So I bought a nice A5 graphics tablet off of one of our developers Ben the other day and after the novelty of writing my name over and over again in photoshop finally wore off I decided to see what it could really do and think about how it could improve our work flow.

To kick things off I got myself a trial copy of Autodesk’s Sketchbook Pro and started to have a play around. SBP is a basic program for sketching and although it isn't nearly as advanced as photoshop, it is very simple and easy to use and it makes it incredibly easy to just start sketching using your tablet and produces some nice results. I drew the Koi Fish in about 2 minutes, and best of all I didn't have to scan it in and use PS Levels to get it looking alright!

This got me thinking about possible uses for this technology in the studio. At CJ when we get animations in we do storyboards to illustrate how the animation will play out and what will happen. When we do these storyboards they are done by hand, normally by Greg and then scanned in and e-mailed over to the client.

This led me on to thinking if we did use this technology for storyboards, perhaps eliminating the need for scanning would encourage us to do a lot more sketching, and in my view this is no bad thing, as someone from Tricky Business once said at a user group, it's a lot easier to change a sketch than it is to change a photoshop file!

So I figure if we were all to do far more sketching at the early stages of a project and get everything laid out on paper (so to speak) before we even start designing then we could save ourselves a lot of back and forth between us and the clients and save ourselves a lot of time spent tweaking PS files here and there.

My thoughts - Get ya tablets on and start sketching!

So there has been a big debate flying around the office about who are the ultimate killing machines.

The nominees were in no particular order: 

James Bond - Jason Bourne - Agent 47 - Leon - The Jackal

After many long discussions we put it to a vote and the results are in:

1st Place: Leon (53 points)

2nd Place: Jason Bourne (48 points)

3rd Place: James Bond (46 points)

4th Place: Agent 47 (41 points)

5th Place: The Jackal (22 points)

Personally I think everyone was wrong and Agent 47 would own everyone! What do you think??

So, IE6 is a pretty out dated browser and amongst other things doesn't support PNGs. Unfortunately there is still a percentage of people using IE6 so we still need to support it which can be a real bummer when the only way to successfully execute your design is to use PNGs for transparency.

Well there are a few solutions out there which will do the trick, however the one we have recently been using has a few issues which limits it;s abilities, mainly the lack of being able to repeat background PNGs, and a few issues with Z-Index of links.

Today Rob pointed me in the direction of a new PNG fix which is real easy to implement.  You can download the script here.

All you have to do is put the JS file somewhere in your solution along with a blank GIF file and then call the script from any page using PNGs using the following bit of code:

<!--[if lt IE 7]><script type="text/javascript" src="unitpngfix.js"></script><![endif]-->

 As long as all your paths are set correctly you should be up and running!

I stumbled across an issue today when using this script but Rob managed to fix them up pretty easily. The problem I discovered today was as soon as I put a link on an image, the image wouldn't render, but as discovered by Rob all you need to do to fix this is on all your PNGs simply put display:block and everything is back to normal!

So the builders have been into the studio and taken out the wall in the Technical room, now Directors Billy and Al are taking out the remaining bricks where the wall used to be. Keep up the good work lads!

Pretty interesting and clever illustration.