tk1 - Portfolio of web designer & producer Tom Knowles

Protech is a recruitment company who wanted to break out of the conventional 'job-board' mentality and do something innovative with their website.

We did some nice Krop-style live search stuff on this, as well as some slick back-end system integration by Mike. I designed the initial concepts and produced the site. Oh and I also put the CSS navigation together, which involved sweating blood for IE6.

A rare foray into the world of brand design and literature, this was a nice little project I put together for some friends taking their first steps into business.

Having learnt a thing or two about the branding process from the experts at The Roundhouse, I produced several concepts (a couple of which are shown here) before we settled on a final design. I'm currently helping out with the styling of the online shop too.

Seven Stories is the UK's national centre for children's books.

And we've done some great work for them – the main site itself (including some nifty JavaScript-to-Flash text resizing – try clicking the larger text size option), plus Browser's Book, and his Collection Quest.

The 'page-turning' stuff has been done a million times since, but it was new back then and I should add that all the ActionScript you see in the site is our own.

This is probably the oldest piece of work here, but I'm still really proud of it.

Yes, elements of it are a little dated, and it's very much of its time (fuzzy Flash MX fonts, 800x600 res etc), but there's a lot of craft in the details. Eg, when you move your mouse over the zoomable map, I replace the real cursor with a replica graphic, then fade it down and replace it with a custom cursor. Who would notice that? No-one, probably. Except me. Go to 11.