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!

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

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.