Log: Week 3

Week 3 Interactive Project

Jan 28 – Feb 04

This week I took some lessons from Luke on 3D studio max. I didn’t actually make anything but he ran me through the tools available and showed me the possibilities. He also showed me how time consuming it can be and just why rendering is one of those things that I hear complained about so often. Although this is an art form I would love to devote more time to, I do not feel that it would be appropriate to embark on that course until after I have finished my course work, at least for this Uni year. So I shall endeavour to learn some of it over the summer holidays and use available resources for the sake of my sanity and my Interactive Project.

I did some work with the camera controls in second life and also revisited the Silver Bells and Golden Spurs website to refresh my memory of what could be done.

It has to be said that my camera work is jerky and I am not initially very good at this. I can but persevere.

 

Log: Week 2

Week 2 Interactive Project

Jan 21 – Jan 27

We talked about his characters and Luke then asked me if, as part of my work for him, I would like to design some characters for him. I jumped at the chance. Oh to pick up a pen again would be such fun. At least I thought so at the time, with hindsight I might think differently.

We discussed and looked at styles of artwork and film previously used for the Terry Pratchett Discworld and Characters.  It was at this point when I asked what style he would like them in, that it became apparent that we would need to do some serious research into artists and illustrators of the printed page which I could show him, and the type of digital art so predominant on the web, which Luke could introduce me to. I noticed he had a book of Gustav Dore’s illustrations for the Divine Comedy and this led to a further discussion of some of the world’s best artist and illustrators past and present and the state of our art education. I don’t mind admitting I am appalled by the seeming lack of artistic historical knowledge being taught to our young people, particularly in the design education field. We decided that it would be a good idea to go and visit some art galleries to see some of these beautiful and fantastic images in the flesh, so to speak. I mentioned a few of my experiences with the work of the Pre-Raphaelites when I actually stood in front of them for the first time.

I have also been frequenting SecondLife to price up land, costumes and props again just to make sure I had it right. I think I did. My findings confirmed that my original budget plan is correct. I am also getting around in SecondLife and chatting to people just to get me into the swing of things. I found and joined the Machinima list in the Groups on the SecondLife Website and I have been looking through the Machinima forums trying to gauge who does what, and how and who seems to know what they are doing, for future reference.

There is a particular guy, Cecil Hirvi, who make ‘Borg Films’. Not sure I would make these futuristic films but then you never know. He seems quite well respected though and has lots of his SecondLife films on YouTube.com.

Signs as True Type

My Font

Log: Week 1

Week 1 Interactive Project

Jan 14 – Jan 20

This week Luke and I spent some time revisiting our IPP and discussing where we had got to and the fact that we did less over the holidays than we really expected to. All the best of intentions but not enough time. Luke is producing a marketing piece for a MMPORPG based on Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. I spoke to Luke about his project. He said, that he wanted to change the focus of his project from the motion capture and greenscreening that he’d had in mind to a more interactive part of the project like the game, the design and interface. This made more sense really as the movie element wasn’t really very interactive and the whole look of the game was actually a big part of it and really the interface would be one of the first things you come across when playing it.

 

I have my storyboard ready but Luke needs to do his yet, so we had a look at the type of things we might need 3D modelling to use in both of our projects. Luke decided to have a look through the SecondLife website to see how I might use the facilities on offer with my project in mind. He mentioned the fact that it is open source and that I could possibly (at a cost) set up my own server and have my own part of SecondLife. I don’t mind admitting that this appealed to me. My own little world. Well, my partner Mr P always said he wished he could get tickets to ‘Shelly World’, he firmly believes that he could make a fortune selling them. Although it would be ‘Shellby Shelford’s World’ after my 2^ndLife name.

This week have downloaded Wink and Camtasia to try out as screen capture devises. I know that Bells and Spurs was done in Wink from the research I did last term, so I thought I would try it.

I have joined the SecondLife Educational (or SLED) mailing list, and contacted the owners of the Education Island Uk part of SecondLife who have suggested a few things and also mentioned that there were somewhere in the region of 240 members in their group most of whom were willing to volunteer for a good cause.

