Network Diagram

Gonna start throwing some essay work up as I'm happy with it, here's my network diagram hopefully giving me a better mindset about where I am in the industry right now and giving me areas to improve on. (More successful contacts please!)

Now to follow up all those emails nobody wants to reply to asking research questions...

I broke your logo today, sorry.

Yeh um, sorry about that...

Bit more of the colour theory stuff this time asking if logos would still work if we messed about with them. Funnily enough it seems certain logos like the Volcom one work in pretty much any colour (They produce shirts with it in yellow and purple if I remember correctly) and other logos just transcend the importance of colour entirely by being so memorable (Facebook you handsome devil you.)

Here we go again...

Elastic Minds Studios  (http://elastic-minds.com/)

Immediately focussing the attention of the user by engaging them with a musical intro and strong visuals, EM studios aims to impress with a powerful first impression. Work is organised by a few rough categories shown in a looping gallery which allows the user to view full sized images at a click. The more conventionally displayed clients list is displayed in its own category allowing potential customers to see an index of achievement. Despite all the fancy show reel styling and moving graphics: as of writing everything on the website performs well and is very simple to use. The website is created by EM studios to establish their corporate identity and makes heavy usage of Flash to stylize its display. An unfortunate by-product of this may be that it won't display correctly on some devices such as more inherently locked down tablets.

 Tom the French (http://www.tomthefrench.com/)

Tom the French's website instantly engages the user by greeting them verbally and visually with its odd display style for what otherwise could of been a boring vertical list. Each project has a list entry which takes the user to a gallery of the finished result mixed in with the occasional cool sketch, all the while casually listing the design brief and web links down the side. Tom sells himself immediately with a dynamic display of quotes presumably from happier clients  stating things like Tom's designs are "A different way of thinking." These quotes like most things on the website can also be clicked through by the user. Further establishing himself via his profile page Tom boasts 10 years of taking risks for ideas and gives a brief self description. Like EM Studios website Tom the French uses flash to create an interesting view which obviously means it holds potential to suffer the same negative points on certain display devices.

Life and times (http://lifeandtimes.com)

The site works similarly to burying a time capsule of the last few years and uses a low text interface instead relying on thumbnails to allow the website to stimulate the users interest and hide the wealth of information and quotes behind each. Returning users would have something to look forward to after each important news story or anniversary of an interesting event, for example a recent homage to Steve Jobs life with the recent news of his passing. While Life+Times is more of a subtle publicity machine for Jay-Z it's interesting to note that most of the links to profitable sections of his career such as merchandise and tour tickets are listed only at the bottom of the page.

The website uses HTML5 to do all of its display techniques such as the rolling thumbnail reel, the mouse over effects and the content/comment display pages, while it could have easily been accomplished in Flash along with a few other technologies  Area17, the creators, chose to do everything with just one presumably increasing speed and reliability somewhat.



Obligatory item of holiday work that I forgot to post:
Few logo designs for a rally driving team I socialise with, the brief was very specific but I feel like I surpassed expectations for a concept so simple, those beermat drawings sure came in handy.

Guess who's a mess?

Just spent 6 hours straight working on visual essay stuff, previews for those interested. No stealy my practitioners! Yeah I guess I'm gonna take a shower and get out of my pajamas before the whole end of the world thing happens. RAPPPTUREEEEEEEEEEE... whatever, enjoy.

p.s. apologies for random lines in these screen-shots, me and Photoshop had an argument and now he wont talk to me and he's taken all my vectors out drinking.

Remains of the Day: Film

In this post I'll attempt to consolidate a quick and dirty film finisher with rationales, the film and any notes on my personal role in its creation.

For our film project we were given the script "Herds" written by our very own lecturer, Jools.



Most of the project files for this have been submitted but for this our group had to complete all of the following prior to any actual filming taking place:

• Risk Assessment
• Lectures on safety
• Health and Safety/BECTU 
• Brief 'Recce' of possible locations 
• Location Release forms

It was during this none-filming period which I took the time to look into the camcorders which we could borrow and after discussing my findings with the group eventually we chose to shoot the whole thing using a Panasonic AG-HPX171E. Thats somewhere between a small studio camera and a handy-cam for most normal people providing a lot of features of the first, but the convenient of the latter. The first issue I ran into here was no manual was provided and personally having little-no experience using anything similar I definitely had to go hunting around for one once that was taken care of and a few tutorials watched later I was ready to fulfill my role as camera man.


Rewrites:
As previously shown we landed the script "Herds" but we decided to take it down a more sinister path with some underlying thriller tones. This elevated our strange but friendly man turn from sandwich stealer to near body-snatching status, replacing the role of the other character and throwing him out of his own home - all taking place right within an identifiable comfort zone. The makings of a solid classic in my opinion.

Complications:
We ran into a lot of these when factoring into account a randomly a lotted group the main two of which were outside work schedules and lazy damn actors. As many people as we managed to cast for our weird flaky roles it seemed none of them were pretending the flakiness, and therefore didn't really bother to show up. If  I'd been hitting the film pathway next year I would of been annoyed but instead between the group we just picked out those who didn't have an active production role, loaded a few extra responsibilities on the others and started shooting.


** One of this for 3d work coming very soon when I can find a good way to upload supporting sketches.

Look at your font, now back to mine, now back to yours. Sadly, yours is not mine.

Rational to describe my choice of fonts.

I went with some pretty straight forward sans-serif fonts to convey a modern look and keep in with the punchy bright coloured feel while purposefully contrasting with the deliberately negative tagline/logo the whole thing is supposed to seem very clean cut official yet creative.

Logo - (Mayberry)
For the logo font I had to resort to using an image to allow a nonestandard font to be useable on computers without it's installation. To keep it crystal clear it's a decent size, anti-aliased and saved as a high-quality PNG while through some kind of witchcraft keeping a filesize of just a few kilobytes. Instead of redoing the image multiple times per section of website instead I just use different css placement options to allow the same image to be reused throughout, further reducing loadtimes.

Content - (Lucida Grande)
The main content font had to be something that is in common usage across different platforms (PC/Mac etc) so that each article can remain small to keep the website down. On the plus side apparently HTML5/CSS3 allows us to use some nifty server side font guff, but that's way outside of the scope of this first project, somewhere down the road and off into the english channel.
As with the classic design rule which was once again mentioned today, I do not currently intend on using many/any more fonts as 2-3 is that user sweet spot we all like to see.

Stop... Bring it back.

On Thursday I was asked about what my favourite website was. Pretty broad question to which I could offer no answer. It plunged me into some deep thought about design and its flow and eventually I've emerged with an answer of sorts, or perhaps just more questions.

Still with me? Good.

Ok so, a wise man once said it's hard to make something out of nothing. We appropriate that phrase to a lot of different things, maybe it's just a cool from-scratch none composition piece, or maybe it's pushing the boundaries of the scripting language you're using to greater heights but there's one thing we never really think to say.

It's harder to make nothing out of something.

Let that sink in for a second and think back to layouts 101 for an example of what I mean. Golden ratios? The problem of choice? All these things discussed right the way up to Jool's final lecture (for now) hint at one thing: the key to good modern design isn't obvious complexity, but nuances and subtlety. We've come so far now we know what the brain likes before it's even drafted - from fonts, colours, spacing... Everything is contrived, formed, researched and remade to influence us on a subconscious level into liking it. Opinions are purposely tipped bias in favor of the works creator; and all by giving us as little as a soft blue and a serif font.


...and that is how you 'make nothing out of something.'