October 5, 2011

R.I.P.

Stay hungry, stay foolish.

Posted by Red Monkey at 11:00 PM | Comments (0) | Design | Stumble

July 10, 2011

My Adventure Book

It's no secret that I love animation and particularly enjoy Pixar movies. I particularly love the storytelling in Up. The first, what, 10-15 minutes of the movie is just amazingly done storytelling. You get all this back story into the life of Carl in a short amount of time and with very little dialogue. And that story speaks to everyone - the kids (and the kids inside us adults) love the explorer theme - the kid beginning I think hooks the kids in the audience and gets them through the silent backstory that the adults mostly cry over. And then Ellie's bright paintings also keep the kids focused on what is important to the story. It's just masterfully done.

But what really spoke to me was Ellie's My Adventure Book with its page "ripped right out of a library book!" As I was re-watching it a few months ago, I thought ... that book would make a great desktop wallpaper. So I took a couple of screenshots and waited until I had some free time.

In the meantime, I planned it out in my head which led to my designing it a little differently from the screenshots. Despite the fact that the letters look like Ellie cut them out, I kept seeing them as stitched onto the leather cover. And almost every crazy little homemade or scrapbook I had as a kid had a kind of canvas-y looking material that created the binding. So ... that's what I went with.

Click the small image for a 2560x1600 1.8MB desktop wallpaper version:

Let me know what you think!

Posted by Red Monkey at 12:58 PM | Comments (2) | Design | Stumble

June 1, 2011

Beginning Summer

In May of 2002, I was a college teacher of first-year writing. The semester was winding up and I was preparing to go to a different kind of teacher's conference - one that focused on teaching rather than on subject specialty. I felt like I was hitting my stride professionally. The Wakonse Conference on College Teaching is really a lot like summer camp for teachers - it's held at the American Youth Foundation's Camp Miniwanca on the shore of Lake Michigan and it's an absolutely magical place. Having missed out on any kind of overnight summer camp as a kid, I was pretty much in heaven. I needed the back-to-nature time just as much as I wanted the discussion and stimulation of other college instructors/professors dedicated to the craft of teaching. I encouraged a few graduate teaching "assistants" to go the following year and we all had a wonderfully renewing time. The following year my partner protested: I'd spent two Memorial Day weekends gone in a row and she wanted to share the holiday with me. Little did we know that was my last chance to go as my position was eliminated at the end of the school year, 2004.

Fast forward to May of 2007. I was working as a web designer (and sometimes copy writer) at a large-ish dot com. A good friend offered me a chance to jump over to a junior design position at the agency where he worked, but I was afraid my portfolio was still weak (in print work) and I thought if I hung on a few more months where I was, I would have the chance to add quite a bit of print work as well as my web work. Alas, planning something doesn't always make it so.

A mere two months or so later, the company unexpectedly shut down and we were all out of work.

Still and all, it was a good summer to hone my craft - and I still felt that I needed a lot of honing.

Since that time I've held jobs in-house and freelance both. I've read a ton of books, studied a lot of designers, tried to immerse myself in theory and in practice ... and kept striving to better my craft on personal projects when the paying gigs weren't necessarily places I could stretch my wings. I found myself coming back to usability again and again - whether talking about web design, or even how a room is constructed, a shop set up, the design of a car's cabin. Don't get me wrong, I love illustration and print design both and enjoy doing them. But invariably, my brain circles from artistic to practical and back again. Last summer, I attended An Event Apart ... and I knew I'd found my people.

I don't believe that artists are flighty and designers have their heads in the clouds. You get flaky and reliable folks there just as you do with any other profession. I think that stereotype that an artist only thinks of some unattainable aesthetic goal and not the needs of the person requesting the piece is a load of hooey that does artists, designers, illustrators and the like a huge disservice.

But here I was at this conference and I was hearing people espouse my pet theories as fact. Many of them had had the resources to do actual studies or tests to back up these theories. And even whilst I learned from them ... I mostly learned that I needed to trust myself more and I needed to really start acting on my ideas. It was definitely a confidence booster.

Fast forward to this summer:

I got a gig with a company that is absolutely amazing. We are going to do great things with the website. I have some gifted, passionate co-workers who get it. I'm in a state I adore. The only thing that would make it better would be if our house sold and we could get a house here in the next month or two. (A pretty impossible timeline, to be sure.)

All I can think about is when I was a kid and summer marked glorious things to come. Everything is fresh and warm and bursting with possibilities.

