Some amatuer photography…..

I am a regular reader of design blog, Smashing Magazine and recently they called for readers to send in photographs of textures. These textures could be anything, and could be used for such things as web page backgrounds, photoshop brushes or anything really.

I thought i’d have a go, and started to look around for objects with interesting textures or patterns. With my humble digital camera i took photos of a rug in my room, a towel and my dressing gown and entered them into the context.

Here are the photos which i finally decided on entering….

The rug that is on the floor of my room

A close up of a towel

My dressing gown when laid out flat on the floor

Sadly i was not the random entry chosen to be given a brand spanking new canon digital camera, but hurrah one of my textures has been featured in the fabric category, chosen out of 2000 photos i might add.

The texture they chose was the shot of my dressing gown laid out on my floor, if you would like to download the image then please click the thumbnail below which will take you to the page where my successful entry is displayed…

I quite enjoyed experimenting with photography in this way, albeit in a very basic way and its something i’d like to explore further in the future.

Some more graphical goodness…

Ive been polishing up on my graphical skills recently and after following a tutorial from .net magazine, i ended up with this. The object of the tutorial was to design a large graphical header for a website, and below are the results. The only thing i changed in the tutorial was the characters, they are creations of my own mind, everything else is the same as in the magazine example.

Really i should re do the tutorial now ive learnt the techniques and come up with something completly original, and i will, but i liked my first attempt so have decided to share it with the world….

Varsity Tennis Poster

A poster i did for the upcoming varsity tennis match. Enjoy…….

Designs of the Year

Over the easter break i went to the design musuem in london to see the Designs of the Year exhibition. The seven categories were Architecture,Fashion,Furniture,Graphics,Interactive,Product and Transport.

I was mainly interested in the Interactive and Graphics categories but i found there was inspiration to be found across all of the categories. I was actually suprised at how much i enjoyed the categories of architecture and fashion, the designs were very impressive and its interesting to look at different mediums other than my own from time to time

A few of the highlights….

Interactive

There were a number of pieces in this category that caught my eye and a paticular highlight was the giant wall of video that i saw immediatly upon entry to the section. The wall was made up of 16 small screens and there was a video camera with a touch screen display which you could film yourself for 3 seconds and choose which one of the tvs you would be on, thus creating a giant collage of footage. It was interesting to see how people tried to link up over different screens, and an engaging experience. It struck me as being a very simple idea but people really took to it and the participation levels on this piece outstripped most of the others signifitcantly. Guess no one can resist 3 seconds of fame on the big screen!

In case that made no sense, take a look at the pictures i took below…….

This was an interesting one also, a black wall which when viewed through a digital camera or mobile phone revealed hidden images. See below for what you could see with my camera, with my eyes all i saw was black,very cool!

And finally, this website from the design studio Poke. It was made for Orange and is a never ending website, no matter how much you scroll down you can never get to the end. Users can draw or places messages along the way and add to the collection of user creations. An interesting concept, but one which loses its appeal very quickly, theres only so much scrolling one man take! Still, a good idea well executed.

Right, enough talking i think i’ll just show you some pictures of other nominated designs that caught my eye, enjoy………….

Graphics

Portfolio related thoughts…

Well its review week time and seeing as one of the outcomes from my previous review was to think more about my portfolio and how it should develop i thought i would post a few thoughts on that very subject.

An online portfolio will be vital for me if i want to get anywhere in the future, and having learnt a great deal this year on the web pathway i now feel confident enough to begin crafting my own site.

I would like it to be a site that combines a blog, to replace this one and also to contain examples of my work in a more traditional portfolio style.

There are many sites that i have been looking at recently with this in mind and below are a few examples of the sort of site i would be going for, if i can come up with something even as half as good i’ll be delighted!

Veerle Peters

Elliot Jay Stocks

The Things We Make

The next step is for me to start thinking about the design, and coming up with a concept. I need to build myself an identity really and that is a task i am very much looking forward to. Its my first chance to really make a mark and stamp my creativity on a site, its a big project and one that must be done right. I shall update you on progress in due course…

Inspiration Techniques

Recently i have been reading the book ‘Transcending CSS’ by Andy Clark, a very useful book about using css to craft beautiful websites. In the book he advocates the use of scrapbooks for web designers/developers, he suggests that cutting out different images or typography from magazines,flyers or anything you find really can help you when it comes to designing and may spark some great ideas that would have otherwise not been thought of.

