After a year and a half of telling people I’ve been building this site, we finally had the AIAM100.com website and exhibtion launch party on Friday night at Cooee Art Gallery in Lamrock Ave. Bondi.

Australian Indienous Art Market top 100 (AIAM100) is a website show casing the top Australian indigenous artists based on their market performance in the secondary art market. Over 130 profiles compiled by Adrian Newstead give the user a detailed view of each artist. Market Performance results are supplied by Australian Art Sales Digest (AASD), these results allow the AIAM100 to calculate the AIAM100 index and rank each artist accordingly. It also provides the overall health of the industry, for example the peak in 2007.

Adrian Newstead at the opening of the AIAM100 website and exhibiton

Ruth Hessey & Adrian Newstead

Being completely built in Flash I see this website as being a RIA rather than just a website. I know I know, it’s not the normal site to be completely built in Flash, and it raised numerous challenges along the way, especially regarding text layout, formatting and resizing (which are basic things we take for granted in developing an html based site). 50% of the site is it’s cutom built php based CMS, along with an extensive database, allowing AIAM administrators to easily publish new artists profiles.

Although i’ll still be working on adding a few more features it’s a great feeling to get AIAM100.com site live into the public.

I recently just finished the ‘People’s Choice Award’ web kiosk application for the NSW State Library. The purpose of the app is to allow the public to vote on their favourite from the Moran Prizes exhibition.

The screen cast shows the general flow of the app, it was relatively siple and includes a back end admin to display user data.

I’ve just finished the design and development of a flash based kiosk app for the State Library of NSW 100 Exhibiton. Originally I was contacted by Mental Media to do the job.

The app was fairly straight forward in process, providing the public the ability to vote on their favourite exhibiton item, view favourtie exhibiton item, complete a survey and enter a draw.

All data is saved into a mySQL database and the library staff can access a admin page to download the various data as CSV files. I had some fun with PHP merging all the tables to provide a simple usable table for the non-technical staff.

The app is running continuously for 100 days, so it was seriously important that there were no memory leaks. Flash and no memory leaks can be a time consuming effort…. At the end of the project I did encounter a memory anomaly where the memory seemed to jump 5MB every time an image was displayed on screen, although I was loading the images from memory. It turned out it was due to the fact I added a drop shadow to the image at runtime…. therefore flash somehow needed to reprocess that shadow area as a new image. This turned into a problem when I couldn’t access it, even by removing the filter, it still kept it in memory. Quick solution.. got rid of the drop shadow.

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.

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.

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.