Final Cookies & Creme Co.

Final project now completed, and handed in, here is a brief look at how it all turned out. Below are images of the final packaging and CD, and the final logo for the mock cafe company. For a limited time you can see and play with the final version of the site on my geocities account (but they are sadly closing soon), click here to see final project.

Death to organization.

After trying hard to get the CSS working… and failing, I turned my attention to playing with the flash component of the site, well I figured come the week its due, i’ll at least have something done. I know I set out to be slightly hand drawn, but still try to be very clean with the design, and i did try very hard to be good with sticking to the hand drawn look…. but the straight and minimal always comes crawling into it. I played around with my intro animation…. added more ‘homely’ features to it, like grass and a sky. And I do like the crayon colour effect, (and after seeing Brigid, she said she rather liked the hand drawn element, so maybe it will stay) but now I think i’ll have to try to keep that scribbly look ‘inside’ the house at the main navigation of the page… I played around with drawing in flash for all the furniture and bits and pieces, the trouble is, I like the scribbly bits in the animation, but I also like the clean-ness of the main navigation… I guess the biggest hurdle now is to try to stylistically marry the two…….. i’ll keep working on it, hopefully we’ll get a happy marriage between the two styles soon

screen grab from intro animation to mock website

screen grab from navigation 'home' page to mock website

style research – infographics

so been doing some digging online, and happily whilst not doing what i was meant to be doing, I stumbled onto Infographics (see coolinfographics.blogspot.com), which is pretty interesting, though I am not sure if I can use it for this project, but maybe other projects…. I like their bold and simplistic graphics is pretty much what I was looking for yesterday, though I am having doubts as to whether this style really is suitable for my project…….Here are some from the site Virtual Water

Image from From Virtual Water

Anyway, I gave it a go, to see how plausible it is for me to do infographic style images using photoshop… its definately more enjoyable than drawing all of it.. but I am not sure, there still needs to be a lot of manual tracing of objects…. but it was definately fun, and I definately will do something with this later on… and here are some pictures:

Proof of Concept

So we had our proof of concept last week, where we bring in a mock up of the website or what we’ve done so far, design etc. In making the mock-up i realized even though i THOUGHT i had the design down pat… I was wrong. But good news was that the navigation and stuff worked OK… and i worked out minor glitches, so I guess i don’t have to stress about navigation, which is usually the part i hate most anyway. I did figure out that I should keep the HTML and flash content on different sections of the site, and introduce the two on the index page, where I present the user with one of two options. In my haste to get the mock project together I didn’t use image rollover as I had intended in the design (in my head)… but used text instead…. I actually kind of like this…. I would upload the mock site here, but I can’t be bothered, there are way too many files.. i’m sorry. BUT since I realized my design and style needs changing, I have been experimenting, and I will stick up images of my experiments… OK one experiment.. on the index page….. it’s probably too small to see, but I think I will mainly stick to white, and instead of having the page blank, I will have a gingerbread man on the bottom in the background………. still a working progress but i like how i can keep this clean and minimalistic, but still “cute” and “warm”

In my attempt to change the style of the site,  I have come up with some new ideas:

- Maybe incorporate the gingerbread man as also a trademark logo of the brand, like a mascot for the website…. and it can be used with the  “company logo”, as they are both simplistic, and minimal in style (both black and white)

- I did some research in some books, and I found this very interesting graphics design book, called Freestyle Scraps 05 Clips, it’s a graphics design book, which you can use the graphics in the book for.. products once you’ve bought the book… does that make sense? Anyway, I liked the style of the graphics, and I was contemplating incorporating its mininalistic, symbol-style of graphics into the website, using that style to draw couches, and cups and other things in my own website…..

(I really wanna buy the book, but I know I won’t be able to stop at one, and they are a lil pricey….. maybe later, as a future investment….. maybe…)

Anyhow, this is my go at incorporating the style into a hand drawn element, I did this pretty roughly with a mouse and not a tablet, so I guess if i concentrate real hard I’d polli get it to look better… the only downfall with this style is that, its VERY hard to do curves…… VERY hard, especially in photoshop, Flash is a little kinder, as it rounds everything off to the last pixel and you get nice smooth curves, but still…. I am considering learning Illustrator just hoping that it would do some nice smooth drawings… but then again…. I’m not sure if it does…… does it? Does anyone know? Can you tell me?????? If not have you got a suggestion as to where I can get my drawings smooth edged and clean on a computer application???? OR even if you know the name of this style of graphics design??!?!??!?!?!? I can’t even google it, because I don’t know what its called…..

Project Propsal

Project Proposal

In the last week/s we had to hand in a proposal for our lounge project, outlining roughly what our plans for the project would be. During this time I solidified a few ideas, such as the fictional business’s name, a small part of what they looked like and what they were about. I’ve included the actual proposal into this post, so that I don’t one) have to retype everything, and secondly bore the pants off you if you didn’t want that much information in the first place.

