Archive for the ‘Graphic Design’ Category

I spent the last semester studying abroad in Ireland at the Limerick Institute of Technology (LIT), and the work Kelley Corless and I had done on a project for the course has payed off. We spent the entire semester working on telling a story of development for a digital media competition set up by the Irish development agency, Connect-World.

We created an interactive, short animation explaining free trade in a simplistic way for children to understand. We started with hand drawn characters and then animated them using Adobe Flash.

Connect-World, among other organizations and businesses such as the Dublin City Council, RTE, National Irish Bank, Movies.ie, and AIB are all finalists in their respective categories in the Irish Digital Media Awards. The Digital Media Awards web site states,

“Launched in 2003, The Digital Media Awards were engineered to raise awareness of the emerging digital media sector in Ireland and more importantly to act as a showcase for the varied dynamic works being created by companies and third level institutions across a broad spectrum of categories in Digital Media.”

Our animation is now a finalist in the Connect-World category, and winners will be announced February 13th in Dublin.

LIT has been extremely generous in their offer to have me fly to Dublin for the award dinner for the announcement of the winners.

I was visiting the MySpace web site to update a friend’s profile, when I came across the above logo introduction for MySpace’s new themes and layouts capabilities. I love the use of color and digital feel in this logo. The transition of the rainbow color horizontally across the logo suggest that MySpace is offering a wide arrange of colorful themes and layouts for your profile page.

Visit the MySpace web site >

A few input methods already exist for small, hand held devices, such as the mini QWERTY keyboard, the standard cellular phone number pad, or touch screen. But these methods can be cumbersome and slow at best. Check out the newest predictive input technology called “Swype” which allows a user to trace a path without lifting one’s finger to create a word. The technology recognizes starts and stop of the finger and interprets this as input.

Read more about Swype >

Watch Swype in Action >

I love the way the MSNBC web site uses a very colorful header with text and navigation overlay. I might play around with my own header (which is also very colorful) to make it a little more compact and neat looking.

I stumbled upon a blogging management website called Tumblr. The front page seems very Googlish and simple, so I thought I’d give it a try, and signed up. The “dashboard” is very easy to navigate with things like account information and posting capabilities in very easy-to-find locations. Tumblr also has a “Goodies” page with a widget that you can download to seamlessly add textual information to your “tumblelog.” Overall, it’s a lot like Blogger, but with a different design.