Wednesday, 21 July 2010

In love with a font

See i told you i'd update this again!

I found a font which i intend to use for the heading text, and wherever else possible on my website. The font looks awesome to me and i think flows well with the free-flowing light hearted style of the clouds and bright colours.

This is an improvement on the old font which came across extremely blocky, and to me became a bit of an eyesore. It also i think forced everything else to be bigger just because of its large blocky nature. So i'm glad to be moving away from it!

Playing around with designs

I haven't really been checking into this blog as often as i should. It's the same with my other blog though... so it's not intentional neglect! I promise... though it might be a bit. If i'm honest i have a slight love for wordpress and still can't fathom why i went with blogger.

Anyway! Over a month ago now i completed a online channel for a collaborative project. Here's a screenshot of the home page for it:



The design for the Fortunes Fall site was much darker than the one i implemented to Cloud Canvas, which moved me out of my comfort zone of bright colours, and allowed me to be more creative. All in all i think the end product was pretty awesome! The different aspects i threw into the design on that site got me thinking about progression of my own portfolio website... something i'd neglected a fair bit lately.

The way the main content was framed by the links bar and, the footer bar gave a nice feel to the content and placed it well. I think this places it much better than the boxes i used on Cloud Canvas, so have been playing around with a new design that does not require boxes. I came up with this:



As you can see the fan gradient does not continue throughout the page and cuts out as soon as it hits the links bar, which acts as a frame / separator for the page. This combined with the footer below which uses the same notepad overlay gives a better feel. It also allows for more freedom in what i put in between, and for page heights as i'm not restricted to the white boxes i currently have on my portfolio page. This will allow the use of Java sliders like on the Fortunes Turn page, and less squashed looks to the pages. In my mind this is good progression.. hopefully i can continue it!

I'll try and keep this blog up to date with changes as i make them!

Saturday, 13 March 2010

Redesigning complete. Time to fill in some content!

After playing about on and off with my portfolio site i've finally found myself content with the basic layout and design of the web page! Just need to fill in individual bits of content now..


I also swapped facebook on connect with me with a blogspot image as i feel this is more suitable to the portfolio website.

Wednesday, 10 March 2010

Contact Me


This is my contact page! I still need to stick in a PHP contact form in the upper half, and also intend to add a note above it with a direct email url for people who do not wish to contact me via the contact form.

Below are various ways to contact me through the sites i'm linked with for the course, these being my course twitter, Linkedin, and even Facebook!




Tuesday, 2 March 2010

StoryBoard


I realised i didnt have my storyboard up in a digital format...

Duck Shoot



Duck shoot game is pretty much finished up! Added some tweens to the clouds so they float about, and threw in a pirate ship that floats past!!!



Monday, 1 March 2010

Audience types

Simple / hand drawn/ stick style animations

A good example here could be the cyanide and happiness comics which have started to move over to flash. This style of animation may appeal to an audience that bases their preference more on content as opposed to quality of the animation, as these animations rely more on the humorous context to be in place and the content to be of a interesting style in such a way that the simplicity of the animation itself does not matter to the audience as the animation in turn merely become a way for the joke or point within the animation to be expressed in a visual form.


Cyanide and Happiness http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/493133




8 bit animations style

The 8 bit animation style is one that can be linked to a select Audience. People who prefer this style may be those who are into the old school 8 bit style games, or appreciate the “retro” look, whereas others may be put off due to preference for more streamlined graphics. Furthermore the audience may be seen to extend based on theme when covering 8-bit games to general gamers.

The selectness of the audience could be seen to vary depending on the content of the actual animation, for example 8 bit animations based around original concepts such as the house of shiny, which relies on it for the humor, may be seen less select than animations such as those based around Mario, Sonic, or Space invaders for example, as these would appeal more to gamers and a lot less to people who aren’t into the specific games they are animated to parody.


Examples:

College Humor - http://www.youtube.com/collegehumor#p/search/7/Va8Sh4Agr58



Bloody gory humor

Much of the animation will see characters being injured, dying, abnormally removing limbs, and often coming back later as if it never happened to die all over again. Much in the style of Kenny from South park. This type of animation may appeal more to older audiences, and even then a select group of them as it could be seen that this form of humor may be viewed as offensive by some people, due to its often somewhat distasteful style and reliance on a somewhat sick sense of humor to be had.

With this all in mind it may be seen that this audience type is most likely one where people will prefer a mix of any time of animation as well due to the selectiveness that would otherwise restrict their preference. That and it’s a weird sole preference to have!


A good example of this style i found was that of the "Happy Tree Friends" in which the twist of every episode is that something will die. It has an unexpected aspect to it tfor people who havent seen it before in how the characters adopt a cute innocent look.





Younger Audience based animations.

Animations such as the disney cartoons or the looney tunes provide a good base example for this audience. The innocent style of the animation often leaves it with a humorous twist to keep people entertained, whilst throwing in slapstick violence and pain where characters may hit into objects, or be hit with objects, but always come out fine with their body or faces distorting to a pancake, and back to normal as if nothing happened.
Much of the style within these animations could be seen as being repetitive between other animations of the same style which may make this style off putting to older audiences who get bored of the same thing over and over again, yet more appealing to audiences such as kids who are seen to be more easily amused.