Friday Night Scribbling

So i'm at home on a Friday night doodling, my fingers are sore from the track pad on my laptop! Repetitive stress injury here I come. Here's my sketch, scanned and filled in in illustrator, am thinking this will form the basis of the homepage of my long overdue new website, this is all subject to change / complete scrappage of course! I want to do quite a simple, clean website, using all flat colours, although maybe the flat colour here takes away from the image a bit so I possibly need a rethink...

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.

SEI Calculator Icons

So it's been a very busy Saturday, i've just finished a set of user interface icons for a Sustainable Energy Ireland (SEI) online application. Basically the application involves developing a calculator for homeowners to assess the cost of replacing their carbon fuel energy supplies with solar power. The icons were intended to represent a set of variables. The homeowner will input his / her specific details and based on these variables, the application will calculate the initial cost of installing a solar panel, how much money this will save the homeowner per year, how many years it will take for the solar panel to have paid for itself, and how much of their carbon footprint they can hope to offset. A pretty good idea all in all!

SEI supplied me with their colour palette and inhouse branding documentation. The palette is really vibrant and varied in tone, which I was very happy with! My work tends to be colourful anyway if I can help it! Each icon uses one of the SEI colour palette options.

Now, have to go pack to travel to the ELVIN kick off meeting tomorrow, another post on that soon!

Happy New Year 2010!

A quick Happy New Year sketch, i'll fix it up & colour it in once I get my drawing pens from work...

edit**** Now in Technicolour!

New Essential French Demo

Happy New Year!

So here are some stills from the Essential French demo I was working on before Christmas, again the demo was made in aftereffects, a mix of vector graphics and stock photography. The course itself was developed by us in DEIS using a mix of articulate studio and flash. In terms of design I concentrated on colourful, chunky, fun graphics to appeal to the secondary school target audience. As part of the design I developed icons for the three sections of the courses; Listening, Reading and Vocabulary, and Grammar, you can see these in the screenshots above. We worked closely with the Essential French grind school to develop an online moodle portal populated with French language lessons. The lessons were informed by the schools face-to-face experience as well as our own expertise in the area and feature a mix of accessible learning resources (such as mp3s and vocab lists) as well as interactive, self-corrected exercises with intelligent feedback and step-by-step introductions to key grammatical points.

DEIS also developed a site for Essential French, see; essentialfrench.ie