logo design.

I've decided that I really like design contests. I think the competition drives me to do better work. It's just the push I need to really bunker down and put a lot of thought into projects. IUPUI's Student Design Organization is holding their annual logo design contest. The winner gets $50 plus their design gets distributed all over the place...its more about the exposure than the prize money, personally.

I'm really excited about this one. The deadline isn't until March 22, but I already have 6 designs mocked up. I'm not sure which ones I'm going to submit yet, though. Logo design is such an intriguing field. So many different elements go into them yet they have to be simple enough that they don't look cluttered, messy or ugly. Definitely the art of minimalism with a message.

I'd post the ideas I have, but I'd rather keep them under wraps until the contest is over. They'll get posted once they decide the winner. Hopefully it's one of mine! :)

CGS Contest!

I've decided to enter the new CGSociety contest. It's a design contest based on the "B-Movie" theme. I'm planning on creating a movie poster. The concept is still in the idea stage. I'll get everything ironed out this weekend and then move on to collecting my materials for the composite. I'm planning on doing this old-school with an actual photo shoot of a model in make-up for starters and then compositing that with other originals for the scenery and effects. I foresee many hours staring at Photoshop.

Here's the link to the contest: http://features.cgsociety.org/challenge/b-movie

Lots of Work + Procrastination = Site Uploaded!

I finally got around to uploading my new portfolio site. You can see it here. I still need to tweak a few things, but having it online makes me feel like I've finished something in the past week.

I have a tendency to "take on the world" when it comes to projects according to someone I know. In the past week I've accepted a Flash freelance project, finished coding my site, and started to play with kinetic typography and/or After Effects.

Is it bad that I only seem to be interested in pursuing ideas when they aren't paying the bills?

Why?

I wish people would stop giving idiots copies of Photoshop. Granted, it is great fun to see what they come up with, but there's also this cultural phenomena that gets created.

Example:
I was contacted awhile back to design a 4"x6" print flyer for a concert a local band was having. "Sure, no problem. Do you have photos or do I need to take some?" "No, we'll email some to you." What I received was a blurry, dark, grainy cell phone image. Upon asking, with just the right amount of tact, "What the hell is this?" They told me to just "fix it in Photoshop". I'm sorry. Photoshop is not your mother, it can't just make things better by kissing it on the forehead. If you start with a blurry, dark, grainy image, all you're going to get back from Photoshop is a blurry, dark, grainy image possibly lightened and saved in a different format. That's about it. Try making a steak dinner from a chicken breast. Doesn't work.

Do everyone a favor and take the extra 5 minutes to take a proper photograph. It saves everyone a lot of frustration and headaches.

After Effects fun!

So I've been attempting to do some motion graphics, right? Well, After Effects is super fun...and difficult. I've been watching tutorials all the time and I think I've got a pretty good handle on things, but it's just so COMPLEX! Let me explain, its not hard to do things, but there's just so many possibilities it can be hard to navigate through things and click the right buttons. So far I'm still on timeline animation and text effects. I haven't even gotten to all of the effects you can add!

I saw a really cool flame effect earlier today that I thought I'd share:



It uses Fractal Noise and Colorama...pretty damn cool if you ask me.

I'm off to get deeper into AE. I'll post up videos as I get to a better stopping point.

Motion Graphics?

In my previous post, I talked about my portfolio I'm about to put online. Well, I have a problem. I'm running into classification issues for some of my pieces. So far the site has web.design, graphic.design, digital.art and photography sections.

Do digital 2D art still count as photography? A lot of them are composites done with stock photography so I feel awkward about throwing them in with the rest of my original images. Or should they go under graphic design?

The reason I'm concerned is that I need to add a few sections and I don't want to get things too cluttered. I've been learning a lot about motion graphics techniques lately and I think I'm going to give that a whirl. I've got several ideas story-boarded out so I should have some examples in a few weeks.

Also, I got a chance to take a 3D graphics course toward the end of my degree and I wish that I had gotten involved with that sooner. It is so much fun! And the results are really cool. I didn't even get into any animation, just some modeling. I'd like to do some character design experiments in Maya (or Blender??) and post those.

Long story short I may need to add a 3.d and motion.graphics section.

There's also no place to post my interactive examples (mainly Flash). Maybe the site itself is enough of an example? Who knows...seriously. Anyone have any thoughts?

New Portfolio!

It's been a long time since I've posted, but I've decided to start up again. I've been neglecting my design practice for too long. From now on, I vow to stay on top of it...at least that's what I'm telling myself. :)

Over the past few weeks I've been redesigning my online portfolio (eric-ralls.com). As usual I've been indecisive and it went from entirely HTML/CSS to a complete Flash/AS site to the hybrid that I'm about to unveil. It's all but done; I just need to take a good picture of myself to put on the homepage and make a few small alignment tweaks. Here's the mockup I did in Photoshop:


I'm pretty excited about it. My existing portfolio relies very heavily on horizontal JavaScript scrolling for the navigation and it tends to lag; not good. It also didn't allow a lot of room for expansion.

This site is HTML/CSS with a cleaner look and animated galleries that I developed in Flash. Also, the info for the galleries is loaded dynamically from XML files which will make it easier to swap out what displays on my pages and the galleries are (theoretically) infinitely expandable. I'll have to be careful not to go overboard with examples.