This is just done for fun to break up a day of coding…. Needed a little colour in the day! desktop size avaiable on my flickr page

Logo Design I created for a friend in London.

Stupid me I upgraded from Leopard to Snow Leopard the other day, for some reason I thought everything would be ok, but the last week has been somewhat frustrating, so much that I am going to do a fresh install back to Leopard. Whats frustrating, well I’ll tell you, most programs I use now suffer a huge reduction in performance, photoshop and illustrator have hard times even starting up, if you can get the to start up. Firefox has probably halved in speed, forcing you to use Safari, which they say is fast but still seems slower for some reason!

However the speed is one thing, but its all the day to day software I use which has suddenly disappeared, and looking on forums there doesn’t look like updates to support Snow Leopard will be anytime soon… DOH! Annoying… my Canon printer driver will apparently be released sometime in October, GREAT!

Apart from the easy upgrade process, it looks like I’m going to have a painful downgrade process over the weekend!

My recommendation to anyone thinking of upgrading to Snow Leopard is DON’T JUST YET! Give it 6 months or so!

Recently desgined a logo for Canopy Artspace up in cairns, tropical North Queensland. Canopy is devoted to contemporary indigenous art and encompasses three organisations under its umbrella.  The logo symbolises a  ‘mosquito coil’ with the smoke from the coil forming the lettering, the 3 rings of the coil represent the 3 different organisations, this concept was orgianlly created by Theo Tremblay who runs Editions Tremblay Print Workshop housed at Canopy Arts.

For a project in the pipeline I needed to create a map of the UK in a 3D, which included a realistic elevation data. I thought this would be pretty easy, just search in google for UK displacement map… well nothing much came up, not the greyscale kind of image I was after. After much research I stumbled across what I needed Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) data. There are a few website out there that supply this data there are a few links on terrainmap.com, however it very difficult to extract and you need to assemble patches.

After much deliberation I managed to get a pretty good map (see image) with a resulting render. Its not perfect but it’s ok.

Render

Displacement Map

Funny that everytime I’ve been to Sawtell, just south of Coffs Harbour it’s been overcast or raining, hence I’m not sure why the sign as you drive into the town quoting ‘Welcome to Sunny Sawtell’

I’ve just finished off a little project for CBDigital a small video production company. The project was a multi-media DVD containing over 40 presentations and discussions on spinal research and development for the SSA (Spine Society of Australia) an abnormal sort of client, but seemlingly familiar in the way that I have spent a lot of time with orthapedic specialists and had numerous x-rays over the past 15 months.

The project intself has taken roughly 50hrs flash development time, also included a day of layout and design. Built with AS3 it was the first time I have incorporated FLV’s in a project since using AS2. To be honest it was a breeze working with the flv using net connection and net stream… just loved it, listening for cue points worked seamlessly and I have fallen in love with Custom Events…. shit I sound boring! HA.

Well the other good thing about this job was it was running locally so no bother really with pre-loading, although there is still a time delay on loading images so loading still needed to be taken into consideration. The project as always had the additional functionality added towards the end and the job is done and dusted all alterations can now be made in the xml, something the client is more than happy to do…. unless more functionality is needed. NO WORRIES.

Anyway good fun job as it went smoothly and the client as always was happy!

L.

I have just finished an intense flash workout at BMF in Sydney, I was hired as a freelance flash developer to develop an interactive colouring in competition for CBA Dollarmites Club. Created in AS3 this was my first agency project in AS3 working in collaboration with design, animators and other developers it was definately an intense coding moment. From my point of view I was bought in mid way into the project, with the designs, animations and a couple of class files already developed. I was given the task of pulling it all together and making it work.

On the first day arriving I was flooded with work, and told there was a strict deadline ect. The usual really, however, generally coming midway into a flash project you need a day or two to get your head around whats going on, especially now with AS3 and its strict datatyping adding timeline animations into code was a new experience… The problem with these ‘rush’ jobs, is it seems structure and planning are usually developed with the project.

After my usual, ‘work when I want’, to doing an initial 75hr first week, it was a brutal, yet invigorating jolt to the system. Magic Map Competition is now live (click on competition link here) and after finshing another flash landing page for AUS Star my work had dried up at BMF. Overall I enjoyed working there, it’s a good agency with really cool people, and hopefully they’ll want me back.

Just completed a Logo Design for a good friend over at ‘The Lighting Hospital‘ in Bath, UK. Specialising in fixing industrial lighting electronics, my logo tries to emulate/REPRAZENT lights/electronics in a fix in kind of way. My preferred chioce is the cross shape, currentlty being referred to as the ‘Cheese’ it meant to be a light beam shining over a cross, connected to it is circuitry which forms the conneting to the name. The font used is orator, a classic monospace face designed font.

The client finally decided on the ‘H’ design rather than the cross.

Which one do you prefer?

L.

Redesign of old logo I came up with these ideas, No.1 is the closest to the original and is the one which was selected and considering the subject (Finance company…. yawn) it’s the one I prefer.