 

Typography Module General Write up

 

 

 

Typography - a dying art form?

http://www.markboulton.co.uk/journal/comments/typography_a_dying_art_form/

 

Mark Boultons page is one I have bookmarked for future reference.

 

An interesting page. The initial article asks a very simple question, which is answered eloquently and not without some passion by the various contributors to the page. It seems to me that there is a definite feeling that Type as a craft, as something to be taught properly and appreciated for it’s own artistic merit and craftsmanship is lacking.

 

There is a definite leaning toward a hope of seeing type evolving with the ever better tools at our disposal as web developers/designers. I can see the point one person made about the trades in which you would have learned to become a craftsman at Typography are dying out, and the opinion that “we’re currently in a much better place than we were even a few years ago, which, in my opinion, is strong evidence for typography’s continued vitality as an art form and indispensible communicative entity.”

 

 

 

The sentiments of the above page, are echoed in the introduction of Robert Bringhurst’s book The Elements of Typographic Style, the bulk of which can be found here

 

http://webtypography.net/toc/

 

“For too long typographic style and its accompanying attention to detail have been overlooked by website designers, particularly in body copy. In years gone by this could have been put down to the technology, but now the web has caught up. The advent of much improved browsers, text rendering and high resolution screens, combine to negate technology as an excuse.”

 

 

The next thing I looked at

http://www.mikeindustries.com/sifr

 

“sIFR-One way to use embodied fonts or as the page is titled;”

sIFR 2.0: Rich Accessible Typography for the Masses

This is definitely something that I shall be looking into further as I continue through the module as it will take some looking into.

As an aside I do like to see the old ‘Hacker ethic’ still alive and kicking at the forefront of the industry.

“We’ve released sIFR to the world as open source, under the CC-GNU LGPL license, so anyone can use it free of charge.”

I do think following some of the links provided are worthwhile too, this one is the original post that Mike Davidson made about this.

http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2004/08/sifr

I shall be looking onto this a bit more as I would like to incorporate this type of text into some of my web design, as previously I have created text in Photoshop and used the jpg image in a web page to ensure that a particular piece of text looks that same regardless of the browser.

 

The Makings of A font.

Having spent some time with Luke photographing various shapes that might either provide a letter shape or some element of on, I then started to sketch some of the shapes roughly into my pad. The photographs can be veiwed here; 
http://www.shellintons.com/typo_pics.html

I read through the various links on the Moodle site page that were provided. I have written about those as in the overall module report as I think they are pertinent to the whole module.

I found that I particularly liked the shapes from the Dummy photograph and some of the iron work from the church gates. some of the shapes reminded me of the crop circles I had cause to research and I decided to follow that as a theme for my font.

So I tried a few different ways of mark making but I struggled to get the perfect lines and circles that I felt I needed if I were using my Crop Circle influence. Most of the images I have seen and the one crop circle I have actually been in, most of the lines and cirlces tend to be as perfect as you could make them.

I began by making a document in Photoshop. I made several layers which contained the common elements I would use in the letters. I then opened a small document in which I was able to drag elements over from the main document and create my font that way. I saved each letter as a layered psd and then flattened the image to drag and drop the finished letter into the main large document.

Saving the PSD layered version enabled me to reuse parts of the letters as elements for new ones. I feel this enabled me to easily keep some kind of uniformity and this in turn gave me scope to play around with the various ideas which suggested themselves to me whilst I was working.

The next step was to check out the FontCreator program which I downloaded. Admitedly it was the trial version but enough for the sake of this project and to get a taste of the program and for making Fonts.

I had a good look through the User Manual before making the font, as I too often just open new software and jump in before really getting a good idea of how to use it. This has, in the past proved to be one way of learning a program but considering the time limit on this part of the module, it seemed wisest to at least read the instructions. The manual does make it seem remarkably easy.

There is some interesting information regarding ‘True Type’, ‘Open Type’ and ‘Font Copyright’ which, I believe, should be read for future reference by anyone making a font.