Hallowe'en pumpkin carvings

My pumpkin, based on some sketches, WIP

The final pumpkins, mine is on the left, and on the right is Imogen's Tim Burton inspired design

Gotta keep those creative juices flowing, even outside of work!

CRAP!

Hi all, despite the fact that this post may look like an expletive, it does in fact have great relevance to the graphic design (particuarly within screens) process.

The lovely CRAP stands for these four graphic design principals.
Contrast
Repetition
Alignment
Proximity (I keep thinking 'Position')

The idea is that in order to create work that communicates well with the intended audience, we must bear in mind the four aspects of creating an effective layout in a piece/webpage and thus achieve maximum impact on our audience.

One question I have is that, if these design principals were adhered to, would a satisfactory result be guaranteed 100% of the time?

Futhermore, how do other factors such as colour theory, content and context affect the overall impact of a design, and does CRAP reduce the importance of these?

Finally, how does CRAP explain the one-hit wonders of the design world, and how can it be used to explore past, present and future designs?

Links to some sites that I enjoyed.

The Young Guns awards for advertising, I particuarly liked the beer adverts.

CGhub.com, an excellent source of inspiration for many multimedia disciplines.

The New Boston is an enthusiastic youtube tutor for all things tech, he has some excellent Adobe After Effects tutorials for beginners, thanks to Bartholomew for the recommendation!

The photoxels website contains some simple but really effective tips for photography, and really helped re-enforce what I have been reading in 'Color Confidence- The digital photographer's guide to color management: Tim Grey'

Nate 'Blunty' Burr AKA Blunty3000 is one of my favourite tech bloggers, and covers a number of subjects including media, gaming, photography and gadgets.

Another blogger is Bobby Chiu, a prominent freelance concept artist, designer, teacher and joint owner of Imaginism Studios in California. I love Bobby's style and his passion for his work is inspirational.

Also, thanks to Edgar for his shoutout to ShutterFreaks.

Interactive website update

Hello all, I've recently completed my second website, which uses the idea of mixing the environment of Nottingham city with the humor of a character based chase.

The principal idea is that you play the role of a chicken who has robbed a bank, and is trying to escape the police- it consists of a number of shots with alternate versions appearing once certain paths are followed.

After gaining feedback on the website, I have decided to complete another iteration but add more pages to set a clearer context, add a sense of urgency and hopefully fix any continuity and visual consistency issues.

One issue in particular the contrast between using the character, arrows and colour for navigation, I need to do some deep thinking regarding the navigational consistency of the site.




Once these have been implemented I will test the site live in firefox, make tweaks here and there and finally hand in the complete version.


Here's a link to my final version :)

Interactive Web Design

Spent a couple of hours playing with Adobe Dreamweaver CS5.5, and finally I seem to be grasping how to set out the pages with working links.

Next up I'll use copyright free images from the Hubble Telescope and create an interactive cosmos page just to get more used to the software.

Here's a shot of the index page.

Whilst creating the website was a valuable experience, it doesn't meet the narrative aspect of the project and therefore I will put it on the sideline and begin brainstorming and storyboarding the next site.

However it might be viable to create a fully functioning and accurate space related page for educational purposes, and I might revisit the idea in the future.

My Design Process

For my last design process, I produced a photoshop painting for a video game fan-art competition.
My initial process started with me writing down the criteria for the work, and brainstorming ideas about, until I eliminate to the final idea(s) depending on the time constraints, I then continue by creating a rough composition in my sketchbook, which I tend to use a lot for concepting and just getting my creativity flowing.

Biro drawing scan from sketchbook.

I then scanned the initial sketch into photoshop and used this as a background layer from which I created a digital sketch over the top of the background using the fantastic layers tool, many tips and techniques that I used in my design process were picked up from the digital tutorials of Bobby Chiu, a freelance concept artist, I also referred to 'Bold Visions: The Digital Painting Bible', Gary Tonge (2008), and 'The Skillful Huntsman: Visual development of a Grimm tale at Art Center College of Design', Designstudio|press/ Scott Robertson et al (2005).

When creating the composition, I regularly used the 'flip' command to horizontally reflect my drawing so that I could re-assess the image through fresh eyes- this is the modern equivalent of holding a mirror to one's work to check that the composition balances well. I referred to some of my previous A level art experience when composing the work.

Once a composition was developed, I moved onto establishing base tones and light sources for the piece, this was possibly one of
the longer parts of the process, as the setup on this layer can affect the direction of the entire piece.

The initial tonal/lighting render.

Upon finishing this stage, I then began blocking in basic colour schemes, attempting to create a complementary and pleasing colour composition, the colours went through numerous iterations.

The colour balance attempt, before final touches were added.

 I used a mix of my education as well as online research to decide upon the final colour composition, though I still experimented with different approaches, as I wanted to test a warm and a cold composition.



I posted the unfinished screenshots to my DeviantArt page, as well as asking for the advice of people I knew, once I had recieved enough feedback I made a note of what needed adjusting and set about it in my final passes where I added details, effects and general artistic touches to round the piece off to a satisfactory degree in time for the competition deadline.

The Final Piece.

The final image won joint first place and earned me a mention as well as a nice collection of goodies.

In relevant future work, I will be looking back on my experience in this project, and build on my skills to hopefully create better and better work.