For my first attempt i decided to put to use the ridiculous amount of flyers and promotional hand outs that i had received during the year so far, well the ones that were lucky enough to not end up in the bin immediately after being given to me!

An interesting idea, not something i’d ever really thought about doing before so i decided to give it a go and it may well become a more regular exercise.

Jon Burgerman

Towards the end of last term we had the privilege of being visited by Jon Burgerman, illustrator/design marvel and Nottingham Trent graduate. He gave a lecture detailing some of the experiences he’s had in his career thus far and passed on some valuable advice for us students.

As the hour passed we were shown many different examples of Jon’s work and the wide spectrum of mediums that it covered. This is something that i was very interested in as i am very keen to not be tied down to just one thing for my career. Although all of his work has a very distinctive unifying style, the experience that goes with each project seems to be very different and unique each time.

The picture below is of a project he did at a Derby school, creating a large mural on the construction hoardings, very cool.

One of the things that struck me about him was the casual way he would talk about working for brands such as coke and pepsi, almost as if it were a little job he’d done for a mate, crazy!

A particularly useful section of the talk focused on his start in the industry, how he went from talented student to an in demand professional. He started by making stickers of his character work and simply sticking them around first Nottingham and later London. These stickers contained his url and a character that he had drawn, and slowly people began to take notice, his work was then featured in a few books and magazines and it snowballed from there, before he knew it he was featuring in major exhibitions and working for major clients.

Mr Burgerman was kind enough to give us all a sticker as we left and here is the one i got, a delightful little green chap….

An inspiring look at someone who has very much ‘made it’ and with the crunch time of my final year edging ever closer i will take his words on board as i look to make my first steps into the big bad world…..

Bantr! – Coursework website

An update on my coursework website, i handed it in about a month ago, but ive been continuing work on it since as i felt there were still many improvements to be made.

Below are some screen shots of main pages of the site.

Homepage

User Profile Page

Private Message Sending Form

They are the three main pages, the others consist of some basic forms similar to the private message screen shot. As i have previously stated, this project was more focused on learning the back end side of things rather than aesthetic beauty. I’d like to sort out the typography, its far too inconsistent across the site and i just dont like the way it feels. The layout could be a bit tighter, perhaps too much un-used space on some pages. In general i am not happy with the overall outcome, there are many lessons to be learned from this and improvements must be made on my next project, it should have been a milestone for me but has instead turned out to be a rather significant disappointment, back to the drawing board i go…

Now the coursework is out of the way i can continue to use this as a nice practice tool, and i intend to chip away at it over the coming weeks slowly improving the visuals so that they come inline with my original vision.

Looking to the future…..

As i prepare to embark on my 3rd term of my 2nd year ive been reflecting on my experience thus far and have come to the stark realisation that my standards have slipped this year in a number of ways, with that in mind i have created this poster as a reminder to myself, a mission statement if you like that i shall keep in mind as i continue into the latter stages of my degree.

Inspired by the “Design is…..” series of images, a nice simple typographic composistion, i have been reading a lot lately about using grids for composistion and layout and experimented with one in this design.

Below are two variations on the same theme.

CSS – from design to the finished article……

*Been going through some old drafts i had waiting to be finished, so thought i’d stick this up. It was a task set early last term, and since i quite like the design i shall convert it into a proper webpage soon using xhtml and css. Look for that post in the near future but for now, read on…..*

We’ve been learning about CSS lately as part of our coursework task of creating a social network website. One of the problems i’ve always had when starting projects like this in the past is always the design process and how you go from ‘flat’ designs to properly marked up web pages.

Well this is exactly the task we went through in our seminar. I messed about in photoshop for a bit and came up with this generic design for a blogging/journal type site.

We then went through it piece by piece and using xhtml and css transformed it into markup. The basic layout is there, but there are many embeliishments that i would like to add if it were to become a functioning web page.

This is the part where i show you an identical photo to the one above and tell you its the proper html version, err not exactly. I’m still working on nailing the techniques for layout using css, making slow progress and rest assured when i get there i’ll post the results here.