Wow. The last year’s been an amazing journey both as a designer, and in terms of my life. For the last year and a quarter, i’ve been working in-house as Digital designer for an AMAZING charity,
The role has been amazing- where else would i get to learn a bunch of HTML and CSS, a smattering of Jqery, Javascript, and HTML5, make cute animated flash christmas cards, wrangle with a CMS, learn to hand-code cross browser, while keeping my photoshop wizardry SHARP, develop a photo editor’s eye for a good picture, get involved in copywriting, and even touch on user journey/ UX.. work with developers, and then turn round, whip out my camera and go and shoot amazing charity events and the like?
I’ve met some wonderful people, and seriously, for feel-good working, the charity sector can’t be beaten. it’s amazing knwoing the hard work you put in has such a wonderful endpoint- delivering caring, compassionate and much-needed end-of-life care to those who need it.
Alas, all good things come at a price, and the price here was approximately 2hrs EACH WAY spent swearing at cramped trains, inconsiderate commuters, endless endless delays, and never getting home in time to make dinner for my wonderful girlfriend Rosie.
So looking to the Future, what’s next? well, i’ve been lucky enough to get a foot in the door in Brighton with a Top-drawer Email marketing agency,
Slight change of tack for me as well, moving from designer to ‘Creative developer’ working on some blue-chip clients, in a beautifully laid out, airy, open plan office five minutes from my house with what looks to be a bunch of friendly people. i start in just over a month’s time.
This isn’t the end of my work with charities though.. i figure i should give some of this new-found free time to good causes. Watch this space for more news.
I’ll also be devoting some more time to my much-missed hobbies of photography, making some short videos, and replacing the disgracefully rusty strings on my les paul with some new ones (sorry neighbours!)
I’m ALSO going to fit in a trip to corfu in between jobs. i hit the dreaded 30 in just under a month, i intend to do it somewhere sunny with cheap booze.
i’m quite possibly (according to sources) getting a waterproof camera for my birthday so we shall see where that takes me.. underwater 1080p video is the likely answer.
Here’s a quick link to a recent project of mine, Berti Investments. Berti are a green investment company who specialise in UK based green business ventures. i was approached to design the site for them. after some initial teething troubles, and a first version being quickly replaced with a second version, here’s the final result
main site is hand-coded html/css, with a couple of rss feeds, and a custom wordpress CMS for the news and portfolio pages.
nerve wracking time for me! i’ve just redone the whole site in lovingly hand-coded css and HTML. it’s much lighter in terms of load times, and everything is a lot cleaner. i’m in the process of ironing out some minor bugs, a couple of things that chrome does differently to the other browsers (grr.. google! standards this, standards that… sort it out!) otherwise, it’s amazing, hand coding and specifying every single detail, once you get into a pattern is not that bad, and i definitely see the advantages! now if i can just control my rampaging inner geek enough not to become a developer by accident, i’m good to go!
MUCH thanks to the incredibly patient Andy Stiller for teaching me the basics, and to Alcwyn Parker of automated chaos (see blogroll) for the natty bit of javascript on my video page calling the youtube videos.
now finally i can relax and put my feet up!
This time one for my old uni friend Marc at FRE23 Media. these guys do it all, design, development, marketing, the whole nine yards. give them a look! there’s even talk of future collaboration in the pipeline… watch this space.
This has been inspired by a book i read recently which has rekindled a lost love affair with the sketchbook.
For Years, during college, i resented these things, due to having to fill them for a purpose. they became forced, and i became dismissive of their usefulness.. now i’ve appreciated the need to have one to expel the whimsical, nonsensical, and downright odd mental images and concepts i have clutterin up my creative conscious, and loosen the fingers and brain in preparation for the day’s work, i’m once again a follower of the cult of sketchbooks.
the book in question is here, and a BLOODY good read.. it’s nice to see inside other’s sketchbooks, to see that not everything has to be relevant, or sensible.
Well, it’s been a while. this doesn’t represent a hiatus from doing any design, far from it. i’ve been working at a london streetwear brand… this has been something of an eye opener! i’ve been doing a few different things, from product photography to catalogue design, redesigned the website : http://www.fenchurch.com/ and done a whole bunch of photography, including an extreme sports festival.. i’ve even got a model photoshoot at a really cool location in the pipeline which can be revealed once the catalogue’s all finished. i’m probably going to be designing that too!
the one thing i haven’t done a lot of is multimedia.. odd considering i’m their multimedia designer but hey, what can you do, right? i’ve got a big slot in my diary for making a video from the festival, so that’s the next fun thing after the photoshoot.
so for now, here’s a snippet. a vid i made in my first couple of weeks. it’s not been used. the graphics are all from fenchurch tees, except the pigeons, cctv, and moon and sun. they’re not mine, i simply took the stills and made them animated in flash, then composited in after effects.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5iETIUjYa8
the high def version is the nicest, naturally.
meanwhile, watch this space, as my site has undergone a wicked revamp, i’m in the final whittling process for the folio images, and a little more coding, and then i’m gonna redo it. all standards compliant, no flash in sight except for the interactive flash design section.
more soon.
