It’s been a long time coming, but finally version 3.0 is now live and kicking! As with most creative agencies, it’s your own site that gets done last, due to the fact that you are pouring all your creative juices into your paid work, so the company site always gets dropped on the back-burner.

Well, this time Fully Illustrated is back with a bang! This lovely new shiny site comes with a whole host of new features, all of which I’ll list below:

• The FI-Blog – Yey, finally I catch up with something that people have been doing for years. Its tooled up with all the usual bits too, so there is an RSS feed over there on the right, so for those of you who like to keep up with my latest releases, it’s now a bucket load easier than just checking back all the time (yes, I’ve finally listened to all the requests, so thanks for asking 🙂

• Branding section – Again, this an answer to the maaaaany questions I receive asking ‘do you also do branding?’, to which I have to mail back a long winded reply explaining that I do, but I just don’t have a section on the site about it. So now it’s here for all to see. I hope you like it.

• Dedicated iPhone site – Yep, there is now a dedicated iPhone site too! As a lot of the work I do these days is iPhone related, I wanted to have a nice welcome screen dedicated to my favourite mobile device. Take a peek at the piccies below if you don’t have an iPhone.

• Evolved look and feel – After playing around with lots of ideas, most of which were simply overkill, I realised that what I really needed to do was evolve Fully Illustrated, not put it through a full on revolution. So I dropped the full flash concepts pretty early on and finally settled on this new design, I hope it’s to your liking. The main goal has been to expose more content, to show off some of the work that you may not have seen before and keep the site feeling fresh, so as you move around the site, you’ll see little promotional areas for other random pieces of work from other sections.

• Epic About section – Again this is something of a response to the many emails I’ve received asking me for more info about my interests, inspiration, background etc, so I decided to create a much more in-depth about section. In here you can read all sorts of information, including…

1. Overview – A run down about all the main info you need to know
2. Services – A detailed page of information about each service available
3. Awards – A page dedicated to all the individual projects that have won awards
4. Background – Covering my personal career history
5. Inspiration – A page dedicated to all things that give me my inspiration
6. The Monster Games Collection – Yep, a page dedicated to my MONSTER games collection.  I’ve mentioned this to sooo many of my games clients that I just had to feature it on the new site.  Over 30 consoles and hundreds of games…not forgetting my arcade machine!
7. Press & Publications – A feature of all the books and magazines that Fully Illustrated has been featured in.

• Twitter feed – Yep, I tweet, but not many people know about it as I’ve never advertised the fact. But if my ramblings seem of any interest to you, you are more than welcome to follow me.

• Top of Page – Yep, another point raised by so many people ‘Please add a button to let me get back to the top of the page’ so that now, when you reach the bottom of any portfolio entry, you no longer have to aimlessly scroll up, you simply need to click the ‘top of page’ button 🙂

• Celebratory Art – To celebrate this new launch I decided to indulge myself in a few days personal work, to create a collection of 3 (as this is version 3, see the link 😉 new digital art pieces.  These were intended to capture the main theoretical elements of creating a new site, starting with ‘Matter’, the stage of envisioning an idea, or collection of random ideas. ‘Destruction’ the sometimes harsh process of removing the old ready for the new (kinda like the theory of fire and earth, fire aggressively destroys, but in turn creates rich nutrients to fertilise the land for new growth) and then finally ‘Conception’ the point where the ideas spark into creation.  Wow, that was all rather over the top wasn’t it…yeah ok, ok, I just wanted to create three shiny new images 🙂  Anyway, here’s a link to the images, so feel free to take a look and I hope you like them.

• More to come! – There are other sections coming too, which will include a shop (for a rather cool range to t-shirts I’m brewing up), a downloads section and a whole host of other things. I just didn’t want to wait any longer on the release, so those will be phased in over the coming months.

So in a nutshell there has been a lot added to this new site, so I hope you all enjoy the new additions and feel free to send in your thoughts and opinions, they are all welcome and always appreciated.

So without further ado, say hello to Fully Illustrated v3.0! I hope you enjoy your visit.

Thanks.

Mike.