BC Trees asked Blackspike to come up with a custom built Wordpress theme to include BC Trees’ new branding and to be fully responsive from mobile to tablet to laptop to desktop.

Visit windows-phone-agenda.com We created a new site and icon for our friends at interact-sw.co.uk – they built a handy calendar app for the upcoming 8.1 release. We first designed the logo, making it really crisp and to be as ‘system default’ looking as possible. By designing the logo in Illustrator and using the vectors embedded […]

We soft launched readspike.com some time in 2013 mostly for ourselves, but more and more people are heading about it and users are growing daily. With more users comes feedback, mostly useful! Readspike v2 now uses localstorage to remember column states and we’ve added a re/code feed as requested. We have updated the logo and […]

Slidestache.com – PHP/Google Spreadsheet/HTML5 DJ mixer and MIDI controller comparison site

Blackspike was asked to help with some animation for Endjin – something we would normally have done in Flash (or less frequently, Silverlight), but the brief was for it to work on mobile, which meant using HTML5/CSS/Javascript.

ReadSpike.com beta one – tech news aggregator project coming soon! Visit ReadSpike.com

A training demo app for a hypothetical hotel, showing off the CSS3 features of Windows Store Apps

We’ve been looking at CSS3 a bit this week, particularly the webkit implementation of it, and we’re amazed. This is going to be great for progressive enhancement to sites viewed in modern browsers. We had no idea it was possible to keyframe and then trigger animations within CSS! Some use cases that spring instantly to […]

Back in March we released our award winning free Silverlight 4 theme, which provides control styles & templates, and a set of brushes to customise the look. We’re not sure that we made it clear how simple it is to change the brushes to make the theme fit your style. Therefore, we’re going to create […]

This is a very simple & specific bookmarklet to hide the annoying footer banner advert on the otherwise great website webdesignledger.com — we love the site but for some reason we find footer adverts very annoying.* After seeing this new Smashing Magazine tutorial: Make Your Own Bookmarklets With jQuery the other day, we thought we’d […]

This is the much requested Silverlight 3 version of my Blackspike theme – same rules apply, you can use it for any project personal or commercial. Let us know if you find any bugs in the comments below. Released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales. You are free to copy, […]

Update: The skin has been upgraded to Silverlight 4 final! Update 2: This theme won an award! We are playing with Silverlight 4 beta a lot at the moment, and one of its best features is the new Implicit Styles. This means that we can design a Silverlight theme for all the controls, and all […]

Following on from our post on how to use Google Docs as a lightweight CMS, this is how to include editable tabular data with custom fields in your WordPress theme. Edit core WordPress theme files You will only need to edit two files in your theme: header.php single.php Copy the contents from the source code […]

We created a website for a friend, who wanted to display a lot of tabular data. We couldn’t find a way to make it easy to update on a regular basis, so we cooked up a simple CMS using a little PHP, jQuery, HTML and Google Spreadsheets. Part 2 shows how to integrate Into WordPress. […]

Here’s some free spinners I’ve been making with Blend and Illustrator that you can use as indeterminate loaders for Silverlight or any WPF app, all that needs changing to suit is the storyboard trigger. Enjoy!

A cool flash/jQuery mashup to expose cheap albums on the MSN Music website, lots of animation and vibrant colours, this was a fun mini site I built at Nokia Music.

A quick site and business card for the talented stone carver Tom Brown. We wrote a php script that loops through a directory for images and thumbnails and some jquery to make a lightbox, a very primitive CMS system in a couple of files. Check out some of his amazing work here: helixstonecarving.com

As worthless as it comes, here’s a theme we made when Silverlight Beta 2 came out. Of course, Silverlight 2 turned out to be incompatible with Beta 2, so we threw it away. For posterity, you can download the source below. Maybe grab some XAML out of it. Update – check out our new Silverlight […]

Early last year we entered a redesign contest to win a free trip to Mix in Vegas. You had to take their HTML page and without touching it, totally redesigning it using CSS and images only. We really enjoyed the challenge, both designing and building it, and were happy with the final result. The judges […]

The music download stores we designed at OD2 (pre Nokia Music) were interesting in that each store was rolled out to web, TV (via mediacenter) and mobile – each with device specific constraints. It was great experience, and we learned a lot about usability dependent on situations (more than just interactive TV needs enormous buttons). […]

Before Nokia bought OD2, the digital delivery network started by Peter Gabriel, we used to be the lead designers and it was our job to design and sometimes build the storefronts for clients such as MSN, Coca Cola, Oxfam and many others. This was the last one we designed, the O2 music store, long before […]

This website was for the super talented artist, Jo Conlon, who wanted a blog to promote her exhibitions and new work, and a shop to sell pieces online. Rather than using the clunky zencart which would be a bit overkill, we used WordPress with a custom theme and the (also somewhat clunky) cheap plugin wp-ecommerce. […]

Zencart eCommerce site Visit keyring.com

A friend asked us to build her a full ecommerce site for her ethical goods business, so after our success and experience building zencart site, ikeyring.com, we thought we’d build hers with it too. Sadly, it never took off, here is how it looked anyway, with their logo we designed

The Who What Why Ian Griffiths, a well respected developer, speaker and author who literally wrote the book on WPF amongst other his many other projects (he even helped write Artworks for the Acorn Archimedes early 90’s – the first Illustrator-like app I ever used!) and an all round good bloke. His blog gets ~23,000 […]

Use igoogle? Here’s how to create your own and get it published. Get your artwork thousands of daily views for free by just making your own homepage not suck with a homemade igoogle theme