Train Rolls On...

This week hasn't brought too much news. Work was an interesting mixture of tedium and real design. I was switching rapidly between data entry (yuck!) and editing an animation in Flash (hurrah!). The combination left me somewhere just north of neutral, since I don't get much opportunity to work in Flash.
And speaking of Flash, work on the portfolio has been a little slow. I'm currently building the raster version of all the artwork on the main page, and while it's coming along, it is slow work. Hopefully the vector versions will be less time consuming, but no matter how I slice it, there's a lot of tracing with the pen tool in my future. After I finish that, it will at last be time to devote myself to Flash. The next step will be building all the code. It's rather daunting, but I have confidence that I can do it. I think on the small scale, nothing I'm attempting to accomplish is that hard, but scaling it up to apply to a whole site seems like a big job. "Baby steps" - that's what I keep telling myself.
In any event, you can check out my progress in this image...
Not looking too bad eh? Maybe so, but it's time for me to buckle down. I've decided that after this weekend, I settle in for the hard push to the end. Wish me luck!

The Journey Continues...

Work has been increasingly interesting of late. I’m finally at the point with Caffeine where I’m making complete comps for new sites (or more accurately, redesigns of old sites). So far, I’ve done one for [EDITED] and one for the [EDITED]. The work has been very educational, and it’s forced me to consider practical ways to incorporate design into sites that are more conservative than those I make for myself. Subtlety in texture, color palette, and arrangements play a bigger role. (The links above are not for my versions- mine have not been implemented yet.)

The portfolio is also looking pretty cool. I continue to fight my way through the actionscript, and I’ve made a working scrolling system for freely navigating the page. In addition to this, I hope to make a button based system so the scrolling will be automatic if the user so chooses.

The artwork is looking cool too. I’ve designed a cool looking cover that looks like it’s straight out of the pulpy cult films and novels of the 1960s and 70s. Once you start throwing on the grungy beat up stuff, it’s hard to know when to stop! At one point it looked a bit like the whole thing had been through a washing machine, but I scaled the coffee stains and tears back a bit, and it’s in a good place now.

Ever onward...

The journey continues this week with more work, work, and work. The internship is progressing smoothly. Unfortunately much of my actual design work isn’t up yet, but I have lots of grunt work to display. Behold, dozens of beautiful [EDITED] Keep an eye out for the very sexy placeholder image for those that do not yet have images as well. Hopefully next week I’ll have some more impressive goodies to share.

My efforts toward a grand portfolio also continue. Today I cracked open Flash and started writing snippets of actionscript in an attempt to produce a microcosm of my future site. The startling truth is that it was not coming back to me as readily as I had hoped. But I think that by reviewing some of my old stuff, and devoting some time to studying over the coming spring break, I’ll be in good shape soon. I did manage to get some planning done, however. Just having Flash open helped me to visualize the internal mechanics of the site, and I made some good progress in that area.

I also was forced to make a decision today regarding the look of the site. Some of my comps from last week have a subtle but very cool papery texture going on, but in order to maintain this, they must be raster images. I fear that the size and resolution necessary for the site is going to make using these an oppressively slow option when it comes to the user-end experience, as file size will be exorbitant. The alternative is to use vector based graphics, which while still looking good, lack the same character. I haven’t given up entirely, but due to the style of navigation I’ll be using, vector is probably going to be the only viable option.

On the literary front, I pressed forward in Designing a Digital Portfolio, and also began Building Design Portfolios by Sara Eisenman. Neither book provided much food for thought for me this week, however, as they covered topics I either already knew about, or which don’t pertain very well to me.

Finally, I also picked up Dynamic Figure Drawing by Burne Hogarth on a professor’s recommendation. It looks like an amazingly useful book, and I can’t wait to cozy up with it, a sketchbook, and some freshly sharpened pencils in the near future.