Posted by Red Monkey at 8:01 PM | Comments (2) | Blog | Design | Stumble

February 13, 2011

Designing Me

My little sister loved the show Bosom Buddies. I'm not sure if she liked Tom Hanks' character or Peter Scolari's character more. The show always kind of disturbed me because I just didn't understand the premise. Why should anyone have to hide who they were just to rent an apartment?

I do recall being utterly fascinated by their jobs at the ad agency, however. Those big tables. The markers. The ideas bouncing back and forth. People did this for a living? Really?

I was hooked.

I had always analyzed adults' commercials - not quite so much the ones targeted at me - and found myself fascinated by the way ideas were pitched. About the same time I became very aware of how my toys were packaged ... and how the toys or playsets were designed. I began rattling off what they should have done in order to do it right. Well, right in my eyes, anyway.

I realized I was utterly fascinated with well-designed toys. I didn't even have to be terribly interested in the subject matter to be interested in the toy. For example, My Little Ponies disturbed me greatly. They didn't DO anything. Their accessories were non-existant or lame (to my mind). Pointless toys. Now, if they'd come with markers for "painting" them, maybe that would have been a concept. (Again, to me - I realize a lot of girls loved them - I obviously was not the target audience.)

Smurfs didn't interest me as a toy, but the packaging and the marketing did. There were tons of these little statues and you could also get houses, a ship, tons of stuff that would make playing with them more intriguing.

And, of course, Fisher Price Little People and Adventure People utterly fascinated me. (I won't go into Star Wars - I wasn't allowed to have them and I tried not to covet them too much. Not that I was successful.)

Early packaging was a mix of product shots with elaborately, but realistically staged pieces. If the product was a house, you had the house opened up and all of the pieces arranged where you could see them. Another shot might be a close-up on those pieces in the appropriate rooms. And the early boxes always seemed to include a child posed "mid-play" with the toy. At least three sides (flaps and perhaps the bottom) had blue line art of the toy in different configurations.

Who decided what went on the box? Who picked the little kids in the pictures? Why draw the toy when photographs would do?

My mother loved art. We had Prismacolor markers in the house, various types of paints, pastels and watercolours. She tried explaining once that full-colour photography was more expensive than 1-colour line art. This didn't really compute for me until I finally understood that we're talking paying an artist to draw the line art and paying to have thousands upon thousands of these printed vs. a full-colour photo shoot plus paying to print thousands and thousands printed more expensively.

I began looking at my toys the way I looked at mom's art supply packaging - malleable. Mom's Liquitex paints came in the most WONDERFUL container! It was silver/grey extruded plastic shaped a tiny bit like a rocket - more narrow at the top and with two "wings" at the bottom. It was rather squared off instead of rounded, but still. And the top piece of the box was perfectly clear. And, even better, my Fisher Price Adventure People fit inside - I had plenty of one-man rockets!

My toys could change as well! For example, why didn't the Fisher Price Village get re-used as an adobe pueblo? It seemed a no-brainer to me. You could re-use practically the entire original mold which had to be cheaper than making a new playset from scratch. Why had they not jumped on this opportunity? I mean, they released the house under several variations. Same with the farm. And the parking garage. Even the houseboat was eventually retooled into a ferry boat.

I was well-known for critiquing how things worked and now I was critiquing how things were packaged and marketed as well.

And yet, I did not immediately go into design or advertising. Why?

Simply put, my sister was the musician and my mother was the artist. I read incessantly. I played with toys longer than most of my peers - largely because I was continually lost in stories of my own making. I assumed I would become a writer. To make a living whilst I wrote, I'd become a teacher.

I completely ignored my own art style, my sense of design and my constant fascination with how things are designed. The family roles were not lines to be crossed.

Ultimately, then, it's not surprising that all of these things converged while I was teaching freshman writing. I built a website for my students to fill a specific need: you can't lose a syllabus that's online if you live on campus and have a computer. (Which 90% of students had at that time, at that school.) They also had the standard-issue paper syllabus because what works for one student, doesn't work for another. I went with function first as I was under time constraints and because, let's face it, the web in 1996 was not exactly a beautiful landscape. It was filled with tacky hit counters, under construction signs and the obligatory 8-bit style of animated gifs.

I was ultimately appalled with what I first put up. It was functional, but it was fugly. Surely there could be a better balance on the web of form and function?

As much as I loved helping my students learn – and I did love that – I found the puzzle of designing "the perfect class website" for them even more fascinating. I was in a constant cycle of not just teaching the class and grading papers, but constantly asking my users for feedback. And finally I realized I would always, always be a semester behind in design of the website because my users were subtly different every semester, always having new needs that weren't there the semester before.

