some changes! ideas on posters! newly found tutorial!

I found this nice tutorial

Besides we will finish the website on Friday when we meet with the guys. We need to fill the store part, attach a PDF, clarify the contact page and that's it! :)

Then I will place it on freehostia.com on Saturday and we will have to encourage some traffic... so will have to produce some posters and distribute them at uni. Plus open a Facebook account and encourage our friends and mates to participate in the project. I will want to follow John Maeda's "less is more" and keep posters simple and consistent with the project. Black and white. Arrow-shaped.
But happy about the presentation- the group liked the idea.
We just need to add some explanation inside the website and more encouragement for people to send their pictures and/or contribute on our wiki.

Ooh, and I changed the beginning of the intro; got rid of the input text where the audience was asked to type their name. After a while I thought that it would look tacky and would make the stage seem to cluttered, as we need to place the countdown as well. Now the intro animation links to the idea of the expire date of VANITAS as it says "ENTER VANITAS before it gets too late...".

Also, the home button was removed. Instead, we now have a wiki button which has a hyperlink to our wiki. The audience can come back to home page by clicking on the arrow logo in the top left corner of the stage. The frame now looks less cluttered and seems more organised.

that's it for now.

Loud Thinking

Maybe no guest book? Maybe it will be too cluttered.



The cursor looks tacky and will be changed.



The content needs some upgrading& organising.



DO NOT PUT TOO MUCH STUFF JUST BECAUSE YOU CAN DO THAT. ASK YOURSELF WHAT IS THE REASON TO HAVE EVERY ELEMENT. What in practice is mucg more difficult than in theory.



Nice tutorial for drawing sketchpad + tutorial from Study Space = a changeable logo for the audience to play with and there will be an option to save and print it too!!!

Finally, I had some trouble recently when converting animations into movie clips- forums on Kirupa and Flashkit were veeery useful. In general, I learnt a lot of Flash just by browsing various tutorials. I will carry on after finishing VANITAS I think, Im getting hooked...

Idea- to have a guest book. It could be linked to the contact page from the SWF file which will constitute the main part of the website.
Black or other customised one- available here. Screenshots of trial versions soon.

Some images

First of all, a screenshot of a home page of VANITAS. We agreed on having frame and simple buttons in helvetica (black in up state, white in over state). I made some drafts in Dreamweaver and added script for the countdown as presented in the Gherkin Blog. I think it works quite nice for our interface but it will have to be aligned to the borders (what will be done later:-)


About logo- as it was written in the main blog, we decided to have an arrow and the letters VANITAS inside using the font named BarMKode Inverse designed by Manfred Klein and accessed for free from Dafont.com.
As the gif file was getting ugly rasterised, I remade it in Adobe Illutrator and saved it as png. Here is the result and this is the file I also imported to Flash. It is less pixelated and should be more efficient than using psd assets (file size!!). I did some drafts for the introductory animation in Flash and the logo will be repeated both in the intro and in the main interface to keep consistency.
The intro animation will be simple and limited to white and black colours and simple things such as motion tweening and masking. There will be also an input text field asking to place audience's name and it will be transfered into the home page. I actually did some of drafts in Flash already and place it when I am satisfied; now it is just to outline the ideas. One problem- if we want to use the font by the author mentioned, do we have to contact him? The font was free to download... But the info on the website we took it from did not clarify if it is ok... Well I guess, we have to include attribution anyway, I will include it after Easter. And we will have to seek advice to clarify if we're free to use it. Better late than never. Copyright is complicated...


Concerning the image for the home page. Of course, our canvas will not be left empty! For the home page image I decided to experiment with one of the pics Matthew posted on the Gherkin. I focused on colours and used the tutorial on manual reducing the colour cast in the pictures; difference is quite striking. Photoshop is the king:-)

Guys liked this image for the home page. While working on this section I came up with an idea of bubbles. The figure of a man says something when the audience rolls over him; the skull also gives us some tips:-) This simple effect adds to the dynamic of this otherwise static image. I will post screenshots after Easter, now no access to software; I also want to add some extra bubbles for other objects in the image. And some sounds too; these could be activated by rolling over them... it would act as a surprise. we'll see:-)


And just to note that we put some of Juan texts into the home page information section. I found a useful tutorial how to load text from external sources in the materials from the last term. I designed the buttons and... will post screenshots after Easter. But I kept consistent with helvetica (my beloved font:-) . Nonetheless, I am considering slight change in the colouring of the buttons, but will talk about it next time.

Pax vobiscum,
eb