I’d like your opinions on these two scenes I’ve made for my animation so far.

They were made by tracing over images in Illustrator and then scaling them up, added the different textures (to the park one) and yeah… I think they both have a nice effect but they’re both very ‘busy’. I’d be most appreciative if any of you have tips for toning it down! Let me know what you think and I’ll change them accordingly =).


I like the idea of the big colours and textures, I think that will engage children but then characters on top of that will simply get lost.


So there we go. Oh, I got another first for my essay on GOB =).

I am finally ready for the day at 10.30, despite setting my alarm for 8.30!


Anyway, over the last couple of days I have already drawn a rough idea for 7 characters for my animation, most of which will appear in the background with the exception of the two main characters. I also already have an idea of their style but I’ll post about that later today.


Here’s my first Character Sheet for the character tentatively known as CJ.

And the style, a homage to Amanita Design.

Key Motions

Kneeling

Waving

Walk Cycle

Animated Walking

Static
Static Walking


Tweened
Tweened Walking

Already I’ve reached Phase 3 of the first year of the course and the time seems to have gone so quickly. I’ve just handed-in the previous essay and the site hand-in is Wednesday (not feeling too confident about either of those) but with the kick start of a new term I’m hoping for the best. So some reflections on what’s happened with working in my first proper group on this course.

Well for me it’s been quite stressful, after some group meetings James gave us roles and we all agreed that he should be project manager (organised, reliable, confident – all good qualities for the position). Since then it has taken a while for us to get much work done, there has been a lot of planning but not much doing. Because of this I broke out of my own roles as image/ graphics/ producer and started on the site. With hindsight I should probably have done this from the beginning but I’m glad I started because the team member that was supposed to do the site still has not contributed any work to the project.

Sorting out the navigational content and site map was surprisingly hard. A lot of sites these days are quite ‘flat’ everything can be accessed from the front page (BBC is an exemplar of this). We wanted ours to be similar but a lot of issues came up from that, how do we implement profile pages? Should we have extra pages? The latest example of which is showcasing the video, we did have the idea of putting the video you clicked on in the middle left of the page with a featured video on the right and a video carousel at the bottom but even when roughly making this it was clear it was too complicated and too many video thumbnails. Currently we’re going for something like the BBC’s YouTube channel with small thumbnails on the right in its own box.

A few other issues I think is just the number of people in our group, six is quite a large number to all give meaningful jobs to. Yet some have ended up working a fair amount more than others, I think this is to do with group dynamics and perceived roles. I think I always seem to believe I have to do much more than I actually do but only it seems to pick up what others don’t do. I was also a fairly active member in the conception process. Coming up with the initial idea of a music review site, the name and the current logo, of course the others helped shape it and it would be silly to think that I could do it all by myself so thank you to all.

I’ll leave it there for now. =)

I believe the site’s took taken shape (thank you Julia) and is fully working. If anyone finds any usability bugs please do get in touch, though.

Things I have learnt in the last couple of weeks:

• Some basic PHP
• Some basic Javascript
• How nice (so far) Dreamhost are, even if they do keep trying to sell me a private server.
• The loveliness and forgiving nature of HTML 5
• How the best designs in Photoshop are the accidental ones
• That I actually find it easier to hand code than use Dreamweaver and go through its menus.
• The importance of typography
• The importance of accessibility
• How WordPress works and how to customise templates.

It’s been pretty fun designing this from the ground up and getting back to grips with it all. Everything validates at HTML  5 and CSS 3 apart from my  blog, but I’m working on that. It has two errors because of inline CSS when a gallery is implemented but I’m not sure how much I can influence that or if it’s just WordPress, anyone got any ideas?

I still have to make the kerning on the titles look more natural, they’re all set to a kern of -75 but because of the nature of the waves it makes some letters look much closer to each other so I’ll have the fun task of typing each letter into it’s own layer and aligning them tomorrow!

It seems that in designing this site I have overlooked one crucial aspect. Actually showcasing my work in a good way. The way it is now I could have a maximum of four projects before it started to look bad and I’d need a scrollable div. Not the end of the world I’m sure but there are better solutions out there and I want to find them. So that’s today’s task, make a cup of tea and think, design, implement. All from 12.40, I need to stop going to bed so late!

I can’t help it, I’m really not liking the site as it’s turning out so I’m going to propose some changes. Leave a comment if you agree/ disagree with any of my suggestions.

1. It looks unbelievably amateurish, probably because it is.
2. The silly bubble things don’t really make sense.
3. The header is ugly and hard to integrate into a good site design.
4. Meh.

On the plus side, apart from the nav element, it looks relatively consistent across ~50 browsers although I’ve had a few complaints about screen issues which hopefully will go away with the redesign anyway. So I’m going back to my visual diary and going to kinda start again. Here’s hoping.

Update at 8.50pm: I’ve had a change of heart, I’m going to give my design one more chance and build it from scratch (again) but this time with a couple of ideas I picked up from brainstorming a separate site. I’ll post the results up here after I’ve returned some films and bought some milk!

