hello world_

Recent projects have made it almost compulsory that I flex my illustrative skills to the max. So attempts at drawing with a pencil as
opposed to my usual pen-it-straight-to-medium technique, a technique I'm very fond of due to its fire&forget nature. Using a pencil forces me to be far too diligent in my strokes which is very alien to me, not to mention that I also found the whole drawing with a pencil very strange in general; the last time I did this was decades ago. Still, it's like riding a bicycle I suppose.

This was done in about half hour or so with a lot of erasing and going over. So happens, I had an old sketchbook (about 6-7 years old) lying around at the very bottom of my bookshelf and the other half found my old trusty pencil case which had one pencil equipped with an eraser on its butt; very useful.


Click to embiggen.

This is dude. Dude has shading and stuff. I am pretty neutral leaning to the not-happy side about how this turned out.

A recent procurement of a very helpful drawing book from Nick definitely helped put things into perspective, especially the shading bit. I've always been thoroughly rubbish at shading. Thoroughly. Can you tell that I'm struggling with this post? No? Oh, good.

We haven't made anything in flash for a while now. Still browser based but having fully acquainted ourselves with linux for a few years now, it's clear flash just doesn't perform decently in this operating system. When I say decent, I mean using up 100% of your cpu so imagine how bad it is on linux thus we've been looking at other options instead including rolling our own browser plugin for native code when that comes out. Javascript seems a simple enough choice, moreso since AS2 will just convert easily.

In any case, the game engine will be stripped of the usual things that come with all our games so it will be teeny tiny. The library will be called Gamecake because it's silly, obviously and because it's currently the hashtag for cakes that are games-related but they aren't so it's now a library.

Here's a peek at the current game.

Drawing is not one of my strong points but that's not stopped me from doing it. They say practise makes you better which I believe is true to a certain point; any better certainly needs talent. Even if a large proportion of my portfolio consists mainly of illustrations, they are mostly background scenes and level designs so character designs and caricatures remain an unknown venue rarely explored. Still, before I ramble on further than I should, some idle scratchings on digital.






Not entirely sure what they are except hesitant exercises of facial expressions, you can see I'm still grasping at straws when it comes to methods and basically, the expressions. Being somewhat disconnected when it comes to facial expressions in general, an inherent condition not voluntary, provides naught to the situation. Although, mirror and images to mimic will come in handy for times like these.

At the present moment, status updates are disposable, fire&forget comments which may or may not invoke a conversation.

They are short for easy digestion with the most popular being limited to 140 characters. Fitting an intended cause or detailed message into one without going out of context requires a certain level of skill hence the most common usage is usually, but not limited to, daily rants or updates of lunch menus.

For this very reason, it is close to superfluous to include a twitter stream on your website apart from informing your viewers that you have an account and may or may not be actively participating in the medium but they should follow you nonetheless; sites are guilty of posting updates on their twitter account which streams itself onto the website where the updates are posted in an infinite recursion. You are lucky if the sites are even updating their twitter accounts at this point, sites I've been to have active front pages but an outdated stream.

So, what's the point?

A centralised hub for conversations is an attractive thing, everyone gets their own @username and a voice to call their own. It's nice to put a number to your followers and know, at the drop of a hat, that your followers may be listening when you announce something depending on the @replies you receive. That is, if anyone is listening at all.

People are adding other people adding other people but useful conversations that matter are far and few. This is nothing new to the internets. Blogging has been the preferred mode of communication in the past albeit a lot more effort for all involved. BBS and forums of virtual communities were other venues. Twitter just made it accessible and short, no effort required; Facebook hides behind a walled garden.

But what does this mean to the creative?

Participation with others on twitter is nice but it is somebody else's platform, you want your viewers to spend time on your site.

You have your blog where you elucidate your viewers of your recent endeavours with a wall of text and maybe images, you have your main site where you showcase your products and projects, you may even have a place for your twitter stream where you may or may not remember to exclude non-work related topics. Your viewers are able to communicate with you directly via email or a contact form, they may even engage a conversation or discussion with you via your blog. But what happens if you just want to post blurbs of updates that are pertinent to the current status of your projects or products and not want those updates to get lost amidst blog posts?


Well, here's http://boot-str.appspot.com/about/mod/note.

Mod note is many things but mostly, it is a means of publishing a comment. When a viewer logs in to comment on a bootstrapped site, they are granted their own profile page where they can update their status with text, links, images and youtube videos which can be automatically embedded. From here, other viewers are able to comment on their status updates thus creating an instant community base for your viewers, all within your site.

Mod note also translates easily into a forum and an imageboard should you wish to. All of these are based on exactly the same things; a site wide commenting system.

And this is the solution. You post a status update which is imported to the front page to inform your viewers of your current status of a project, you can pick the last 5 or 15 or just the one. These updates can live on a seperate page, a page purely for updates or posted on your main page, with links allowing your viewers to comment on or share.

Hell, we might even make it so you can even push those updates to twitter easily without ever leaving your site if you really need to and unlike twitter, you are able to manage your content (only you can delete/hide them), you own all of your data, the comments that are attached to each update and the viewers that are attached to those comments.

And before you ask, of course I'm using it :}

Some examples:
http://www.esyou.com/shi
http://boot-str.appspot.com/
http://gen-information.appspot.com/

The thing about being a visual/graphics creature, you are constantly in a state of flux; fickle and fidgety.

I've been sketching a redesign of the site, a total overhaul of the entire site. Well, to be honest, I've been redesigning all the sites currently under the ongoing projects in-tray. This seems to be a constant thing but I've come to slowly accept that it is ok to do this as long as you agree to a finished design at some point and just move on. Until it needs redesigning again.

I suppose I could say practise allows you to gain experience and become better at tackling user interface issues. The thing I find about current designer sites is the focus away from functionality but more towards a similar, familiar mold. The balance between accessibility and form should lean more towards the former, at least for me. There is no point in perusing a trendy site where tiny black text on even blacker background is the main selling point of a theme, where a site is so flash-heavy it kills my browser, where the site is obviously optimised for massive screens only or ipod/ipad only.

I have been furiously looking at site designs lately, most of which uses familiar cms like wordpress, joomla/drupal, proprietary corporate cms from the late 90s that probably costs an arm and both legs. Most of these sites have lesser content than they appear to have so they are stretched out thin to compensate for all the SEOs that are attached to them. For a site like mine with content growing at an alarming rate, the task to design it is far from menial and this is why I'm still wavering about decisions.

At the moment, most of the things I want to display is put on hold and/or hidden as it would overwhelm the site with just too much content and I refuse to design the thing like your ordinary blog with posts laid out in sequence as if the previous is less important than the next. Then there is the focus which I've still yet to decide upon. Currently, this entire site was built in a couple of days just as a placeholder for later, hardly doing the content any justice.

Looking through the sites I have designed and developed, most of these suffer from the endless scroll of doom which happens when you have your content laid out as blog posts. I suppose this is okay if each chunk is bitesize and fits within the standard screensize of 960 x 480. On the other hand, one page websites though aesthetically pleasing is pretty much less useful when it comes to transparency.

Amusingly, I find the traditional magazine page layout as probably the most fitting for content-centric sites. Apart from the obvious familiarity of the format, a traditional magazine layout is specifically designed for the reader/viewer; chunks of information punctuated with relevant thumbnails. I won't go into the gridsystem format as that, I feel, is far too limiting and clinical for a site to be pleasing to the eye, much less for the digestion of information.