We’re very excited to announce a new working partnership with the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery to design & develop an online educational resource for public, students and professionals.

Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery houses the largest collection of Pre-Raphaelite art works in the UK. The online resource will enable for the first time the general public to see the entire collection of over 3000 works. Alongside this we will develop tools for the creation and sharing of user generated essays, teaching resources and lightboxes.

We were shortlisted and subsequently selected for our unique design vision and technical expertise. We will be building the site from scratch using the new .NET MVC framework, all design and development will be handled in house. The project will launch in early 2009.

Nathan Fletcher recently sent us a bunch of posters so we thought it worth reposting a link across to his excellent portfolio site, My Broken Shoe. Nathan has a really great illustrative style. One day we’ll commission him to make us something ace for us, in the meantime why don’t you!

Wowsers - this is amazing - it's a Ferris Wheel that is powered by your computers keyboard; each time you type the wheel lights up, spins and the dodgems ride the rollercoaster! Follow the link to the product site to see the wheel in motion.

Wow - boxes and boxes of Beavers!

About a year ago I posted this great picture of the Star Wars Rock Band. Turns out it’s only half the image! Check the image below to see the full band!

(Click to zoom in)

We’d like to offer a big “Hello” to two new members to the TAK! massive.

Joining us from Sweden is Chris Lind. Chris is a graduate of Hyper Island and will be busting some fresh skills focussing on Flash and digital design.

Jenny Prescott is from a bit closer to home and is hired as studio manager. Jenny will be overseeing all work passing through TAK! as well as focussing on client services and new business.

Unfortunately, we have to say goodbye to Brett Meyer who recently moved to London to persue a freelance career down there. Brett worked on pretty much all the Flash websites we created over the past 3 years and we highly recommend hiring him for any Flash / Design / PHP work. Click here if you're interested. To say thanks, we invited Brett up to Birmingham to have a few drinks at the Moseley Folk Festival. We had too many. Check below for photos.

Check out the awesomeness in these… a company who custom makes rooms for kids…

I was playing around on YouTube yesterday and decided to make a playlist of every DMC champion from 1987 onwards. It's interesting to watch each 6 minute set to see how the skills (and music) have progressed. I remember being blown away seeing DJ Noize do his thing on TV back in 1996 — watching the anthology it’s clear that his approach changed things quite a lot.

YouTube’s great ain’t it!

I’d live in these — without a second thought.

Great micro-doc on the worlds largest record collection. I love this and as much as I enjoy digital music it’s such a shame that a huge portion of history will eventually get forgotten. It’s the same with VHS > DVD > Blu Ray — as each new format comes along only mainstream productions get converted.

I’ve had it with Firefox 3. What should be a relatively lo-fi experience of ‘browsing the internet’ seems to be the most difficult task for this browser to handle. Maybe it’s trying to do to much and forgetting that is the core Firefox role?

For the past few weeks every 30 seconds of browsing time is punctuated by an annoying 3 second pause (beachball) as the browser plays catch up with itself. This tends to happen during the funny bits in YouTube videos or crucially when I press 'Proceed' in a checkout.

Maybe it’s deliberate?

The most recent spate of issues center around the browser totally smashing my computer’s processor. The fans kick in and everything grinds to a halt. Any input in any application takes forever and is only fixed by pressing the blue button below.

What gives? Don’t get me wrong — I see the potential in the browser — I love the new bookmark tagging and plug-ins (I only run a couple btw) but if this hinders the core process of accessing the internet then sorry — but it’s time to uninstall. That has to be the drastic measure — by keeping it on my hard drive, instinct will surely make me fire it up again.

So where next? Maybe… I might give Camino a whirl. It’s by Mozilla and is pretty decent. I might also give Flock a try. It’s a social networking aware browser which seems quite interesting. Or it’s back to Safari — but for some reason it isn’t storing my passwords correctly… sheesh!

For those ready to defend Firefox — I'm running on a 2.2Ghz Core Duo Macbook with 10.5 & 4gigs of RAM — should be more than plenty!

“Screen WM is the leading agency for film, television and digital media in the West Midlands”

Back in April we won a tender to redesign and redevelop the Screen WM website.We won the pitch based on our design skills and the simplicity of our CMS technology.

The site features clearer information structure as well as a comprehensive events calendar and video channel. The site also features numerous blogs and news sections to communicate all that is happening in the region. All this is powered by our in-house developed CMS — Wrapper. The result is a super fast site which is customised to the client.

Future updates will allow event submissions, possible video submissions and more. Watch this space.

Our shop is now open for business. We’ll be adding some more stuff in there over the next few weeks… for now you can buy our ‘Zine & bag. Woot!

Ah man… why don’t things like this happen in the UK?