Project Clay Progress – a short term solution

In the initial stages of this project my client mentioned the desire to have an interactive page that would provide the ability for users to keep track of the latest progress of Project Clay.

During the process this idea was partially dropped as the clients vision for this page was quite significantly out of sync with the project schedule, so i decided to provide a temporary solution.

Despite the client initally stating they didnt want a map, a map they have got! In the future i would suggest building a custom interface that pulls in technology from outside sources such as Googlemaps, Flickr and Wikipedia etc to create the application the client wants. The solution i have come up with at this time is to use a combination of Googlemaps and a site called Dopplr.

Dopplr is a web 2.0/social community site that you can log your past, present and future travel plans. It automatically encodes its RSS feed with GeoRSS data which rather handily can be interpreted by google maps to plot all your travel plans on a nicely embeddable google map.

So i have signed up to Dopplr, input details of countries involved in Project Clay as if i were travelling to them, exported that data to a custom google map and hey presto you have this page…

Client Project – my battles with WordPress!

I have used the full version of wordpress for the stories page in my client project and here is a quick update on how that process has developed…

To give you some background on this, my client wanted a page on the site where they could display the stories of Project Clay participants. They had found the experiences of participants thus far to be fascinating and a page that could be easily up-datable was required so they could aggregate all of the stories from all over the world.

Given the clients complete lack of knowledge of programming a content management system would be required for them to be able to easily update this page. So having expierience with WordPress.org as a blogging system i decided to adapt it and use it as a CMS in this instance.

So what ive basically ended up with is a page that on a normal wordpress installation would act as the blog page, but in this instance its just a collection of stories. In reality its not all that different from a blog page, with the main exception being all the stories will be displayed on one page rather than being archived like a normal blog.

If that doesnt make any sense let me provide some visual reference…

The client would simply log into wordpress and  input the story into the admin panel above, a very simple system to use that requires NO programming knowledge at all, perfect!

Then as if by magic… we have a nicely updated page and the client can continue to add as many stories as it likes due to a handy bit of CSS that will repeat the background on each separate post and the page will continue to grow as stories are added. Long term some sort of categorisation would be necessary, this is something that the client could tie in with their desire for an interactive flash application of the projects progress but that’s another story for another post.

So there you have it, its a blog but its not a blog, it uses wordpress and it makes it all very easy for the client to update without getting stressed about code. Tremendous

Client Project – Keeping track of the design process…

Evening all,

A quick post to provide some ingisht into how myself and my client have kept on top of the design process in this project.

I created this Flickr set http://www.flickr.com/photos/25565512@N02/sets/72157615777614011/

This allowed the client to keep a close eye on the designs i was producing and saved us both the hassle of having to email attachments and comments back and forth. They could simply look at this set and get back to me right away, wonderful!

Have a look at the set to see the evolution of the project, its come a long way since my last post. Another useful thing about collating all these mock ups in Flickr is the ability to look at how the designs are gradually developing all at once, you get a real picture of the whole design process aswell as being able to scrutinise each individual version…

So do check out the Set and let me know your thoughts, do you like where it has ended up?

More posts to follow soon…

This blogging lark isn’t as easy as it used to be!

I have updated this blog far too infrequently this year, the days of my first year when i blogged pretty much 2 or 3 times a week for the whole year seem a long time ago!

Anyway, i am going to make a concerted effort from here on in to update this with my progress as i approach the home straight of my degree (aaaahhhh!)

So without further ado, the topic of today is my client project

My client is a company called Clayground Collective, they are running a project whereby people around the world are encouraged to dig up clay from their local area and send it to London with the ultimate aim being to create a piece of artwork from all the clay that will sit in the Olympic gardens in 2012. An ambitious and exciting project, the stories of people participating are varied and fascinating and my task is to build a website that people can use as a central point for the project. Participants will be able to upload video, pictures and tales of their digging experiences and truly feel part of this project on a global scale.

The creators of Project Clay would be the first to admit their current website needs an overhaul, which is precisely where i come in. I am well into the process of this site now and have been working hard on coming up with suitable designs for this exciting project, of which i shall give a few examples below

An early design concept for the new Clayground Collective website

A slight variation on design concept 1.0, some more detail and texture has been added into the background

Plenty of work to be done on this project yet, i shall post details of the design process of the two above mock ups shortly but for now i must get back to work! Adios!

Final Year Exhibition Idea – When multimedia collides

We’ve been thinking of ideas for a theme to our degree show, we all had to pick a word or concept and expand it into an idea for the branding/theme of the show.

After struggling to think of anything worthwhile on the spot when asked in a recent lecture i went away and had a proper think.

A word that came into my head and captured my imagination was collision.

Students on this course will be graduating with a wide selection of skills, we all have different areas of expertise and all have areas of shared knowledge. So i was thinking we could play on the idea of the show being a collision of all of our multimedia skills.  A huge range of different skills and talents colliding together at once and shooting all over the place in different directions.

To visualise this ive collected some photos of collisions, i like the idea of having a representation of all our skills all feeding into a central object and the result of the collision being our work, similar to the big bang.

The images above are of collisions in space/energy, i dont think our show should mirror this exactly but use the concept as inspiration.

I think the graphics for our show should depict all of our skills and areas, be it in a  typographical or image based nature coming together and exploding into this main object which would be the degree show name/central image.

A definition of the word collide:

verb (used without object)

1.	to strike one another or one against the other with a forceful impact;

Our multimedia skills will be colliding against one another at this show, and i like the idea of these skills forcefully clashing together but feeding into a central object and coming out the other side as something else, something more cohesive and fully formed.

Just a few thoughts there, the idea needs to be developed further and some more visualisation produced but in my opinion it has potential.

