Over the past two years I’ve worked with Pixillion for HJ Marketing to produce a mini-series of simple viral games for the UK’s biggest trade union, Unite the Union. The games have been used to raise awareness of specific campaigns Unite have been representing. I’ve illustarted, designed and developed virals for them since 2008, here are a couple of examples:

http://www.hjmarketing.co.uk/unitetheunion/liongame.html

http://www.hjmarketing.co.uk/unitetheunion/chickengame.html

For a while now if I wanted to use a pretty font on a website and still have it accessible and able to be read by search engines, I would have to turn to sIFR. This is nice enough but it doesn’t always behave like I want it to, and it’s still a little tricky to use. So I’ve tried out cufón on this website. It was quick to set up and very easy to use. Here’s how:

• Head here to upload your font and download cufón.
• Upload the js files to your server and include them on your page
• Use js in the had tag to replace what you need. The following replaces all h1 tags with your font.

<script type="text/javascript">
   Cufon('h1');
</script>

There are lots of custom features you can add, and you can check out the full documentation here. One particular thing that is useful to point out that I encountered was that :hover is switched off by default, so if you plan on using cufón on any <a> tags with :hover attached to them, be sure to turn it on like in the following example

<script type="text/javascript">
   Cufon('a',{hover: true});
</script>

Enjoy!

So next week is the UK general election. I’ve been pondering a lot about who to vote for… really for the first time. At 19, I could have voted in the 2005 election, however I was underwhelmed and confused by who to vote for. I’m not massively clearer this time, but something has made me take a firm interest in voting. Perhaps it’s the lack of campaigns telling me I SHOULD be interested in politics. Telling a teenager they should do something usually results in them not doing it, and sitting there in the cinema watching something along the lines of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I wasn’t inspired by an advert telling me I should be interested in politics. Maybe though, it was more the feeling that my vote doesn’t matter, that the same people are going to vote for the same things and my opinion isn’t going to change that. It’s that argument I hear over and over again, and I sympathise with it… but this time there is something slightly different.

It may just be me getting older, taking more of an interest in “grown up” things (…maybe…posssibly…) but moreso, thanks to social networking, I’m noticing more voices. More people talking about it, more people who perhaps wouldn’t mention anything before, saying what they think. One particular Facebook group I have noticed goes under the name “We got Rage Against the Machine to #1, we can get the Lib Dems into office!” – At first look I thought this is maybe a bit too gimmicky to be taken seriously in relation to something as important as a general election, but then you see that as I write this, there are almost 160,000 members. Whether the group has merit or not, there are potential people in there who may have wanted to vote Lib Dem and would usually stay silent or not bother, who after seeing more support might actually start believing their vote could make a difference.

How many of these 160k members will actually go out and vote on the day remains to be seen, and how many are doing it for the wrong reasons is also an important question… but I think the something to note is that social networking is giving us a mass voice, which we may not have heard through the swamp of specific party biased newspapers and TV channels. On the other hand, the power some celebrities have on Twitter could be viewed as even more influencial and biased to certain targets. Twitter king Stephen Fry has the power to send out his opinion to a million and a half people at the click of a button – a million and a half people who have chosen to follow him because they enjoy or find what he has to say interesting. His post of “Still surprising myself with LibDem thoughts. Haven’t yet heard good anti-hung parliament argument yet. Interesting. Few days to decide.” is potentially enough to send uncertain minds swaying in more certain directions.

Either way, it’s clear social networking has a place in this campaign, it’s full impact is yet to be seen, but come next week it’ll be slightly clearer.

I’ve just finished a complete design revamp of Simon Jaymes’s new website. He’s currently gearing up to release his new album and wanted a wordpress based site to make sure he has full control over his content. It’s all wired in to facebook and twitter and is good to go! Also started using mailchimp for his email campaigns which is proving a very nice tool indeed.

www.simonjaymes.com

In other news, Matt Barney and I are working on a new viral gaming wireframe for Toasted Digital, while I’m also on a new exciting media project with Leigh Jackson.