Hello there,

My site’s taking form nicely. I’ve decided to construct it in HTML 5, the reasons being 1. It shows I’m up with web trends, most modern browsers can render the basic tags I’m using. 2. I want to push both people and browsers to supporting the new standard rather than waiting for 2020 or whenever the W3C believes it’s going to become the de facto. Get in touch if you think that this is a good or bad move. So far all the pages validate apart from the main page because it uses Dreamweaver’s built-in script for the rollover image, I’m sure there are alternatives though so I’ll research that. Interestingly, (for me anyway) I’m still using Espresso as my main editor, I guess mainly because of the really easy FTP access it gives and Quick Upload on save. The fact that it’s so much nicer looking, quicker, and better organised than Dreamweaver, I just wish it had better lazy code writing like Adobe’s beast but it’s a small sacrifice to make tbh.

I’ve got a nice contact form that uses PHP and has basic JavaScript validation with the help of Kirupa and a few Google searches. It’s been quite fun building that portion and learning some PHP and how it works, same with JavaScript, I’ve never managed to get into it and understand it but the more I spend in it’s company the more it’s starting to make sense. Most of the pages now have content and are coming along nicely, a couple of images to spruce things up. Also there’s a custom error page that I’m rather fond of but definitely not the best out there.

I’m still not happy with the design; I can’t get it to look how I want it to be. The only cure is more hours on Photoshop but already I’m tiring of it =p.

The next things for me to do are: complete and upload my CV, build a site map,  build a WordPress theme to make this blog consistent with the site and get the design and colour schemes right.

Just a few stills from the music video for ‘Stay With You’ by Lemon Jelly, designed by the ever beautiful Airside. I also believe it’s heavily influenced by a 2004 interactive Flash animation by world renowned Japanese web developer Yugo Nakamura called Borders.

Anyhoo here are a few stills to help illustrate what I’m aiming for in my own portfolio.

You’ve probably noticed that the last one is completely different, that’s because it is. It’s from the same DVD/ album and is called ‘Go’ (featuring vocals by the legendary William Shatner) and uses the same layering effect. Like the Stay With You video it also takes the viewer on a journey through vast landscapes and is quite powerful despite not much really happening – just a guy with different backgrounds walking from one end of the screen to the opposite side. Anyway, the point of layers is still there and it uses photos to generate texture and meaning.

The one day project really changed my perspective as to how to design my portfolio. The header I made was kind of nice and all but it had no context. The design that I’ll spend the next week over (as well as my essay) should be much better and add more coherence throughout the site. This is basically a note to say that that’s now what I’m up to and I’ll try and get proper hosting for this blog and get my .com back online =). Anyone know any cheap reliable hosting let me know, kay?

Tuesday has arrived and that means the One Day Project is upon me. The brief is basically to design a theme for my site whilst referring to at least one other site and another source, in my case a music video. Also, design a basic structure and then if I’ve got time to build a simple mockup in Photoshop.

Lead up to deciding on the music video looked like this:

After spending a good portion of yesterday looking at things that I like it suddenly struck me that Lemon Jelly’s ‘Stay With You’ video was possibly one of my favourite pieces of design ever. Designed by Airside it is amazing, I’ll post a YouTube link when I have time. So, I’m thinking of using that wave design and colour palette as a place to start. I also really like the art style found in Okami with the watercolour effect and texture so I could desaturate some of the colours and add that.

All sounds well and good but I need to find some sites that deal with a structure that I can use. I’ve been looking at some blogs that have the ‘Top 20 Best One-Page Portfolio Designs” and it’s intimidating to say the least! I think I’m best off at sticking with something quite simple for today… but where? Hopefully I’ll find something.

I was talking about the watercolour feature, you can see an example of this here. Online, Heiko Brömmelstrote has a nice example of texture in the background adding a bit of ‘reality’ making it feel less like a screen. An example I’ve just found showing what I mean by overlaying texture with colour and making them look right is nineliondesign.com.

I’ve just found a beautifully laid out site, Theatre Website. I like the fact that the navigation comes first (usability) but this doesn’t detract from the wonderful header design that then leads to the rest of the site. I think I can incorporate this sort of design with the idea that I have, I’ll draw some sketches and see what comes out of it.

Update at 12. The sketches have been sketched, I’m now grappling with a logo design. I like the idea of Jason Reed, simply using a stylised signature. This makes the site feel much more personal, adding a small profile picture would be good idea. I like one guy, Kino who had a Flash header with his own head interacting with what you click on, I could do a similar thing with an animated face of myself, simply looking around.

Logo Designs

13.30 I’ve got some sort of Photoshop sketch, I don’t like the fact that it’s black though and the header design isn’t how I imagined so I’ll change that at some point to what’s in my mind when I find out how! I also need to figure out fonts and colours, I know what to do just not how to do it yet! Photoshop tutorials ftw. I’m going to have the waves as a block of colour coming from the side so it will flow better with the rest of the web layout. I’d quite like a non-serif font contrary to what’s there already, something quite curvy too akin to Alex Coleman’s site.

Rough portfolio design

A very quick rough version in white:

White Design

I’ll add to this throughout the day as I find more.

Everything consolidated: