April, our instructor here at the Interactive Multimedia Design program, has been keeping us well busy over the past little while. Last night was the first night in a while that I could just sit and watch TV with Sandy for the evening.
This week is a little "light" for deadlines, but we did have another website interface due yesterday. This one was the "urban" interface. The goal was to create an interface inspired by any and all things "urban". This was mine:
When I was a little, my family used to drive fairly regularly to Montreal to visit relatives. I was the only kid who wouldn't sleep in the car because I loved looking at all the lights as we drove into the city at night. It was like Christmas... only bigger! The billboards that flip sides, the traffic, the neon signs... fantastic! Every city was like Vegas when I was five.
On Mondays, as mentioned in my earlier post, we have Visual Design. We started off fairly easy: a couple of fun design projects to wet the whistle and get us "in the mood".
Now, we've been exploring creating website interfaces using a variety of jumping off points for inspiration. This week, we produced interfaces using a photograph for inspiration. Here's my photo:
and here's the website interface I produced from the photograph's colour pallette:
Last week, we created interfaces based on a font of our choice. The font I chose to use was Optima. I discovered Optima Black when I was in the graphic design course and particularly enjoyed making "totem poles" out of the vertical text. I just love the way the curved ends of this beefy font meet to make interesting negative spaces. Here's the interface so you can see what I mean:
Of course, designing a pretty site is all well and good, but actually getting the code to work is another story... maybe even another blog! :)
I'll be doing some more cool stuff and posting it here, so please stay tuned!
After being out sick almost all last week, I sure had a pile of projects when I got back! I'm all caught up now... finally!
I am enjoying all of my classes here at Interactive Multimedia. Mondays we have visual design. It's like a mini graphic design program with a web twist. This class in particular has already made me draw more than I have in the past few years.
Tuesdays are set aside for Project Management & Multimedia Presentation. This week, we all had to get up in front of the class and do a presentation on a designer of our choice. My designer was Marian Bantjes from British Columbia. Her stuff is absolutely fantastic. I encourage you to check out her extensive portfolio on her web site.
Wednesday is Web Design which I believe is my biggest challenge. We are just getting into Cascading Style Sheets. If I ever come up with anything decent for this class, I will be sure to post it... it may take a while though before that happens, just sayin'.
Thursday is Audio/Video. For today's class, I submitted my first edited movie which I also shot myself. This was the first time I had ever used a video camera. I was also the only actor, so between acting and running back and forth to the camera to switch focus/zoom settings and the record button, I was pretty sweaty by the end of it.
And then there's Flash Fridays... my favourite! :)
I had spent last winter going through a Flash tutorial book, so I'm a little ahead of some of the others in our class. I have to say though, nothing I did for the tutorial book was anything near as nice as what I've put out for this class so far. I'm attaching my first two Flash projects here so you can see them. Both projects were focussed on "nested animations". The second project also incorporated play and stop buttons (my first action script... I am so proud!).
