Archive for February, 2010

Robot Beach Review over at Tall Tale Features

February 01st, 2010 | Category: Experience | Written by: Matt F

Robot Beach Review over at Tall Tale Features

The Gang over at Tall Tale Features have just finished completely re-working their website and have started a feature where they review one webcomic every week, and I am flattered that they have chosen to start things off with a nice, in-depth review of my little strip!

David Reddick, Norm Feuti, and Scott Metzger all contributed to the review. These three are extremely talented and established cartoonists in their own right, and it is a huge honor to get an honest critique from them. They had a lot of good things to say, and some very fair criticism as well. I will be sure to keep it their words in mind as I work to improve my strip. Be sure to head on over to the new Tall Tale Features site and check out the review! And leave a comment letting them know how much their thoughts are appreciated.

In other news, I did a little test this weekend to see how I liked drawing my strip live on Ustream. Turns out it works pretty well, and so I have decided to make a regular event of it. I will be drawing live every Saturday starting at 10:00 pm eastern. Feel free to swing on by my Ustream channel and say hi!

See the original post here at The House of Move | Art and Animation Nightly » Iona.LABS
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links for 2010-02-02

February 02nd, 2010 | Category: Discover | Written by: ChadU

links for 2010-02-02

See the original post here at Visualrinse | Design and Development by Chad Udell
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links for 2010-02-03

February 04th, 2010 | Category: Discover | Written by: ChadU

links for 2010-02-03

See the original post here at Visualrinse | Design and Development by Chad Udell
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links for 2010-02-04

February 05th, 2010 | Category: Discover | Written by: ChadU

links for 2010-02-04

See the original post here at Visualrinse | Design and Development by Chad Udell
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Iona’s New Collateral Design

February 05th, 2010 | Category: Experience | Written by: hford

I think it is good for a designer to go back to her roots. I recently have spent much of my time designing interactives, editing video and creating motion graphics. I think when anyone breaks the pattern from the current media they are working on, it can help foster creativity. Recently, The Iona Group has begun redesigning some of their collateral materials. Being the Lead Designer at Iona, I accepted the challenge. I created a new design that corresponds to the current branding. The Iona Group has always had a simplified, geometric look and feel to their design. The classic simple-to-complex design philosophy is portrayed in Iona’s identity. The design shown here mimics how simple shapes can create complex forms. In geometry, a dodecahedron is any polyhedron with twelve flat faces, which results in a simple shape that creates a complex form. I took this concept and created Iona’s 2010 success factors as a three-dimensional infographic. The infographic describes the success factors of the year based upon Iona’s 4Cs (clients, company, coworkers, community). I wanted to create a design that was fun yet cohesive in order to represent how all of the 2010 success factors are equal and rely upon one another. I also have included below some additional collateral that I have created for a proposal cover. I wanted to create depth to our new collateral by not only creating a three-dimensional object but also through subtle gradients. Look forward for more to come.

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Innovatively Creating a Culture of Sustainability through Interactive Design

February 05th, 2010 | Category: Experience | Written by: hford

The Iona team and myself as the Lead Designer recently completed an interactive design for Richland Community College’s Center for Sustainability and Innovation Building (CSI Building). The interactive was to convey key concepts related to the green CSI Building and its use of SMART building technology. The Iona team of Jeanne Foster, Mark Tovey, and Jeff Idleman brought their expertise to the project. Having such a great team allowed Iona to achieve a successful solution to the client’s needs on the Define and Design phase of the project. The “big idea” of the project was to create a sustainable, innovative community-regionally through interactive media.

The two key points and objectives of the project were to demonstrate how the CSI Building meets the LEED criteria. In addition, it was to demonstrate some of the career skills and people who worked together to make the CSI Building. The client was very adamant in having a “wow” factor. We created the following milestones to meet the client’s objectives:

•Strategic Plan – Define the purposes of the interactive, identify key messages to be developed, identify the communication goals to be achieved, identify the audience, define how the new programs will support Richland’s long term goals, identify the results expected from the interactive and how they will be measured.

•High-Level Design – Determine conceptual design. Identify narrative story lines that will be developed. Identify the “look and feel” that should be used. This will include: fonts, color and other graphic standard issues; music, narration, screen composition, navigation, user interface styles, etc.

•Content Outline – Define project content and assets and how they will be formatted for these presentations.

•Navigation Outline – Organize the content and outline a navigational structure.

Iona suggested that Richland Community College would use higher media production values and enhanced interactivity to increase the dramatic impact of the display. This approach will add video commentaries by virtual guides to increase the human aspect of the interpretation. In addition, this would be complemented by allowing visitors to manipulate high-resolution images of certain key features by dragging the images with their fingers and zooming in for greater detail. The project will be created in Flash and will use CMS plug-ins for the image manipulation interaction. In addition, the project will use Flash video to provide testimonials and key green features of the building.

Overall, the project was well received and gave Iona the chance to really use our 4D Process to its greatest achievement. Below are some of the Graphical User Interface Designs from the project.

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links for 2010-02-07

February 07th, 2010 | Category: Discover | Written by: ChadU

links for 2010-02-07

See the original post here at Visualrinse | Design and Development by Chad Udell
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links for 2010-02-09

February 10th, 2010 | Category: Discover | Written by: ChadU

links for 2010-02-09

See the original post here at Visualrinse | Design and Development by Chad Udell
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Making the most of your toy robot (Part 1 of 4) – Custom hardware controls

February 12th, 2010 | Category: Discover | Written by: erik

Using a keyboard to navigate a virtual space; be it the internet, a game or some other format, is familiar to most adults and older children. The Wowwee Rovio (rover) can be driven by such keyboard controls or mouse clicks with the built-in interface. Couple of problems with this however:

  1. The interactive needed a custom interface so the built-in web interface (and keyboard controls) would not work.
  2. The interactive needed to be accessible to children as young as 3 years old.

The custom interface was built with ActionScript3 and so to move the rover, the api was used. With the api, the rover could be sent movements via http requests. These api requests needed to be mapped back to user input and so the web interface was recreated in with as3. The ASDW keys were mapped back to specific movement requests via the api. This is a specific piece of code initiated by a keypress that gets sent to the rover:

switch(e.keyCode){
//forward
case 87: //W key
drive = 1; //1 maps to forward
speed = 1;
request.data = "Cmd=nav&action=18&drive=" + drive + "&speed="+speed; //action 18 is manual drive mode
loader.load(request);
break;
}

Happ Joystick

The drive variable signals the command/direction for the rover (forward, backward, rotate right) and the speed variable is how fast the command should be executed by the rover. Sending one of these http requests would move the rover a fraction of an inch. Mapping each key to a specific movement and sending multiple commands successively reproduces the motion of the built-in interface. This does not remedy our problem of simplifying the interface for 3 year olds. This is where the custom hardware comes in.

Our custom hardware consists primarily of a joystick but also includes some auxiliary buttons for game functionality which I will describe in a following post. The hardware came from Suzo Happ and also included a UGCI board for USB interface. The UGCI board had an included key-mapping utility which was used to map the joystick and button contacts to key presses. A constant connection with the joystick in any direction sent a repeating key press rather than a key up and down.

With key presses mapped to the joystick control and to the rover’s api through actionscript, the rover could now be driven with custom joystick controls. Now if only our rover could see…

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links for 2010-02-12

February 13th, 2010 | Category: Discover | Written by: ChadU

links for 2010-02-12

See the original post here at Visualrinse | Design and Development by Chad Udell
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