't even get a look in.

So with the 'fate of floppy discs becoming apparent' what will happen to the Floppy Disc Save icon that we see on every computer application that has saving functionality? Will it be modernized to suit the advancing technologies that we now use to store our files? Or will it be standardized as one of those all-time-favourites that just don't need changing? Well I did a bit of googling on the matter, as you do, and found this interesting discussion: Modernizing the Save Icon?

You will find a few comic jokes thrown in here and there but some very valid points are raised about why should we both touching something which has become such a standard?

"Quick, off the top of your head, what does a red octagon with a white outline represent? How about a button on a GUI that looks like a pair of scissors? What about a red circle with a red line across it from the lower left to the upper right? A button on the corner of a screen window that has an X in it? Do *any* of these things actually look like the object or process that they
represent? Does it matter?

A good icon is simple, visually distinctive, easy to recognize instantly, consistent across many interfaces. The floppy disk icon for save is all of these things, and it's also familiar to almost every experienced computer user. It could be simplified a little (removing some superfluous details, like the label and the little readonly-lock thingydo), but the basic visual is already
quite simple and distinctive. Nobody's going to mistake it for (say) the paste button. Sure, it's an anachronism, but the standard icons for cutting and pasting are scissors and paste, respectively, and nobody's used *that* method of cutting and pasting since word processing came into vogue. So what? The icons are visually distinctive enough (well, the scissors are; they should
probably have used a roll of transparent tape for paste, but it's too late to change that now) and their meaning is well established."

I think the above nailed the point really: an icon is something which is easy to recognize instantly, consistent and requires no thought. Just because the technologies that we use nowadays look different and are structured differently physically doesn't mean functionally they do not have the same purpose - to save your current file

We have recently been working on a multi-lingual website - one supported language being Korean. Thankfully, on Windows Vista, we have a pre-installed language pack which displays all of the Eastern language characters. However we were running into a problem on some Windows XP machines, that even after installing the language pack, some elements (primarily select drop-down menus) were rendering with square text rather than the Korean language.

After researching into whether or not it was the DOCTYPE of the page, if the font being used supported Korean characters, or it was infact a browser issue as the problem only occured in Internet Explorer. I was able to fix  the problem by setting the language charset for the page to Korean by using a meta tag:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=euc-kr" />

So simply place this in the <head> tag of your web page and the problem is fixed. Hurrah!

Following on from Billy's post on Tuesday, I recently stumbled across this interesting post at Smashingapps - 21 Stunning Examples Of Creatively Done Stop Motion Animations

Here are my top 4 favourites:

What's yours?