Evolution of Hexademic New Media

Whilst browsing through the OEP Ning, I found Shaun Belcher has added an Industry tab. Here I found several links to new media firms in the east midlands, one in particular called Evoluted. At first I found the website a little corporate and stale but after viewing their portfolio and reading through their content I realised I could learn a great deal from these guys, especially in terms of features and functionality. Hexademic New Media needs a website and I think this has finally inspired me to start building it.

Edit: I also found this very interesting www.erskinedesign.com

Web Design Assignment

I've started making progress on the web design assignment (a three page html site with three flash objects). I have been drawing up designs in CSS using my new scratch built CSS template. Its proving to be a faster way of drafting designs than photoshop. See my current progress here.

http://www.erebusstyx.co.uk/about/

G.I.R

After painting a Mighty Mugg to look like Master Chief, I think I rekindled my love for painting (in a very unconventional sense). I brought some paints and started painting once more, perhaps in a more traditional manner this time, on a canvas. I painted a character called G.I.R from a cartoon called Invader Zim as a gift for a very remarkable person. I plan on attending several life drawing sessions at the Waverly building to further hone my abilities as a artists as well as a designer.

CSS Template

I have produced my own CSS template for when I wish to quickly produce simple websites. As much as we may hate to admit it, most websites will boil down to some sort of header, sidebar and content area. I have used a set of my own labels for class and id tags which I will now try and standardize every time I build a site or style sheet. I have also told Phil who I work with on Hexademic projects about my CSS template so he can not only quickly interpret my style sheets but edit them also.

View my Template here: http://www.erebusstyx.co.uk/css/

View my style sheet here: http://www.erebusstyx.co.uk/css/style.css

Touch Browsing

Touch screens are evidently the future of computerised interaction, its simply a more natural ergonomic way of working with something. As a result designers, including myself, don't necessarily need to know how to produce touch screen software but design with it in mind. I need to start asking myself, how would somebody viewing this page on a Iphone or other hand held, receive this website? Obviously the first thing to consider is page sizes but there are several other issues to address such as plug ins, will this flash object be visible? Do I need an html version for other users?

It would also be wise to start thinking about developing a touch screen based Flash .swf or even an application, perhaps using something like Coco, as used by the Iphone. Currently my coding skills don't go far beyond html and css but it would be good to at least try and get involved in some of these exciting new projects by contacting the professionals who work in this field.

Un.Titled

http://un.titled.co.uk/

Active Ingredient

Active Ingredient is a Nottingham based design firm who work with interactives, web design and more... Their website features full page flash and many interactive elements including a drawing tool and image gallery of other people’s drawings. As the current 3 page HTML/Flash assignment is almost already achieved through my existing projects (such as the NTU Gamer Society website) I have been asked to look into more advanced ideas, such as the projects that Active Ingredient are working on. Although I am still very much a PHP rookie and I would like to devote most of my time to OEP Web Applications, Flash cannot be over looked especially in terms of interactive features. In the near future I will further analyse the work of active ingredient and the importance of interactive design in the multimedia industry.

CSS Zen Garden

During a OEP seminar, Shaun Belcher was teaching us how to embed flash files into an HTML document. We felt this exercise wasn't particularly relevant to me (It's more than likely what ever site your reading this feed from has a Flash element already embedded in it.) so shaun showed me a site called Daves Notes. It features several online presentations about web design from more of a basic coding stand point. After reading through a few of the presentations I found they helped fill in the gaps in my understanding of basic web design (for example the difference between HTML and XHTML). What I found really interesting on Daves Notes was his links section, a web site called CSS Zen Garden. This website has a set of links that reskins the website with fantastic examples of CSS, it really shows you how much is possible with CSS. Perhaps sometimes we're to quick too use flash for presentation. Anybody interested in CSS, I strongly recommend you check this out...

"Change Has Come To America"

Barack Obama has become president of the USA, quite frankly I'm relieved. I won't delve into my politics too much but if this is anything to go by, I think the right choice was made...

Fire Service... Call the Police!

I was looking at the Fire Service website looking at firework safety for the interaction design task and noticed a bit of internet plagerism. The Fire Service website favicon (the little logo in the tabs menu of your browser) has been stolen straight off Feedburner.com... It's exactly the same!

Interaction Design - Firework Safety

Much like my fireworks banner, my flash lecturer David Downes has set me another design task. This time a multiple slide flash animation promoting firework safety. The project must have between 6 and 8 flash sections that include both animation and interaction.

I have several design ideas already, all of which are centered around "The Firworks Safety Code" that I found on saferfireworks.com.

My favourite idea so far is a virtual safety guide, a book that you click on to open and presents you with the 10 rules of the fireworks safety code. I have literally just been set this task so of course no ideas are set in stone yet, I will post some initial ideas when I have them.

Flash Banner

Here is the flash banner I worked on for David Downes with Anthony Wood. This to me, primarily seemed like an opportunity for our lecturer David to see our basic abilities with flash. I had more experience in flash so we designed and planned with Anthony and I lead work on producing the Flash. We looked at web compliant banner sizes at Simply Grafix, considering we endded up choosing a fireworks banner, a tall thin (vertical tower) banner appeared most appropriate after a little experimentation.



.swf file coming soon...