OK, anyone who has met me will know I am a guy who 'likes his food'. So imagine my excitement when we got a call to go and discuss a possible new site for Jean-Christophe Novelli!

After our first meeting with the man himself there was one statement that resonated in my head; “My academy is my home, my heart and my life”. So the challenge was to try and convey this in the design. How to create that warm and welcoming atmosphere you get when visiting the academy, when you first land on the homepage?

As always, the process started by sketching away, the usual waking up in the middle of the night with another idea that might just work and, strangely, feeling hungry. I remember at the time in the office we were playing with textured backgrounds and it seemed very fitting to apply this approach to this site. It would set the academy in a different light to some of the competition, whose sites tend to look more clinical as you might expect from the catering industry.

There are many elements to the final design that I love, but creating the recipe page was especially enjoyable. I was experimenting with web fonts at the time and we had the idea of using a notepad, as though Jean-Christophe had personally written out the ingredients for you.

It was the little inspirational ideas like that which really made this a particularly enjoyable project to work on.

P&O Ferrymasters (POFM) approached Getme, concerned that their website wasn't representative of the company's image. They felt that the services they provided weren't clearly presented, the website looked dated and lacked any form of interaction with visitors. They asked us to help resolve these issues.

The focus of the most important page – the homepage – was to be a 'hero image' which would represent the company by including every aspect of the logistics services that POFM provide. As you might imagine, it's not too easy to find photos which include an HGV, a goods train, a container ship and an aeroplane, all in a single shot! The solution to this problem proved to be the creation of a montage image, via the magic of Photoshop (translation: many hours work in Photoshop and Blender3D).

It was possible to find separate stock images of a container ship and aeroplane, and a plane flying over the sea is an easy enough thing to create, but where to put the HGV and train? Another image of a truck on a coastal road was found, and composited into the foreground. However, the HGV didn't look quite right: the perspective was wrong and the trailer appeared to be too small. To correct this, a 3D model of the trailer was created and merged in with the image. This gave the HGV the right dimensions and, importantly, allowed the P&O Ferrymasters logo to be clearly shown along the side.

The only space to add the final form of transport: the goods train, was along the coast next to the HGV. There may be a safety issue or two related to this arrangement in real life, but hey, for the image it works. Except that finding an image of a goods train, winding off into the distance, to match the exact shape and perspective of the coast in our montage, would be... tricky. So instead, a 3D model of a long goods train was produced, textured and manipulated to match the shape of the road. And the train tracks needed to be created, for our train to run on. Simple.

With every item in place, there followed a (not particularly small) number of tweaks in order to get the image looking just right. Elements were resized, colours balanced, route lines added and destination times placed.

Finally, it was decided that the image was great, but some interaction would make it even better. So we added the ability to highlight any element and be presented with details about that service, along with a link for further information. If the mouse is not over the image, automatic cycling shows each element highlighted in turn.

P&O Ferrymasters were very happy with the result, and it seems they weren't alone, as visitor numbers increased by over 70% following the launch of the new website.

You can take a look for yourself at poferrymasters.com.

While we are mostly known for our websites, it appears to be a little known fact that we also design for print?

I graduated from university quite a few years ago, before the internet was widely used, and if someone tried to talk to me about HTML I found myself staring back with a blank expression on my face. This was hardly surprising as in my first year we didn't even use computers, it was metal type and composing sticks for us. Ask me about ligatures, em spacing and kerning and I will happily bore you for hours about the importance of good quality typography.

That's where my design career started, and it is still a massive part of my life. Yep, I'm that guy who sits in a restaurant and will study the menu, not just for what I want for starters, but also looking over the design. I constantly find myself picking up brochures and magazines. The content could be anything, but it's the layouts and the grids I am interested in. It has become an irresistible impulse.

Since becoming part of Getme I have continued to design for print – anything from a leaflet for a local brewery to full product brochures. I love the challenge of having a blank page and considering all the ways I can get the message over as simply and creatively as I can.

Although, clearly, print design is in my blood, at Getme I also now venture into the world of web design. I feel the two are becoming more aligned, with the introduction of CSS3. Just look at the two column layout of our blogs. I would always do this in print as a matter of course, and now I can design like this for the web too – happy days!

I continue to work on both disciplines, always putting a strong emphasis on those techniques and rules I have learnt over the years producing design for print.