The great thing about sites like Amazon.com is that I can pre-order something, and have it be a little surprize waiting for me when I get home some day. That is the case with the book ABC3D that I received a few days ago.
This is a really fun book. There are really interesting ways that Marion Bataille, the author, chose to represent the alphabet in pop-up form. I got really excited by some of these letterforms, and you can see why here:
On a side note, there was another video dealing with giving letterforms a three-dimensional shape:
There is just something beautiful about typography, don’t you think?
As a side note, here is one of my first motion assignments, where I had to find a way to transition between a number and a letter.
I really fell in love with After Effects during the last quarter of my sophomore year at DAAP. I wanted to continue working with the program and pushing myself to learn new techniques. I knew that if I did not set goals for myself during this Co-op quarter, I would get distracted and put my endeavors on the back burner, so I decided to create a new video project every week. Each week, I will try to learn a new technique, be it recreating an effect from television or film, or re-imagining effects from a tutorial.
For my first assignment, I chose to recreate the “title cards” seen at the end of commercials on A&E. I really enjoy the way they arrange the information they present. Color is used to highlight specific pieces of information, be it a title of a show or a time it airs. The motions are concise, but hierarchy is displayed throughout. It is a simple animation, but there is beauty and elegance in the simplicity.
Please refer to this video if you are not familiar with the way these A&E title cards look.
Here is my attempt to recreate that look. [media id=1]
A discussion today started on the idea of branding cereal with iTunes. The idea made a lot of sense to me, since there are a wide variety of ways available to marry physical items with the ethereal digital realm… The trick is not confusing your consumers in the process.
I now get to blame something other than my genes for my loss of hair, and that something is Internet Explorer 7. Why would a browser that was supposed to be an upgrade to the flawed IE6 work? Why would a Microsoft product be compliant to web standards?
If you have viewed my portfolio page in IE7, you will notice that all of the layout is horrible. There are horizontal rules running through text, terrible spacing, and layout that looks like a grid is it’s worst nightmare. However, looking at the same page in any other browser (including IE6), the layout is fine. I have been stressing over the layout in IE7 for a while now, and I am at the point of wanting to tear my hair out.
