I’ve been out of it for the last couple weeks, immersed into Visa paperwork, trying to figure out the best way for me to stay in Canada, well I took some time and sent a t-shirt design that was sitting on my computer for months to Threadless.
For the few of you who might not know what Threadless is, it’s a t-shirt company that prints limited versions of designs created by different designers & artists. There’s an initial period when you send it and they can either take it or reject it, and then it goes public for people to vote and comment on it.
Here’s my first tackle at the Xpresso node-based editor of Cinema 4d, I’m connecting the Sound Effector to control the birth rate, size and rotation of the particle system I created with Thinking Particles.
Today while I was doing research for my Final Project, I stumbled upon this unusual yet amazing website. The address http://laptop.org belongs to a non-profit organization called One Laptop Per Child, program initiated by the MIT and designed by renowned industrial designer Yves Béhar. It’s mission, to develop low-cost ($100) laptops for children in developing countries.
A slideshow of how the program got started can be viewed here www.dcontinuum.com
The thing that amazed me the most is the great design of the laptop itself, it looks nicer than a lot of high-end computers in the market, showing us that you don’t need a lot of money to generate great design, sometimes all you need is a cause.
By the way, you can emulate their OS by going to this link: Emulating the XO I haven’t tried it yet, but I will when I have some free time.
While I was reading some articles a couple hours ago, I stumbled upon a quite promising website, Christmas greetings from Wieden + Kennedy London. This website’s reason to be is to express your Christmas spirit to friends and family, without killing trees.
I don’t know if it’s the fact that I haven’t slept since Thursday night, but I found the application pretty hard to use, first of all It took me three tries to figure out how to change the color of the tree. The color engine features an eyedropper tool, which by the way selects random colors sometimes and then when you select a color your tree doesn’t change; It was after the third time I tried to change it that I tried to click on the tree and it indeed changed, but the tool never changed to a paint bucket, or any other icon for me to know I needed to do that second action.
Another thing that struck a nerve was the scale feature of the tree ornaments, I was excited when I realized you could do it, simple yet effective; then again when you reach a certain size it gets really difficult to move or scale up or down your ornament.
Even after those little details, I still enjoyed the website and find the concept really interesting, plus, this evokes creativity from users; I’ve seen some quite interesting little trees on it.
A couple weeks ago I volunteered at the Vidfest, Vancouver International Design FESTival, and was able to attend a workshop given by Joshua Davis. In this seminar one of the things he talked about was a process he had to extract colours from photographs, and I was quite amazed because when you extract colour from nature photography all the colors blend beautifully. And I started doing it getting great results.
Well, a couple weeks after I was looking into the Automator Application and how it can help you do stuff like resizing images and what not, and I started looking for Adobe Automator scripts, see what people have done with this application. After looking for a while I found a post called “AI CS3 + Flickr + In The Mod mashup.” So I started reading it, and It was quite amazing.
What it was, was a flash application that gets images from Flickr depending on what you are looking for, and then you can extract the colours from these images, real-time from Illustrator. All you have to do is run the Script look for images and copy the colour palette to your swatches. It doesn’t get easier than that, so if you are looking for fast good colours in seconds, this is a must have for you.
Here’s a video on how the application works, enjoy
