new inspiration!

ok, so last night, while in the lab with krista, and our webcam pups to keep us company :), I found some sites on the interweb that encompass everything I want to achieve style-wise in my flash interactive animation.

misprinted type 

emmanuel polanco

And after hours of layering and layering and such, this is a look I've come up with. Some big changes I already have planned are printing out some circut type and scanning back in the torn out letters individually to make the "ENTER" button.

the class that will keep me from graduating

Hallmark Symposium

Last night at Hallmark was a speaker, Emmet Byrne. I came in a few minutes late, but I gathered that he does a lot of design work for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota which features contemporary visual and performing arts exhibits and programs. He showed a lot of interesting projects that many people at the art center had contributed with, as well as to show us the style of their design as a whole. I really liked him. And wanted to be his friend. He seemed really genuine and not so hoity toity about his own work. He used a lot of hidden/deeper meaning concepts in his pieces which i have a lot of respect for. The main project he talked about was a book he designed for Kara Walker. I had never heard of her before, but apparently she's stirred up a lot of drama in the african american artist community. Her writing is extremely graphic and vulgar, and Emmit decided to put one of these bold statements as the cover of the book to survey Walker's work. The US actually required him to design a belly band to cover the "bad words".

Interactive Flash

I finally got the idea for my interactive flash page! I chose the learn how to play classic card games, and initially wanted to play off the illustration of the hand in the book and go with an asian theme- which then led me to watching drunken master for inspiration (awesomeee kung fu movie with jacki chan!) I was swayed after stumbling upon the old etchings in the original Alice's Adventures in wonderland, though, and have started working with those in a cut paper style.
I'm excited for the end result. Flash is a program I want to learn more about and become more fluent in. And I read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland for research to better use the images and it was AWESOMEE. I love reading books and watching kung fu movies for "research." My major is bomb.

MuggleNet redesign

here is the link to the website I've been redesigning!

click me

ps: choose ravenclaw!

more sweet sites

hello diary,

It was another good weekend. I carved a pumpkin with Jeremy's face on it, and he'll find out when he reads this. 3 more days till fall break! Sorry I left you hanging since the last post. I still have 2 more to show you!

4. The Hammerpress website is another sleek site. It's great because the style of the site directly mirrors the style of their products. They produce letterpress works of art and products for people and businesses, and the website itself looks like something they might have made with a letterpress as well.

5. Last but not least, the new facebook. I think people are a bunch of whiners sometimes. The new facebook is much more easy to navigate. The new design has given facebook more depth in its organization. Tabs now keep unnecessary information of the first page so the rest of us don't have to scroll through a billion applications to write on the wall. The pictures have an easy scroll for thumbnails now, and the login page is much more sophisticated and designed. Very pretty. Which is god because I'm on it all the time.

Ok, back to work

weekly update starting now

Dear diary,

Ok, so far I'm not doing too hot on this blogging business. So sorry. But now we're required to talk to each other every tuesday, like a date. So I guess I'll start off by giving you the update, and then we can start from there. 

We were supposed to respond to another reading a few weeks ago by asking a question about it, which I read, but no longer remember. I do remember the crazy fact about Shakespeare, and how (i just looked up the exact fact) there are 540,000 words in the English language, which is more than 5 times as many as during his lifetime. 

But Gina already took my question: "I want to know which words were created since Shakespeare's time"

..but not really because that would take wayy too long. Lets move on shall we?

The next assignment was to find 5 websites that I think are stellar and tell you why.

So I'm going to post 6 and start with this one. 100% based on the content, and not design. 

1. Design-wise, the apple website, along with all of their packaging and product design, is absolutely beautiful. It's clean and organized, and is cohesive with the design style of all of their products. Let's give them a gold star. Because I don't really surf the web much, I downloaded StumbleUpon to help me find random sites that I could judge.

2. The first one I found successful was probably after the 25th or 30th click. Not good world. The Kobudo Weapons site followed a consistent design throughout their site. They had good organization and placement of images, it was easy to navigate, and the colors were really nice and calming- a good contrast for a site with handmade weaponry i think.

3. Next awesome site! Understand. dontclick.it is verry cool! very interactive, I love the colors and the typography. The information is organized easily and the highlighted sub section moves around but is still easy to find and use. The content is very interesting and brilliantly explained with interactive explorations and history lessons. all while fighting your urge to click. def check that out!

I'll find more later.

I'm out

welcome!

This is my very first blog ever.

How exciting.