Here's a commercial I did a few years ago for the Construction Industry Trade Body. We had lots of fun doing it - the animation idea was an midnight inspiration that I ended up scamping on Photoshop originally. The animation was done by Bermuda Shorts, directed by Will Barras.

Looking back at it, I'm really happy with the way it worked out. There was a lot of information to get across and the endframe looks cool. It also worked really well, it drove lots of traffic to the website and the client ran it for three years. Icing on the cake, it picked up a Best Use of Advertising at the MCCA awards.

Drawing by Jorinde Voigt on butdoesitfloat.com

I'm a big fan of fffound.com and dropular.net (currently switching servers, try again soon) - they're image book marking sites. They're great as a source of inspiration and imagery, design and photography, illustration. They're also a bit frustrating as people bookmark the same images over and over. The interesting thing is to follow the links - one source that crops up over and over is a site called butdoesitfloat.com - a mostly visual blog run by two designers. Go and see it, it's one of the most interesting and original sites I've come across. It has an air of erudition and sparkiness around it that reminds me of Brian Eno at his most egg-headed (in a good way).

Untitled (Palm Tree Trunk, Green Wall, Cuba),” 2007, by William Eggleston, image from Cheim & Read, New York

I took the afternoon on Wednesday to go to see this exhibition with my friend Ivan (who’s a top art director).

It was, in a word, sublime.

Eggleston’s photographs demand your complete attention. In repro in magazines and newspapers or books, they’re easily glossed over. But as large prints in an amazing gallery space, they command your attention and draw you in. Each one tells a story – life always seems to be happening somewhere just out of shot and that’s the genius in it. One shot shows some dresses in a window, blurred and yellowed behind sunshades. But the world you can see in the reflection of the window tells a whole different story.

There are details upon details that draw you in. They are unsettling and disturbing while being strangely comforting because they dwell on the ordinary. Scenes and details that you might overlook are centre stage. The disconcerting nature of the ordinary makes you think hard about your environment. Rarely do people look closely at what is around them. The new and pristine becomes the bashed and lived-in. The extra-ordinary becomes the accepted. But you don't notice it. Look at the walls around your home – how many of the pictures do you look at, really look at, every day? How much of it is just ‘furniture’? Eggleston questions all of this and finds beauty in a dumpster or a flawed wall of mosaic tiles.

There is an elegiac quality to all this, the sacred in the ordinary. It’s that feeling I get in big cities when I look up – suddenly your eye is drawn to the unexpected architectural detail, the shock of an arc of rainbow mosaic on an arched window in Regent Street or an indigo-enamelled Edwardian Street sign with its simple postcode.

I always feel privileged to look over Eggleston’s shoulder. If you get the chance, get yourself up to Victoria Miro gallery before 27 February. (The gallery itself is worth the visit.) When you’re done, walk down past the surprise of the City Basin to the Eagle and have a pint and a sandwich – it’s the pub from the kids’ rhyme ‘Pop goes the weasel’:

Up and down the City Road

In and out the Eagle

That's the way the money goes

Pop! goes the weasel.

Ivan and I enjoyed a couple of pints of London Pride and a long chat about Eggleston, Smash Hits and all sorts of other stuff that I'll no doubt write about at some point.

Saul Steinberg in Nose Mask 1966 - Irving PennThere's a new exhibition of one of my favourite photographers of all time, Irving Penn opening at London't National Portrait Gallery in a couple of weeks. This portrait is amongst his best - reminiscent of his 'mud men' series. If you've never seen these before, check them out - the technique and prints are incredible. The last time I saw these in a gallery was at the V&A in about 1989, so really looking forward to this. Find out more here.

Banner ads are strange beasts indeed. To be honest, I'm a banner-avoider. I just don't click on them if I can avoid it. This banner slipped through the net. I clicked and was rewarded. 

It's actually a website for Aquent - click on the different widgets and banners and it tells you who you need to hire to create them. Like the best ideas, simple, entertaining and to the point.