Too much caffeine to sleep, too tired to work. I present to you… ‘Stuff that was never used (and not really finished): Part 1′. I was going to upload ‘Stuff I have recently completed’ but none of the interesting stuff/stuff I can get away with posting on here has been absolutely finalised and I just can’t bring myself to post something that may change again before it’s signed off. I suspect I am mentally ill.

Artifact 1: Everything Starts website (work in progress). I’m sad that we never really got off the ground, but then given it was a project combining two people neither of whom had any spare time to start with it’s not a massive surprise. We may resurrect in the future but I would imagine with a new website. As you can see by the trailing off of the design this was dumped mid-design. I quite like it but can see that I was being influenced by Web 2.0 and Bioshock fairly deeply at the time. I am aware the whitespace is a bit fucked.

Artifact 2: Marquee Website. This was abandoned as it was one of two designs submitted to the client for a job. They went for the other option. I can’t argue, this was a bit more ‘out there’ than they were after (the final chosen design was a much more conservative, photo-centric option). The background colour is a poor choice and I obviously spent all the time available on the header and ran out of time for the rest of the layout (please note: this is not my usual working method, this design was done as a free-bonus-extra, proper design submissions to clients are finished properly).

I love the header, I have since re-used most of the bits of it elsewhere, apart from the marquee, which is a shame, I put effort into that damn marquee

More soon…

I did a wordpress!

My first crack at a Wordpress Template and I’m fairly happy with it. The template is for a site called “Conversations with a Cuban Sow” which I’m working on with Emily (Moonshine PR site doesn’t actually exist yet, this is on the list of “Stuff which must be sorted soon”). The Cuban Sow site is a PR blog for Emily’s mother’s forthcoming book of the same name which Emily is doing the PR for, in her words:

Conversations With a Cuban Sow is the forthcoming book by Elisabeth Bird, an English national living and working in Cuba.

This is Elisabeth’s blog, complied from letters sent to her daugher Emily over seven years and gives a fascinating insight into the daily toils and troubles, highs and lows of life in Cuba, both political and personal.

The WP template is very much a work in progress as currently Emily is still compiling the information for the site, technically it’s not been launched so I’m effectively making her life harder by now linking to it in advance of us finishing it off (sorry Em). It’s an interesting project to be involved with, there’s going to be a fair amount of content to come along with information on press coverage/etc so we will be modifying the template as the PR work builds up. I’m just going to have a quick tweak to make sure it’s all W3C compliant then lay off until Emily get’s her copy in order.

The layout itself is very simple and clean, it’s not aimed at designers it is purely a framework for Emily and Elisabeth’s words so it needs to be easily legible and simple to navigate. Emily drew the pig!

Working with Wordpress templates is a surprisingly pleasant experience, my background is very much in bespoke, ground up applications so it feels a little weird to be fiddling with something someone else has initially built, but the documentation is brilliant and the way the WP system works is so simple and effective I wish I’d started playing with it an age ago.

Aside from this I’ve been working on a mountain of other bits and pieces, the majority of it being paid work which isn’t of particular interest. I have just finished some nice Actionscript work which I may chuck up later on, also working on the complete branding for both Shinytastic, Moonshine PR, pretty much completed the History Of Guns album graphics, so now moving onto sticker and T-shirt designs for them while we plan the PR campaign. I’ve started writing a ‘Recommendations for Clients’ guide on how not to utterly piss off your Graphic Designer/Web Developer/etc which I may chicken out of posting. Still trying to get to grips with my new D40x, I purchased the Magic Lantern guide as recommended by Jen although forgot about bank holiday postage issues so probably won’t get a chance to read it until next weekend now. I did post some fucking awful photos from the Line Out Showcase in Southampton last weekend I really need some low light practice, I wanted to try and edit them but time really is not on my side right now. I also need to find time to completely rebuild OnLineOut.com, it’s starting to age badly. My big non-paid priority right now is to sketch out the long term plan for the label, but I want input from other people before I even start to think about that.

Happy Easter!

Got a random call from Kneill of Killer B-Movie asking if I knew how to make an old horror film style hypnotic spiral that changed colour over time. Apparently I do.

This is only a sample of the full DVD which is an hour long and cycles through a variety of colours, a complete colour change every five minutes. I had been tempted to do something a bit more extravagant with it but Kneill really wanted something simple and uncluttered. It’s intended as a backdrop for their gigs so hopefully the audience will be looking at the band more than the animation. This is the first gig projection I’ve been involved with in years, I’m going to go along to the gig and see how it works out (Killer B-Movie, March 21st, The White Horse, High Wycombe), come along it will be fun.

The spiral was drawn in Adobe Illustrator, imported into Flash, animated as a simple rotation, exported to an AVI, imported to EditStudio, old film effect added and tweaked, Vignette added, colour change on a keyframe every 5 minutes. Exported to AVI burnt to DVD. I quite like the final product (given it took all of an hour), it reminds me a bit of the steampunk graphic style used in Bioshock (although nowhere near as good). Kneill was happy with it, he was still playing it on the big screen on the wall of his tattoo shop when I left, I like that he had a customer sitting in the chair watching the spiral.

I’m still tempted to get hold of the Adobe video editing suite, but the cost is just too much right now, EditStudio does fine for the two video edits I tend to do a year, given a bit of spare time and money I’d like a chance to get good at it.

The History of Guns – ACEDIA packaging is nearly done. I’ve just finished the J-Card (both sides), replaced a couple of the photos in the booklet and gone through and done an additional tweak to some of the typography. Just waiting for the band’s final sleeve notes/thanks list and for them to check they are happy with the entire thing and we are ready to go to print, well as soon as the audio master is done.

It’s been a lot more work than I expected, but in a good way. It’s the first 16 page booklet I’ve done myself and I think it’s worked out nicely. I set up an InDesign file for all the text and typography which really made life a whole lot easier. Scott’s photos were as ever excellent to work with, even before this is complete I’m looking forward to working with him on the next project, although paid work is going to have to take priority for the next couple of months. We originally planned to use an O-Card (the cardboard sleeve you sometimes get round jewel cases) but the cost was a little too high so instead we’ve gone for a double sided J-card (the bit that goes in the CD tray) with a transparent tray and stuck the design intended for the O-card in there.

The hardest part of the entire project was removing the Tesco label from the bottles on the front cover. I would guess the hardest part of the whole thing for anyone was Max who had to get naked in a car park 3 days before Christmas. I have a new level of respect for him after that, the level of professionalism on the shoot from everyone was brilliant. The most amusing/unpleasant part of the shoot was Del with the fake vomit. We had Del lying on his back with Max spooning the fake vomit mixture into his mouth, he had to push it out of his mouth while looking dead until we’d finished taking photos. As soon as we finished he started eating the remainder of the mixture and telling us how pleasant it was. The mixture was made of soup, fruit juice and biscuit and in all fairness probably tasted great but it just looked like Del was eating a cup of vomit.

Hopefully the band will like it all, I’m sure there will be a few tweaks but I think we are pretty much there. Here’s some more parts, I’ll upload the complete set once the album is out

Front Cover, the complete image. The final version is cropped down with the band name/album name added. Max’s winky is covered not through any sense of self-censorship but just to protect his modesty. If he gives permission I’ll post the uncensored version;

Back Cover, Del choked on his tasty vomit.

Just need to sort the press release, poster design, promo cd design, flyer design and any web assets.

Night night xx

A couple of the (work in progress) spreads from the forthcoming History of Guns album booklet. Photography by Scott Wylie. I think myself and Scott make a damn fine team…

It appears to be quite late. I have meetings first thing. Dammit. Sleep time.