Chugging to a halt

At long last, the final piece on this theme... 


I've finally managed to coherently piece together elements to create a microsite (of sorts) in Flash. Uploading the swf for now is beyond me, but here are some screenshots.


It was based on the same idea used for the editorial piece - charity muggers on the streets of Wolverhampton, and offers a witty yet informative exploration of the theme.

Above you can see why this made my head hurt - learning about keyframes, timelines and scripting was like learning a completely new language.

The home screen looks like this, with various buttons which allow you to interact with it. Clicking the people causes the opinion bubbles to appear, the clock causes the chugger to be squashed under the weight... Clicking Greggs starts an animation - a walk-up to the shop which ends in collecting a pasty, although not without interruption.

It took me a long while to get my head around the software, but I'm making progress. Good job, I've got to make another one of these in a fortnight's time.

Mistress

Guess I've been sleeping around... Here's my blog I've been keeping for research purposes: http://wynne1009745.blogspot.com/ and I'm afraid to say I've paid it far more attention than this in recent weeks. I will of course attempt to rectify this.

Can I have another minute?

Maybe it's a little self-indulgent to keep posting the same work, but when this amount of time has been spent on it, I feel slightly more justified.


In order to get a feel for how the magazine/editorial article might look and work, I used black and white copies to construct a couple of dummy books - one for each chapter.

Chapter one was assembled with a messy sellotape approach - I cut out the pages to their actual size, taped the relevant pages back-to-back, and then taped the spine. Chapter two was done slightly differently:

Due to a lack of A2 paper I avoided this technique with the first chapter, but upon attempting it with chapter two I found it worked reasonably well on A3. The pages are left uncut - with crop marks left showing, and the book itself is essentially made up from blank A3 sheets. My pages are simply mounted upon these blank sheets.

Neither is a pretty picture on close inspection, but this wasn't the main reason for doing it - the two dummy books do their job in showing how the chapters themselves would flow - something which mounting individual pages (which is my next task) can't show.

Carrolling

A while ago I posted about how I'd be producing spreads for a children's book adaptation of Lewis Carroll's "The Hunting of the Snark", and that it wouldn't be long before posting some of my actual artwork for it.


Two months later...


It's been a bit stop-start this one - I think I've known how it's going to look since deciding on my story (not really advisable, but never mind), and as such have struggled to motivate myself to disappoint my imagination by actually putting it down on paper. I've finally relented, and produced these over the last few weeks/two months. I imagine this'll be something which occupies me over Christmas.

The imagery needed to be mysterious, but also fairly vibrant and quirky. Backgrounds will be in pastel, with the dreadful drawings seen here laid over the top drawn digitally.

These two show slightly better how a finished page would look - having two spreads out of thirteen dummied up is slightly behind schedule... But at least I know where it's roughly going.


I'll probably post more of this kind of thing when it actually looks good - anywhere from two months to two years then!

Can I have a minute?

When tinkering with something as specific as letterforms, kerning, widows and the like, the only satisfaction is viewing the final thing and seeing no further improvements to make.

Unfortunately, that point never comes - we only ever get to the point where we say "Yeah, it's pretty good, and that's where I'll leave it". Never satisfied.

Anyway, I'm rather sick of looking at these, so you can look at them instead.

If you've no idea what they're about then look here. Don't try and read the type, it's latin (although I may have left the word "phallus" lurking about in there somewhere...).

I wanted chapter 2 to visually link in, and achieved this with use of a signature colour, a similar bookended approach, and similar typographic features. I decided to slightly change the pace by using more imagery in chapter 2 - this keeps it from looking too stagnant (or at least that's the plan!).

Right, there's one battle fought and won - the weapons for my second battle may or may not include the following instruments: spray mount, a scalpel, and a strongly-worded email to the people who provide the toner in the Uni printers.

Chugging away

We've all been there - you're trying to get to where you're going down the high street, and you can't walk five steps without the man in the red coat stopping you. You know the one - he carries a clipboard, pushes his face right in front of yours, and won't take no for an answer.


A writer in the Metro a few years back coined the term "chuggers" - a combination of "charity" and "muggers", as what they appear to do is forcibly take money of people in the name of charity. Anyone who has ever visited Wolverhampton will probably know that here it is a problem more prevalent than in a lot of places. When our editorial piece was to be on "social, political or economical issue" in the city, then, it didn't take me long to decide on this as the topic to design for.


Three double-page spreads were wanted for the problem we were dealing with, and three were wanted for our response, or a potential solution. Each set of three was to contain between 2,500 and 3,000 words of body copy. I've mostly designed chapter 1:

The red mirrors the mental image we have of the man I mentioned earlier. Plenty of charities use it as their primary colour - it's distinctive and bold, as well as iconic. I wanted to book-end the piece with the large red pages at either end to ease the transition from chapter 1 to chapter 2, and also to keep the design from looking too similar throughout. This way, the central spread is more of interest due to the photograph.


I need to start designing chapter 2 now. Hmmm, solutions to chuggers...? Should be fun.

Out of Logos Cometh Animation

I promised (what an anti-climax) to post my finished logo animation, so here it is.

The logo was a simple concept (see here), so the animation was made simple too. The three-tone sequence was chosen to mirror the three coloured strokes, along with the three words in the strapline. I'm no sound technician though, so don't judge on the quality of the sounds themselves - they more give an indication as to the kind of jingle which would accompany the movement.