Store Wars

I was shown this link by my girlfriend, who apparently saw this on Richard and Judy, and i thought it was hilarious. Thats all ive really got to say, just sit back and watch the 5 minutes of magic that is 'Store Wars'

Ive had Surgery

No i'm not injured or ill in anyway, but i earlier this week i intended a graphics 'surgery' with Roma Patel. It was pretty helpful and i showed her my logo designs to see what she thought and to gain some feedback.

The main thing that came out of it was that i should continue to explore the curved border for my logo as it reflects television/computer screens which is of course related to media.

The square design for the border has been commented on by a number of people and they have all likened it to a number plate or car logo. Not neccessarily a bad thing but still probably not the effect i'm looking for. So with those comments in mind i went back to the design drawing board and below are some of the latest refinements of my designs

Here i have gone back to a curved shape and i have added a glow behind the text. I have also toned down the border of the logo, the previous bevel effect was a bit too heavy and overbearing i feel.

This is the same as above except with a different colour for the glow and its a fuller glow too.

Yet more bloody logos!

I am still experimenting with logo's, its a frustrating process when your searching for the right look. I made a breakthrough today though, ive started to use Macromedia Freehand as i like the effects it offers you and its relatively easy to use.

Anyway so my latest ideas look something like this, i really like them and for now they are in my opinion the best version yet, please leave comments if you read this and let me know what you think

This was the first attempt, i used the Bevel and Emboss effect to give it a sort of 3D effect and to create a nice border around the edge. I also used the fish eye lense function to change the shape of the box.

Then i refined the design on this idea, went for the original rectangle shape and used an inner emboss rather than an outer emboss for the border. I think this is more effective, but it will be tested on an audience sample before finalised.

Website Usability

In our seminar today we learnt about website usability, this was a very interesting seminar. Highly relevant to the Idents module, i hadnt thought about any of the usability issues relating to websites before this session so its definetly something i'll be considering when constructing my website

If you are making a proper accessible site you must consider people that use text only browsers, people that are visually impaired such as blind people or colour blind people, or even just the elderly. Also people that use screen readers need to be considered, if your website isnt properly coded then someone using a screen reader will not be able to understand your site.

I have tested the usability of a few sites and evaluated them in the report below, click the link to download the document.

http://www.fileden.com/files/2007/2/2/725270/Website%20Usability%20Seminar%20Evaluation.doc

Forget Trent Media,what about my Identity!

Hello reader, as you are probably aware by now i'm heavily into my idents project and i am actually quite fascinated by the whole issue of 'Identity' it can be taken in a number of different contexts and when you think about it it's so important. Identity defines who we are, defines who a company are, what they stand for, without Identity then you are nothing.


This got me thinking about my own Identity, what is it? What do i stand for? What do i represent? What do i beleive in? Where am i going, where have i been? How should i present my Identity to the world?


This train of thought led me to think about creating my own Identity, in the same way i'm creating one for Trent Media. I want to eventually move my blog to my own independently hosted site and i want that to be the basis for my new Identity. I want a place to showcase my work and who i am, and i want that place to be synonomous with my Identity.





I have been doing some research and have found some cool blogs which relate to what ive just been saying, take a look at these











This a blog i randomly stumbled across by a web designer called Christopher Scott. His blog is really nicely designed, and it contains lots of useful links for web design related stuff. It was of particular interest to me because he is currently in the process of re-designing his own logo and I.D and i found it helpful reading some of the commentary on that process.



http://www.christopher-scott.org/

This is the site for a company called Hicks Design, an oxford based web design company. I found this through a link on Christopher Scott's site, and the blog entry that interested me in particular was the one about the re-design of the company logo. He detailed his design process and gave reasons for his eventual decisions, this again was a valuable reading exercise. It made me see how much thought must go into things like this on a professional level. I really like the new design of the Hicks brand, to see more visit the site.

http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk/tag/logo/

Thats just two sites of the millions of bloggers out there, i just happened to stumble across these two as i went on my everyday journey through the web. Which makes me think about what else is out there that i havent even seen, that i may never see. Anyway, it has all got me thinking about whats possible for the future. In the meantime ive got the small matter of my Identity Project to be getting on with so farewell for now.

Flash Experimentation

Ive been experimenting in Flash lately as i want to use it for part of my Ident website, but ive found its quite a frustrating process at times. The animation below took me the best part of 2 hours, but i'm working through a textbook and slowly everything is starting to make sense.

Anyway, what you see below is a top down view of a game of 5 a side football, me and my mates play every friday in the uni league. We keep conceding goals because of poor marking and i made this to demonstrate where we are going wrong. My team is the red circles, notice how two of them are not in posistion at the start which leads to the rest of the team having to move out of posistion to compensate, which leads to the opposistion scoring. Hmmm, if that made any sense then watch the video below....

Identities - Yet More Logo Experimentation

Hello all, ive been continuing my work on my Trent Media logo, i'm still not satisfied with it. From the previous post it seems logo D is the most popular,however thats only from 11 people. I plan to take to the streets of nottingham and ask some random students for their thoughts.

For now have a look at some of my experimentations....

I used Macromedia Freehand to create a 3D effect for this idea, i like it but not sure how good it will look in print. I think this would be better suited to an animation for the website

For this design i simply changed the font from Myriad Pro to Eurostile, not sure which one i prefer at the moment.

I received a helpful comment from Rimante on my last post. She mentioned i should try putting a white border around the logo to make it stand out a bit more, i had not considered doing that but i think it could be very effective so i'm gonna try different variations of that.

Thats all for now, i'll be posting more frequent updates on Identities from now on so keep checking back to follow my progress ( i bet your excited!)

Trent Media Logo - Cast your votes

Ive been thinking of ways to gain public opinion on my Trent Media designs so i decided to conduct a poll on my blog. This will also serve the purpose of showing me if anyone actually reads this thing too!

Please bare in mind that image quality will not be at its highest due to the constraints of this page, but you can still get an idea of how the logo will look when finished.

So take a look at the 4 logos below and vote for your favorite

A

B


C

D

Identities - An update

Hello all, ive been working on my Idents project for some time now so i thought it was about time i gave you an update on my thoughts and progress (or lack of as the case may be)

As soon as we were first given the brief i decided almost instantly to choose Trent Media. As i am already involved with Trent Media, in particular Fly FM and to a lesser extent Trent TV i knew there was massive room for improvement on the whole image/brand of Trent Media.

So over the last month or so ive been steadily researching and thinking about designs, ive found this quite a frustrating project, yet strangely enjoyable at the same time. Its very hard without ever having tackled a project of this nature before to figure out the best process to use. No matter how much research i do i always find something else which changes my thinking completely and brings me back to square one. I am creating a separate journal document which will cover in much more detail my progress, i'll try to keep it fairly brief and to the point on here, keep an eye out for that soon.

I am writing this in the middle of a mini panic about my design board presentation on monday, i have plenty of matierial and ideas but trying to mould it all into a coherent presentation is proving to be a big challenge, but i will get there in the end, i have to!

Thats it for now, i'll leave you with one of my designs for flyers, my logos still need work so ive decided to keep the exisiting logos for these designs...


Flyer