It’s been a long time coming, but I’m now making the big jump to being my own boss and the master of my own destiny. I really couldn’t be happier. Five years at magneticNorth and two-and-a-half at LOVE have been simply marvellous, but as of Monday November the 8th, I shall be freelance and proud – off into the big wide world as a one man band.

So hopefully someone out there will need some cool games making, some AS3 coding, some Flash designing (oh and coding on that link – just go with it), a spot of writing, an interactive installation or maybe just something nice for Xmas. I’ve made plenty of lovely interactive stuff for people like Diesel, Sony PS3, the BBC, Kellogg’s, Warburtons, Dr Martens, Vauxhall, Microsoft, Coca-Cola and Umbro, if that helps.

Please say hello on email, twitter or LinkedIn and you’re on my site now, in case you were wondering what this was.

Cheers. As you can see above, I’m visibly excited.

Oooh look. Much toil, blood, sweat, tears and seemingly never-ending meetings have finally culminated in the all new LOVE. site!

A lot of people really didn’t like the old one, but sod them – we did. After all, it was funny, it won awards, it got us the business we were after and acquitted itself admirably, now bowing out gracefully for the new generation to take over.

And this time, we’ve taken a different tack. Firstly, the work’s all there up front. Big, bold and colourful. Then there are loads of new videos and web walkthroughs, not least of which is LOVE’s brand new retro brand film, made by our very talented video elves. And thanks in no small part to very recent advances at Vimeo, all this should look as pretty on your iPhone or iPad as it does on your big work screen.

Oh, and of course this covers BLOG, SHOP, Vimeo and Twitter too.

United Underground 2 was an event held on the theme of conflict, so we encouraged people to show their support for peace by giving two fingers to war with the classic “V” for victory gesture. Their poses were displayed on a huge screen behind the performers, in a constantly-changing demonstration of unity.

Here’s Dorothy’s video:

U+262E: Two Fingers to War from Dorothy on Vimeo.

For Sony PS3, LOVE’s biggest digital achievement to date: The Game.

Look at the pretty games!

Carrier are a high-end holidays company, so they wanted a high fashion feel to permeate the site.

We at LOVE. tried to make a silky-smooth flash site as easy to navigate as your usual information-rich xhtml, with gorgeous full bleed photos, smooth fades aplenty, nice image galleries and easy text scrolling. And it all sits within a browser-height stretchy interface that adapts all text boxes and search results to fit snugly to the footer.

The Flash was built with the Gaia Framework for its built-in templating, SWFAddress, google analytics and so on, which worked like a dream once I’d dug into the forums to “get” Gaia and figured out pulling all the data out of Mark’s enormous backend through CakePHP. So to speak.

Been busy busy on LOVE’s 2008 xmas card thing for couple of weeks and it’s finally all ready and polished. SHHH!TV was a real team effort (you know who you are, etc) and we’re really happy with how it turned out, but it just seemed such a pity to scale down the gorgeous RED One footage to 640 wide for the web. Such is life. One day, maybe.

Please send a gift to everyone you know and care about, just don’t send the Orange Stick to your gran. Depending on your gran, of course. Mine’d probably rather have the Cliff calendar.

Incidentally, the Sky Guide-style menus are meant to be slow and clunky, just like the real thing! It took lots of Timers to get the delays just right as the screens build and the video scales down. Just for the record…

Here’s a special little gift, from me to you. Ho ho ho.

We put the new LOVE site live last night. Please click here.