10¥

A friend of mine gave me am invite to the Beta of a little program called Skitch. According to the site, Skitch “is an amazingly fun and super useful. Everyday we all share images, ideas and have fun with friends online — this should be easy… right!?” As a user of Photoshop and rather expectant of high quality in my imagery, I was a little unsure if this program would be useful to me. Well, I was certainly proved wrong!

(more…)

For our Print Design class, we were supposed to do research into DVD packagings in preparation for doing our own design work. I spent around an hour in an HMV looking at special edition and regular DVDs but didn’t really find anything that really captured my attention. One item, the Scarface Limited Edition, had some interesting elements. So, I decided to see if there were any more photos of it online. With my searches, I stumbled upon Feed My Brain, a website documenting someone’s (I couldn’t find a name!) personal DVD collection including Film and TV special edition box sets. There are tons of images of all sorts of collections. I highly recommend looking at the site if you are looking for inspiration or simply to marvel at the collected works from around the world. From that site, I came across Skull Face, a site that also documents DVD collections as well as reviews them. See one of the most amazing ones, the Band of Brothers LE, after the cut.

(more…)

There is a old saying, “A stitch in time saves nine.” The meaning being that if one takes that extra little bit of time to make sure everything is perfect before working, then one will save a great deal of time. Well, apparently I didn’t check my work well enough (which doesn’t really make sense given the number of times I did a test render), but some stuff ended up off of what it should have been.

Thus I have wasted nearly 22 hours of render time.

…

And now I have to fix it.

I can assure you I will be carefully checking things now.

I have for you friendly folks two rendering projects I am currently working on.

The first is a soccer field that is being designed for a motion graphics infographic piece for this term. My partner and I are going to explain the lovely game of soccer (that’s football to you non Americans) and give the viewer a basic introduction to the sport. So, this field is going to be the primary container for the piece, moving about and exploring. Should be fun.

The hardest part I found was in creating the net. The goal itself was pretty simple and just a matter of creating the cylinders and then bending them as needed. The net though, was a bit of work because I wanted to put the

slight gravity drop into it. Ultimately, I created a plane and attached cloth nurbs, then bent it the same as the tubing. Finally, after setting fixed points to all the edges, I applied “relax” and watched gravity do its job^^ Quite thrilling when it all worked out. The ball was the result of a tutorial I followed. I had painted it beforehand but discovered that shrinking the size of the ball messes up the special texture, so I need to repaint it. *sigh* As for the field, the floor and texture are native to Cinema 4D while the lines were originally created in Illustrator, then imported into the area. All in all, it was a fun project! Now I just need to apply the camera movements and we’ll be in business.

The other item for you today is a pill I kinda threw together for a DVD menu. The ultimate look will feature text on the pill indicating “Play,” “Scene Selection” and so forth. I thought it would be cool to have the pill rotate when the user clicks the “left” or “right” button on their remove and shift to a new button. Here is the front where the main menu will be.

and here is the back where the special features or scene selection will be. We haven’t quite worked that out yet!

I’m rather proud of this idea and I like how it is shaping up. I’ll be sure to post more about it in the future!

Today’s image comes from a project for class in which we needed a marker. Well, it was much more fun (and useful!) to make in 3d, so here we are! It was pretty simple to put together.

For Visual Communication, we were requested to make a promotional poster advertising our class (in my case, DD08). To create this poster, as a class we took lots of pictures and played around for a few hours, then everyone took the photos and developed their own creation.

Here’s mine:

I really like how this turned out. I first gathered several analog images: the thumbs-up, the flame, graphite scratchings and a bright fireworks image. Then I started playing with them and how to work them together. I used a background texture that I took off of a light bouncer, then starting adding elements on top of it. Over time, the flame became the center of the image and I worked how to bring focus to it. First was through using a channel based on the graphite and the fireworks to create the sense of a space being broken through by the flame. Then I put the thumbs up in to give the sense that the fire is coming out of the hand; or instrinsically a part of the hand. In any case, the emphasis is quite strong in that direction. On the other side is the branding for the image, “DD08 - A Spark of Genius” is the tagline for the poster and the graphic is a logo for the class. To create it, I experimented with how to illustrate the double Ds and the 8; the 0 had already become the centerpiece of the design. Eventually I hit upon the sense that the Ds are much like the two halves of the 8. I started developing butterfly-like designs, but found that the perfect circle in the middle of the dd/8 created a stronger brand image.

Overall, I really like how the poster came out!

The final project for the 2D design class this term is to create a self-portrait. It was expected that one would create layered shapes that are then colored to create an image that looks much like oneself.

I decided to go in a different direction. Instead of using shapes to color my design, I colored it:

As you can tell, these projects take time. I hand added each part to the design slowly. Overall, however, I’m quite happy with the result.

Ver 1 (see below)

I made this for the 2D design class today. It was a lot of fun to put together, though much of the key elements were lucky chance. I really like the way the ink blots are reminiscent of falling cherry blossoms (probably part of the reason I gravitated toward a Japanese name for it). I considered removing the diagonal lines/diamonds but felt they brought the design together strongly rather than things being a little looser. Actually, the ink blots themselves were a bit of a random accident which I am quite pleased with. I discovered a number of options to create interesting blot effects on the board, but those ink ones were the best for the overall feel of the design. I also like the choice of colors. The blue and brown go together quite well; especially with the small bits of red at the top and bottom. Overall, I’m quite happy with how the design turned out!

*One note. The reds are not quite as strong in this image as I made them in the original Illustrator file. This is due to the web-safe color set. Sorry!

At Angy’s suggestion, I played with the design a little more and I think this one is stronger than the one above. One thing I really like about it is that it looks as if there is a light burst in the middle of the board that lights up the “foil” that is the lines and blots. All in all, I like the black to silver look of the design.

Ver 2 (Final)