Inspiration – London Transport Museum

Been meaning to post this for quite a while,  ive been thinking of ways to get inspiration for my work from sources other than looking at websites and reading design blogs.

So i thought i would visit somewhere in the capital city that could maybe provide some of that inspiration,  i decided upon the London Transport Museum as it’s always looked interesting whenever ive been around Covent Garden.

I found it to be a very interesting and worthwhile visit, the place was full of fascinating imagery and artefacts documenting how the city of London has gradually become the huge great mass of networks,roads,tubes,rivers that it is today.

Particularly interesting to me were some of the signs and posters from the early 20th century, i love the old fashioned typography and hand made artwork. A refreshing change from the Photoshop world we live in today, take a look at some of the photos i took ( on my phone so quality isnt that brilliant!)

Mark Crossley

During the summer i was contacted by Mark Crossley, ex station manager of Fly FM and current Trent FM radio presenter, to build a website for him that could showcase his radio demos and provide him with a blog. I took on the project and quickly designed a holding page that would alert users to the fact the full site was under construction whilst still allowing them to hear a few of Mark’s demos.

The holding page looked like this…

This page was a fairly straightforward job, i created a nice textured background in photoshop and designed a collage style image for the header which i think work really well together.

The next step was to begin creating the full site, which i will update you on in my next post…

Simulated Client Project – Healthy Living Microsite

I’ve made a micro-site based around healthy living, specifically student healthy living. This mini project was the first part of the client module this year, its acted as a practice for the real thing that’s coming up shortly, more on that later…

I chose the topic of healthy living because an idea popped into my head as soon as i saw the list of potential topics, i am terrible at cooking but am frustrated with what i eat and know that a lot of students feel the same so a micro-site containing short simple recipes for a healthy balanced diet would be the perfect solution to this brief.

The initial research process lead me down a path of handwritten fonts and hand crafted aesthetics, they are a bit of a trend at the moment and i thought it would fit the student concept well, with the vague concept being that the site could look as if it was scribbled down by a student in their notebook whilst bored in a lecture or something.

I drafted up this mock up in photoshop…

So using that design as a base i began constructing the site in HTML & CSS. I really learnt a great deal about CSS layout techniques during this process, a lot of the techniques i had used in the past i found were more on the side of workarounds than best practices, i was conscious of the need to make sure everything validated and as a result i feel my knowledge has come on leaps and bounds.

So after a hectic few days coding the site, and dealing with ie7 (didn’t even get started on ie6, more on that later in the post!) i arrived at the outcome of the image below…

I made a few adjustments from the original mock up, the main one being adding more detail to the page background image, the little doodles really enhance the hand drawn look.

One of the things that I’m not happy with is the typography, i like the custom fonts used in the headers but the body text just doesn’t look right. I didn’t have time before the deadline to tweak it as much as I’d liked, i just haven’t got to grips with web typography yet. Very much going to get some books and nail it on my next project, its often an area that I’ve overlooked and as a result my skills in this particular area are a little underdeveloped at the moment.

One of the main learning outcomes of this project has been dealing with cross browser issues. I wanted it to work in firefox and ie7 as minimum, and in the end that turned out to be what happened as i just didn’t have time to deal with ie6. I was experiencing great problems with ie7 that lead to a complete restructuring of my css rules about half way through construction. This turned out to be a good thing as it enhanced my understanding of css and how best to use it. I got to a stage where the site was nearly the same in both browsers but there were a few layout issues in ie7 that i just couldn’t fathom so i used conditional commenting to load an additional stylesheet for ie7 users that fixed the errors, a very useful technique that i’m sure i will be using again! Would liked to have made it work in ie6, particularly as my next project will definitely need to work in that browser, but i just didn’t get time to start implementing all the various browser hacks that would have been required for my site to display as intended in this terrible excuse for a browser. I’m aware that future sites will need to work in ie6 so definitely will allow more time for that next time!

Here is a shot of the site in ie7…

So all in all i feel pretty pleased with this project, ive certainly learnt a great deal and it also had the added benefit of helping me get my head back into web design after some time consuming extra curricular distractions of late, but thats another story for another time.

I will get a live version of the finished site online soon. Just need to sort out some copyright issues first,  i ‘borrowed’ the recipes from a popular cook book for the purposes of this project so will come up with some original ones for the public domain version of the site.

Welcome to the third age…

Hello and welcome to the first post of my 3rd year as Multimedia student, its been a long while since ive updated this thing and ive finally found enough time in my ridiculously busy life at the moment to become an active member of the blogosphere once more!

Its interesting as i start this third year of blogging about my course to look back on previous posts (spread across this blog, and in my first year over on blogger – http://walkerjournal.blogspot.com) and see how far ive come.

Ive been up to loads of stuff over the summer, some work related some not but all exciting so i will update you on everything that ive been doing soon, but right now its time for me to sleeeeeeeeeep!

Interactive Travel Agency Map

It’s been a while since ive updated this as ive been busy on a few projects ive got going over the summer but i thought i’d post up a few examples of recent work.

This project was for my 3rd term coursework, in collaboration with Ben Lill. We had to come up with an idea for an interactive display for a travel agents. We chose to construct an interactive map in flash, using actionscript 3. The hotspots on the map, when clicked, show information about hotels in that particular city.

It is connected to a mysql database and using an xml string inside AS3 we were able to pull information out of the database and display it within the flash environment. This system would allow for easy updating of the information as the database would just need to be updated and the flash file would automatically read those changes and display them when asked. It is on a constant loop so every ten seconds it refreshes itself and would display any changes made to the database.

Here are a few screenshots, i could upload a live version of the project but it would crash due to the database being hosted on a secure university server that cannot be accessed publically.

I shall work on re creating the database on my webspace so i can upload a working version of this project for all to see it in its full glory, but for now take a look at the screen shots above and use your imagination….