Decided on a new ident for the company this week, before i leave, wanted to give em somethign spagly to remember me by.
decided on making a neon bar sign type thing with the logo, and adding a fly getting zapped and the tagline ‘no annoying bugs’
this was VERY simple to make. wath and learn kiddies.
find a brick texture.
overlay your logo onto it in photoshop
make a flat mid grey layer and add the lighting effects
switch layer blending to multiply
you should now have your logo, dark on a low lit brick wall with lightin effects.
it can help to make a second layer of the bricks with logo, redo lighting effects direct to the layer this time adding a texture channel, uncheck white is high then the mortar will be recessed. leave this layer in as a hard light layer on low opacity- this will texture the bricks nicely.
add the component parts of the logo one at a time. duplicate the layer, add glow effects to the top version, and a strong gaussian blur to the lower one. these go on top of the lighting effect layers, the blur makes it look like it affects the brickwork.
now output the layers one at a time as .png files with transparency. if the aftereffects project is the same resolution as the files this saves you having to scale/align things.
go to after effects, and simply import the layers one at a time, and in the timeline place their appearance in order so they light on and off as required.
the fly was another png, semitransparent wings, motion path. when it gets shocked it goes to an inverted colourised pic of it with it’s wings folded.
the sparks come from starting a new composition, adding a cc particle world filter to the timeline, playing with the parameters till you’re happy with the result, and then import it into the main composition with the layer blending set to ‘add’
been editing some video lately, or trying to, problem was it was shot on a weird canon camcorder that uses the .mod format.
been having a nightmare trying to get the free converter i was reccommended to do the vids. keeps asking me to buy and install quicktime mpeg-2 playback software. been racking my brains to find something to make it work, i’ve tried every shitty bit of free software out there, no joy. then i find a page on google with what looked like a rubbish answer, but in desperation give it a whirl and follow the advice..
this is going to sting a little.
you know how to make a .mod file into a video that can be used by adobe, imovie and anything else you care to use??
change the bleeding file extension from .mod to .mpg
that’s all.
well, it’s been a bugger of a week. been busy as all hell getting the framework for my site up. it’s partially finished. Now for some, it would be an absolute no-no putting up a site that isn’t finished, but i find myself lucky in that due to my facebook friends, i have a ready-made set of design savvy beta testers on call. I don’t mind most of these guys seeing it unfinished, they’re a lot of what inspires me, my friends, so their feedback, and them seeing any flaws is all good.
I’ve overcome a lot of obstacles in flash this week. previously i’d been using some AS3 to load an external file, allowing me to divide up the site into sections for better load times. the problem there was unloading, i had to put bunch of ungainly button code onto the site to make sure every frame i loaded an external file onto, i had a code for each button to unload it so it didn’t end up hanging on like the last guest at a party, you know, the boring but pleasant drunk dude who won’t take the hint and isn’t annoying enough to prompt you hoofing him out on the street? well, i got round this, the code works well inside a movieclip, which then also allows me to scale and position the file on the page, and automatically unloads it when the movieclip leaves the stage.. great! saves me a bunch of tedious coding!
Here’s the results of my latest tinkering. i got given a Veho Muvi. it’s the wordls smallest digital camcorder. it’s rather nice!
(it’s not me in the photo by the way)
It’s got a rather grainy lo-tech charm to it, like video lomography. it’s a bit too saturated, shaky, but interesting.
it got me to thinking, lomography incorporates a lot of fisheye stuff. i’d heard of a fisheye lens for mobile phones, but it was LUDICROUSLY expensive, and not worth it really.
so i decided, i can probably make one myself for a lot less. i hit upon the idea of a door peephole, as it’s essentially a ready made fisheye lens.
purchased myself a 200 degree field of view door peephole, from crime prevention products for about £6 posted. when it turned up, it was a little too long, it placed the fisheye too far from the lens, so while the fisheye effect worked, it was on mch to small a portion of the image, losing detail and affecting the camera’s ability to meter light, so the centre was waaaaaaaaay overexposed. i trimmed off the exces with a hacksaw, and, using the conveniently perfect-sized hole in the front of the rubber case that comes with the optinal extreme sports pack, mounted it onto the camera.
homemade fisheye adapter made from door viewer
and the final result?
i’m pretty happy with that! good wide field of view, it’s not going to win any cinematography awards, but i like the result, it’s got a very lomo vibe to it, and it cost me less than £10. not too shabby.
i should also mention it works on my iphone quite well, version 2.0 is in the works.. thinking of using elements from old lenses and a disposable camera.. more soon.
