The Escape Blog...

If, like us, you often need to come up with colour schemes here is a great tool from Adobe labs. ‘Kuler’ enables users upload their latest colour scheme sets and name them accordingly. They are then there for us all to see and use or be inspired by.

A great feature is that you can do a key word search eg: ‘Winter’ or even ‘Cherry Cheese Cake’ and all the schemes relating to that word are displayed - great stuff i say!!

PS: Thanks for sending me this Charlie

Pandora.com was sent to us by one of our Clients (Thanks Debbie) for all those people who like to discover new music, like what we do.

Can you help me discover more music that I’ll like? Those
questions often evolved into great conversations. Each friend told us
their favorite artists and songs, explored the music we suggested, gave
us feedback, and we in turn made new suggestions. Everybody started
joking that we were now their personal DJs.

It’s Tuesday. The gusto you started yesterday with is starting to wear off and you’re desperately willing Wednesday to come so you can start counting down to the weekend. You want to crack on and get that important project done but you just can’t find the motivation.

What you need is a pick-me-up. Fortunately deviantArt is full of them.  My new favourite of which is Line Rider.

"Its not a game, its a toy." Says *fsk, the creator. "What i mean is there are no goals to archive and there is no score." Simply draw lines onto the white background and watch the little guy on the sledge ride them.

Smashing! Bet you can’t make a loop-the-loop!

Check Line Rider out here.

Report over on our Boomerang Blog about the predicted growth of online sales in the UK for 2007.

Sorry to jump on your bandwagon Craig, but another very important event happened this week. We got a super duper new fast boiling kettle! This now means we each have approximatley 6 more minutes per day* to dedicate to all our lovley clients!

Andy was so pleased he even gave it a polish!

* Well it depends how much tea you make for everyone - you know who you are!

Much easier to have a run down of work for the whole week, rather than the individual case studies, so welcome to our new weekly post. (I did rip it from Brandflakes - it works so much better, so thanks for that).

• We have just agreed to be involved in a project for Talk 44 called Talk Seminars after the success of their recent Talk Creative Seminar. This project could really create long term benefits for them and we are very excited.
• We have also agreed to do a local charity website. Very nice stuff for us
  to get involved (details under wraps at the moment) - more in January on that, but they are very
  excited about using the web in an interactive way. Hoorah!
• Keith has been working on a sexy new web tool. We are going to sit down and work out the merits of it and other types of tool following the success of the web page analyser.
• Christmas has well and truly started with clients realising there is little under a month until the big day. Jacqui is very busy sorting greetings cards for them (as are the studio designing them), but they would love some more - the Slade CD is still not had enought wear.
• Our Christmas campaign is coming on. Dan, Jac, and the web guys are
  finishing off the pre-production. Much laughter is being had and we
  can’t wait to get it out.
• This post from SEOMoz got Keith e-mailing the immortal phrase (which I like to imagine him saying it as Wayne from Wayne’s World) - "The META will never die!" (bit of a techie one that)

It’s hissing down in Basingstoke so have a nice warm and dry weekend.

As a web designer i’m always on the lookout for new and creative ways of doing things on websites. Here is a great example of thinking differently as far as a site navigation is concerned. It seems to be inspired by a family tree. Have a play at evasolo

Google Talk is a brand new tool from the search engine giant that lets you communicate with your friends and family for free. It’s very similar to Instant Messenger and allows you to VOIP, instant message, send files and leave voicemail. It works to open standards so it will work with plenty of other IM applications allowing you to talk to people even if they aren’t using Google Talk.

It’s still in beta and seems to only be available for windows at the moment, but considering its early days this may very well change.

All you need is a Gmail or Google Account and your all set.

Check out Google Talk here.

I have discovered Papa Stour this week. A very nice web site set up to showcase the talents of Scottish Artists, Photographers and Product designers.

It’s full of nicely designed, unique & quirky products plus some great art and photography. I think the web site itself looks great and manages to get across the quality of what is being created, whilst retaining a feeling of independance - cottage industries if you like.

Expanding on the above point you can even see profiles of all the artists, which i think is a great touch and gives a real personal shopping experience no matter where you are in the world.

With Christmas around the corner you might even want get something a bit different for your nearest and dearest. I know I am going to.

First they are bringing out the zune to rival the iPod - too little to late?

Now, new free accountancy software for small business - this I like - ideaWins - The software really embraces the web and online culture with some nice integration features for online traders.

The design of the site? I really can’t make my mind up whether I like it or not. It seems as if they’ve got loads of techies in a room to analyse online design and then tried to recreate it. And, they didn’t quite get it right.

That said, it’s nice to see them trying.