After the last few weeks in our production tutorials, I’ve come to the realisation that CS4 and Action Script 3.0 is hard. Very hard. Not to mention mind boggling and complicated… the coding might see a scale down of my project… but I’ll just have to see how I go with it all. I bought my project into class last week so Brigid could fix up some bugs, good news was that I finally got some buttons to work, bad news is because I was using Action Script 1.0/2.0, I will now have to recode the thing again…. yay….

Since we had to do some extra research for the proposal, here are some more brilliant research websites listed below for some viewing pleasure:

http://www.happyingreenville.com/

http://www.hellosoursally.com/

http://www.cookie.net.au/,

http://www.milkandcookiesbakery.com/cookie/

http://www.cupcakesonline.com.au/

http://www.alannahhill.com.au/

http://unlimited.orange.co.uk/flash/go

http://www.yourplayground.org/

http://kinetic.com.sg/

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_0h2BKDv2xyk/STdluu3p7DI/AAAAAAAABCA/gC0UnKk9umU/s400/0905_frontis_cooking.jpg

Lounge Project: Week 2-3

A short week 2-3 update:

 

So after the presentation from week 1, it became evident that I needed to work on the concept of the lounge a little bit more. Brigid said I had a strong grasp on the stylistic elements of my project, but would need to go home and think about the lounge and the concept of what the site is actually going to be about.

 

Typing ‘Lounge’ into Google define: bought up some general ideas of a lounge for other people:

1)                  A lounge was usually a social space of gathering, like at an airport.

2)                  A place of relaxation – like a bar

3)                  Like a lounge room in a home, it is sometimes a central intersection of where a group of people met – a common space.

 

Not wanting to stray too far from my first proposal of making some sort of a commercial website, I thought my initial idea of making a commercial website for a small café or a bar would allow me to incorporate the idea of a lounge as a small, cosy, social place of gathering. Thinking along the lines, I think my interface will then deal with the idea of a lounge room. Perhaps a hand animated lounge room where people interact with pieces of furniture to get information. Much like how people interact with real furniture and people in a real lounge.

 

I wanted to explore the idea of the ‘lounge room’ more, as the centre of a home. I also thought a little about how we should have some form of narrative in our work this semester, something to involve the audience/viewer/customer. Looking back at the http://www.happyingreenville.com/ site, it introduces the viewer into this separate world by having a short animation at the beginning of the site. Another example would be http://kinetic.com.sg/main.html, a short introduction with robots really captures the attention and introduces the viewers into this separate world and introduce kinetic as a creative business/entity. I think this would be a good feature to adopt into my own project, a short introduction of some sort.  Perhaps the formation of a whole before we introduce the lounge room interface.

 

Meanwhile, whilst stumbling on the kinetic website, I found this site to do with chairs! – well to do with furniture. http://www.lorgans.com/main.php?f=1  may be inspirational later…

 

 

Sketches for Lounge Project

Project Ideas:
I have been brainstorming a few ideas on the purpose of the website, and I’ve narrowed it down to either a website either for a restaurant, store or a personal portfolio – in other words, a commercial website promoting a product,  with the inclusion of a gallery.

Style Manifesto, Likes:
I researched a couple of websites and found lots of flash websites that were very interesting and exciting to visit. I chose to look more specifically at Flash based websites because I have never really used Flash as a website building tool during the span of this media course, so I thought it would be both a challenge and a learning opportunity to use Flash and build a website with it.

Through my research, I found a few commercial sites that demonstrate a style that I liked. In particular
http://www.happyingreenville.com/ , a website promoting a health system.

Screen shot from main page of website http://www.happyingreenville.com/

Screen shot of loading website http://www.happyingreenville.com/

I very much like the aesthetics of this site. It features very simple hand drawn characters, in what appears to be a series of loops and roll-over buttons. I particularly like their transitions between scenes, where an image seems to shift between the scenes. I am also fond of its loading bar while the website loads (as it is an image content heavy site, it takes a while to load), I thought this was not only a good way to entertain the users but also add to the overall aesthetics.

Image from final assessment for MDCM2002

The style of happyingreenville.com is a little different to my own styles. Looking back at the website we build last year in MDCM2002, my style seems to lean towards a more minimalist approach, relying on layouts, positioning, negative and positive spacing. I also have a tendency to work in black and white. Though the styles are rather different, I think it would be interesting to incorporate bold black and white features with hand drawn characteristics.

Style Manifestos, Dislikes:
There aren’t many flash based websites I find uninteresting or uninspiring, so it was rather difficult to pick one that I hated. However, I dislike the way http://www.fromscratch.us/ is layout.