Your website is never "done."

It's never finished.

A print piece generally has a finite deadline and purpose. To hand out to this audience at this situation. A website is often a far more complicated creature which often serves a much, much more broad audience. It's not just a Sears catalog for shopping. It's not just an enticement. It's not just about educating your audience.

Don't get me wrong, print design can be very complex – I'm not saying it's easy-peasy.

But a full e-commerce or business website? So very complex. So much to think about. Who is your audience, what are their goals, what are your goals, how do they access data, what data do you want them to access, how can you make them comfortable finding what they need, how can you make it easier, how can you make it enjoyable?

And how do you balance function and form with all of those details?

And that's why web design has such a diverse number of job positions, from visual designer to user interface designer to user experience, content strategist, architect, front-end developer, back-end developer ...

Ultimately web design incorporates so many of the fascinations I had as a kid - from how you "package" the site, how the pieces fit together, the look, the enticement, the whole enchilda.

I consider myself lucky that I live in a time where I can work on projects so complex. It was a career I couldn't imagine the first time I logged into a bulletin board on my neighbor's Commodore 64 ....

Posted by Red Monkey at 2:35 PM | Comments (0) | Design | Stumble

December 4, 2010

The Box Lid

All right ... here are some picture of the now-finished box lid for the Plants Vs. Zombies game. Click the images for a larger version.

Posted by Red Monkey at 6:34 PM | Comments (2) | Design | Sketches | Stumble

November 28, 2010

A Little Overboard

I get these wild hairs from time to time. Something just strikes my fancy, and on a whim, I have suddenly committed myself to a huge project. Last year, it was making a Sculpey piece for everyone in our department. This year it was another Sculpey project ... but a little bit different.

I watched a few friends on Twitter conversing with someone who sounded intriguing. So I followed her. She was having a rough year. Her body was attacking several organs and things were looking serious. After several surgeries and more tests than you could shake a stick at, she finally had a diagnosis of Lupus, something I've rather feared for most of my life. (I've been tested for it from time to time and had doctors bandy the word around since I was in high school.) Through it all, her kids seemed so sweet and loving.

So one day, she's tweeting about the kids playing their made up game of Plants Vs. Zombies in the backyard and she's just basking in their imagination, ingenuity and sense of fun. I mean, Plants Vs. Zombies is an iPhone game. Kind of a strategy game somewhere between board game and video game. And they are making up their own version to play in the backyard. Later on, she tweets that her two kids had asked Santa for Plants Vs. Zombies toys. I'm sure that PopCap is planning on making some at some point, given how wildly popular the game is ... but as of mid October when she tweeted that, there was nothing.

This sounded like an excellent Sculpey project to me. Two sweet kids. Imaginative. Hard year. Yep, just the kind of project I like.

I looked around the web for some screen shots, since I'd never played the game. Found out what their favourite characters were ... and went to work.

And ... umm ... I went a little bit overboard.

I kinda built them a board game version (they'll have to make up their own rules, though).

The full project isn't quite done - I'm waiting to get something back from the printer, but you'll get the general idea from these pictures:

An overview of the whole - the box is just a mockup, printed in tiles (that's the piece I'm waiting to get back from the printer):

And then there are the watermelon-catapult things - these are apparently the kids' favourite plants:

Then there's an angry "Wallnut" and a pair of zombies that are only loosely based on the game. As much as I love working in Sculpey the stuff is amazingly soft once you start working with it. Which means every time you touch it the slightest bit, you affect the sculpture. And if I've mixed colours to get a specific hue, I can guarantee the stuff is so soft, I'll never be able to get my finger prints off of it completely:

Then a couple more zombies which are more directly based on the game:

Then there's the peashooters:

Then there's the snowpea shooter and a trio of mushrooms:

And finally, a quartet of sunflowers to round everything off:

And because I can't leave well enough alone, I ordered some custom cut foam and built a box for the whole thing. Sculpey is fairly sturdy if you don't drop it on a hard surface, but why not stress that this is a little fragile?

And then a final image - this will wrap the box lid and make it look like a board game:

I should say a few things:
One, I respect copyright. This is a one-off art piece made specifically for these kids and I made it clear on the box that Plants Vs. Zombies is PopCap's baby.
Two, I won't make another one.
Three, I've accepted no money for it. I did this on a whim for some kids who needed an extra-bright spot in their lives this holiday season. That's it.

Posted by Red Monkey at 12:25 PM | Comments (14) | Design | Sketches | hobbies | Stumble