Rules of the Road 1967

I found a rules of the road book from 1967 in my parents house, love these retro, colourful illustrations! Way nicer than the current rules of the road!

Giorgia Lupi and Accurat

I read this amazing interview with Giorgia Lupi today via designboom.com. I've always been interested in information deisgn and her work is BEAUTIFUL! So stunning. To me they manage to appear historical, modern and science-fictional all at the same time. I love her colour palettes. She also has some brilliant thoughts on drawing that are useful to reflect on in any discipline. I think i'll bring them in to my students:

"I use drawing as a primary form of understanding reality and expressing thoughts and ideas. this is also very related to what I just said in relation to the previous question: the very act of drawing, of reproducing reality and thus focusing on the things we like and notice definitely helps to introduce what I would call ‘a level of abstraction’ that helps to translate the things we like into clues for our designs. since drawing can mediate between perception and reflection, it plays a constitutive role in the production and communication of knowledge, and from my perspective, the genesis of ideas is often directly connected with graphical thinking."

A Working Bank Holiday...

Tearing busy at the moment, finishing off storyboards for NAIRTL need to get into production today to get it done for Friday.

Here's a sample of the storyboards. I scrapped the earlier varied colour palette in favour of something much more minimalist which I think works well and better reflects NAIRTL's visual identity.

Hence, my poor uncelebrated bank holiday... though I am going to see Kick Ass later so it's not all bad!

Visualising ELVIN

I’ve been working today on visualising the ELVIN social networking platform, the different interactions and the different tools etc that will hopefully pair learners and learners as well as learners and content. We have a skype meeting tomorrow with all partners so hopefully these will go a long way in making sure everyone knows what we’re talking about!

There’s a lot to work out but visualising the process really helps!

Here’s an example of one of the diagrams.

ELVIN Kick Off Meeting + Social Networking

I'm just home from the ELVIN kick off meeting, hosted by Escuela de Administración Pública de Castilla y León (ECLAP) in Valladolid. ELVIN is an EU project which aims to leverage open source social networking platforms to faciliate online, collaborative language learning in the vein of social constructivism. Users will enter the system and, depending on their stated skills, goals, occupation and profile information, they will be paired with other learners in order to practice the desired language. Content will be developed at quite a granular level, more to facilitate collaborative, peer-to-peer learning than to act as traditional course content. The platform will be piloted with public administrations in 5 different countries. DEIS are heavily involved in the project as technology partners. We are responsible for developing both the platform and profiling tools in order to pair learners. We are jointly responsible with Salamanca university for developing content tools and a respository. At this early stage we think we'll use either Elgg or Mahara to facilitate the platform and Dspace to develop to repository. This is all subject to change pending further research!

These are two versions of an image I developed for my presentation in Valladolid. It represents a social network and it's components. The image developed from a number of preliminary sketches, particularly one of a tag cloud and a "taking a line for a walk" type image. The first image involves typical social network features, all overlapping and linked together. The second image concentrates on only the links.

Sigtec Animations

Here are some screenshots of what's been keeping me busy lately,

Sigtec is one of our first innovation voucher clients in DEIS. The job involved developing three animations to represent Sigtec's main product - the Bluebox Solution.

Sigtec supplied the scripts and I began work on the images. The three animations consisted of an overview, an example of the system in operation and a run through of the benefits of the system. I developed the illustrations and icons for industries in illustrator. The photos were downloaded using our subscription to a stock images site. As the content was very explanation-driven (particularly in the second animation) I wanted to develop images in an information graphic style, this is pretty broad I know! I concentrated on developing clean, minimal images, using colour to signify the more important elements in each image.

Once detailed storyboards were developed and signed off on and voiceover was recorded, I began work in aftereffects. The animation is quite simple, concentrating on information diagrams and sequencing of images an photographs to illustrate points being made.

One of the more difficult aspects was to develop an interesting animation introduction involving the logo. After looking at a number of tutorials, I developed the 2d illustrator logo file into a 3d image using this tutorial: http://hottek.net/2008/07/advanced-extrusion-with-shatter.html I animated the logo with camera movements to produce a sweeping / zooming effect, the background was more difficult to develop. I worked with after effects presets, but problems with a slow machine, and the general unsuitability of the presets limited me. Eventually I downloaded stock video from videohive.net.