Screen shot from website http://www.fromscratch.us

Fromscratch.us is a design studio’s company website. It showcases the works of the studio in a flash version of a drop down menu, with a scroll bar to go through different tabs. Though I am impressed by the complex transition between scenes, and the menu bar that allows the user to view the website in different screen modes, I dislike the way each section of the website is under tabs and organized in drop-down menu style navigation. I think by doing this, the website loses its appeal because it becomes less visually immediate and vibrant, and much more rigid. This contradicts my personal style manifesto in that I like my works to be immediate visually arresting. However I do appreciate the complexity of the website.

Practice manifesto:
As said before I think I would like to take on the challenge in building a flash based website- something I’ve never attempted, and hopefully I am able to learn something new about the program. I also have never used Dreamweaver before so technically these would all be something I’d have to learn.

Stylistically, I am going to explore a less minimalist approach in my designs. Perhaps even revert to a more organic style of designing, drawing on my skills learnt in animation in MDCM2003, which has allowed me to be more free-hand in my designs. I think my challenge is to learn to incorporate a more organic and free style without losing the ability to have neat and simple designs.

The lounge:
Since I am taking a more organic approach, I thought I might include the lounge as a hand drawn element. My initial thoughts are one that the lounge is that of a place of discussion. So maybe the lounge can be a place where people comment, like a guestbook of sorts.  Or even the site can be set up as an architectural plan of a house or an artificial house, where upon entering you enter into the lounge room (the lounge is usually the first place you see when you enter a house) and that leads to other parts of the house – which contain different sorts of information – such as the hallway is the gallery, or the phone is where contact information is stored.

An example of hand drawn lounge element that can be included in final project

Here are some other sites I found inspiring:
http://unlimited.orange.co.uk/flash/go -style
http://www.yourplayground.org/ -style
http://unlimited.orange.co.uk/flash/go – style
http://www.hellosoursally.com/ – style
http://www.alannahhill.com.au/ – style
http://www.mcbd.co.uk/ – loading status bar
http://www.belgia.ru/ -navigation/menu
http://www.letyourworriesgo.com/ -navigation
http://www.tiltdesignstudio.com/ – its gallery

Introduction

Hello there,

My name is Vivian (weeweeyun), I am currently a third year student at UNSW doing a Media and Communications Degree. You have stumbled onto my online portfolio-blog. This is where I will post works, ideas, and brain storming of professional and experimental works. This will be an electronic scrapbook for ideas and inspiration.

I wasn’t able to use weeweeyun (my online identity) for this uni blog because I also hold another more intimate blog with the same name (weeweeyun.wordpress.com), its full of experimental works I do in my spare time. I have dubbed this blog my image blog. Because the idea was that it was going to be my regularly updated web journal, using as few words and as many images as possible to document my day-to-day life. So unfortunately if i had wanted to write extensively about something it would break the image blog’s manifesto…… but having two blogs isn’t so bad.

‘an image blog.’ (weeweeyun.wordpress.com) has been going for about 11 months now, and it has been very fun running it and watching it grow and im sure running this one will be just as fun…nonetheless Check that blog here.

Leave me a comment to say hi J (I’m also trying to break the ‘most visitors in a day’ statistic, which sits at 42 people….. so help me by clicking the link!)

But enough shameless self advertising for a minute, I should tell you a little about my hobbies likes and dislikes, why I chose to do media and what I hope to do *gasp* in the future.

I have always had a very strange and geeky obsession with media related fields. I was always interested in movies and photographs, music and culture. I was always interested in how various media works were made, but more importantly I wanted to be a part of making media works. And when the internet came along, I was a happy camper, because for once I was able to create content, sure, no one really cared about what I thought at the age of 12, but it was still fun making WebPages that you had creative control over, needless to say I happily embraced Web 2.0, where you can create content with 2 clicks.

Apart from my geeky obsession with media, I also have an interest in Photography, Design, Art, architecture, basically anything that allowed for creative control I like to dabble in or be surrounded by. I often experiment with things like photography, both analogue and digital, I post most of my experiments on flickr. I try my hand at art from time to time, can’t say I’m exactly good at it, but whatever I think is presentable I put on my deviantart, or my noise account. I also love music, in many different genres, but I can’t seem to crack the secret of creating sound… it’s very sad, but I have a few singer song writer friends, and I look at their awesome works and it makes me want to ‘leave it to the experts’. I do however like discovering new music on sites like last.fm.

What I hope to get out of this course and perhaps pursue in the future is to simply be allowed to have the freedom to be creative, no matter the project. To always make something those excites people and maybe even bring people together. Maybe the ability to connect people and with people. It’s a pretty broad outlook, but I just hope whatever I do will be fun.

Contact Details

Please contact me via email at:

vivianwongproductions@gmail.com