Over the years, together we’ve dabbled in graphic design, photography + film work, illustration, and web design + code, trading first as sole traders with our own small businesses, then combining them to form a partnership under the name Lightbulb Head. Since having children we’ve folded the business so aren’t currently earning money from our creativity, but that hasn’t stopped us from creating.
In this section there’s a selection of some of the projects that we’ve worked on over the years – scroll down for the most recent, or use the categories on the left to see specific projects.
In 2018 we re-designed and re-wrote the website for St Paul and St Stephen’s church in Gloucester. This was our first “mobile-first” web design where we designed it first for mobile devices, then adapted it for larger screens. We drew on much of the functionality of the St Mark’s website – the events calendar, the highlights on the front page, but we also brought the latest sermon recording onto the front page too. We also wanted all of the key information for a new visitor visible on every page, so we designed the footer of each page to have service times, contact details and a map of where the church is
We were commissioned to re-write a website for a private tutor. The previous iteration of the website had many different illustration of a compass, but these were from different sources and in different styles. So our customer asked Kiri to put together a set of compass illustrations that would be more consistent and uniform for the new site.
We were given a brief to re-write the website for a private tutor trading as Compass Tutoring. As the previous website was already pretty nicely designed, we created a custom WordPress theme, retaining most of the existing design elements and only making a few tweaks in terms of alignment of elements. The biggest change we made was to make it responsive, so that it displays well on any size screen. We also added a blog and some minimal social media sharing buttons on blog posts.
We designed the logo for St Mark’s Church in Kennington, London in 2015. We circulated a questionnaire around the congregation with regards to how the church views itself and what the important aspects of its culture are. A multitude of responses were received, reflecting the diversity of the congregation, but one key, consistent aspect cropped up again and again; that of welcome. After throwing a few ideas down on paper, we settled on the concept of an open door with light flowing ou, incorporating the shape of the church, as it has quite a recognisable silhouette. Along with the new logo we put together a pared-down style guide containing a suggested, consistent colour palette to use for all printed media and electronic media.
Charles Bridge in Prague is known for its hustle and bustle, but one of the most striking memories of my first visit to Prague in the 1990s was the beauty and tranquillity of the bridge. In order to re-discover that tranquillity, we got up early one morning on our travels to capture the golden morning light and the transition from stillness to bustle. Surprisingly, the quietest time on Charles Bridge wasn’t at 5:30 when we arrived, but around 6:30. From then, it just got busier until the stalls were all set up and the crowds had reached their mean daytime density by 10:15am, at which point we stopped the camera. 12fps using shots taken every 10 seconds for around 4 and a half hours
Whilst travelling around Europe, we stopped at Belgrade Bible college where we were asked to re-write their website. We’ tried to retain the general feel of the site, whilst making minor improvements where possible. We added a videos page, a calendar page (simple embed of a Google calendar), a blog, used consistent icons for the contact page and embedded a Google map on their contact page. We also created one stylesheet behind the whole site rather than having individual page stylesheets (as the old site did), which should help to improve consistency of pages across the site. Oh, and did we forget to mention that the site had to operate in both Serbian and English? Gotta love a bit of a challenge!
As we travelled around Europe in our trusty motorhome Bertha, we had originally planned to accompany our blogging with a video diary too. We got to video number 3 and realised that actually we were spending just as much time editing the video as we were living the experience, so we carried on filming, but left the editing until our return to the UK. And then life happened… so here are the 3 original videos. There may be more in future (as we are sitting on over 40 hours of footage!) but possibly in a different format
The brief for this church website was to make it easy to keep up to date – so key to this was adding functionality that would always display the most up to date information on the front page – what was happening this week, what the events were that were coming up and what the latest news was. The easiest way to tackle the first without writing a whole calendar framework was writing an integration with Google calendar, so those in the church office could just keep the Google calendar up to date rather than having to update the website directly – the latest iteration of this code is on GitHub
Steve photographed over 30 weddings since he was first asked to stand in at the last minute as a photographer at a friend’s wedding in 2005 through to the last one in 2013. The style majored in more on trying to capture natural moments from afar rather than staged photos – but always taking the lead from the couple getting married (hence the three shots above that were staged)! Most were under the branding of “SRPhotos”, but the final couple were under the branding of “Lightbulb Head”.
Before we moved out of London we wanted to do a timelapse of a busy junction near our flat… so with the permission of the vicar of St. Mark’s Kennington church, we set up a time lapse as dusk fell of the junction at Oval tube station leaving the camera to take a picture every 3 seconds.