solar boys virtual diggs

here's the man himself outside his virtual house, which has yet to be equipped with solar panel malarky.
i'm not that happy with it to be honest, i'm not accustomed to building normal looking houses in second life so find it rather strange... i think it needs a lot more work but at least it looks like a house.



fio kaminski's building it though.
it wont be floating in the middle of nowhere when it's done, just need to terraform a plot first.

orange cow.

you read right.

yeah, he's cool.

this little orange cow named Winny was designed by Kuntzel and Deygas, and features in a little film by them, in which Winny tours Tokyo.


he visits a variety of places, including a japanese spa and fish markets, but there's not that much interaction between him and the world around him. he mostly tends to look bemused at the world around him, but poses at the same time.



there's also some cartoon inserts dotted throughout the film which show which part of Tokyo he's in.



there's also some very subtle effects with Winny, while his facial expression is restricted to the mask he's wearing, through some post editing and dabbling his eyes move, it's quite subtle but very effective.


Me and Ben watched the film before we filmed solarboys adventures, hoping to get a similar effect, but with a lot more interaction with the world and people around. We would like to make solarboys eyes move with some editing, but at the moment i'm not sure we're going to have the time for it!

filming and mock ups and that

finally, he was ready.

look at him in all his glory!

we then went out filming. we now have lots of hilarious footage of elf playing as sun boy, being ignored and embraced by the people of hyde park.
we thought he would mostly be ignored, but people seemed to warm to him... a bit too much. so we had to deploy a "please ignore, thanks!!!" sign. here he is wanting to go on the bus.


and here is the mostly-final-i-can't-see-much-wrong-with-it mock up of what the site is going to look like.
i'm getting used to illustrator now, methinks.


and here is his myspace page:
solarboy LOVES YOU!

final-ish ideas and mock up

sketchlings:

scribble scribble scribble.
thinking more in a simple vector-ish style, with a better idea of where i want to put things.

and here's the mock up:

one has been spending quite some time pratting about in illustrator, but needs to learn to tidy up her pen-age.
it's quite twitterish.

needs work...

transition from low res to high res screen is enlightening.

still, chirpy.

good morning starshine

the earth says hello!

ideas:

but with a big giant paper mache sun head, stalking his old school friend.
he'll have a myspace, facebook and twitter page, all the tools of a good stalker. he'll add as many people as he possibly can. he'll upload his stalker photos and tag his stalk-eee in his photos. he'll update his twitter with his where abouts and his current thoughts.

gosh darn it, the sun want's friends and he's going to get them.

oh yeah, that project...

the solar century project has been in the background the past couple of weeks while i try to get my head around my website. but here's what i've been up to.

i've taken on the role of web designer at the moment, while ben comes up with a viral video that pops up when the solar panel is plugged into the usb port of the council's pooter. the idea being that we send out little bitty solar panels to coucils, to try to persuade them to use solar energy. they plug the little solar panel into their computer and a little viral video pops up, which then forwards you onto the website.

at the moment i'm not thinking about text and images too much, just figuring out where i want to put things.

at first i started drawing up my main idea - rollovers! i think that by using them cleverly it will be possible to create a really nice feeling of interaction. what i want to happen is for the little circles to get bigger as you roll over them, revealing information. i looked at some little circley ideas first.



then i drew up my first idea for the rollovers, a sun on top of an image of some nice grass, with little circle rollovers surrounding it.



as awesome as it would be to have a face covered in yellow face paint, staring out manically (the sun is manical), i decided that the idea may also be suitable for using the rollovers on top of a photo of a house, or a council building. not a kiddy-ish hand drawn one as shown below.



i tried to refine the idea down a bit more, trying to keep the fun feeling but make it less childish. this layout would probably look great as a flash site, but i'm sure i could figure it out with CSS as well. (the orange circles are going to be stills from the viral ad, with the centre of the sun having the lovely sun guy, maybe not his face, he can just pull a pose.)



this still felt a bit childish, so i also made a "boring as hell" layout, if we want to appeal more to the serious minded mindset of the councils. all nice and corporate and boring to design. but dammit the sun guy still gets in there!

super happy sun time

trying to visualise what is in my head when i consider the solar century brief.

yum yum yum infographics

since we need to inform and educate and that through our little "web experience" for solar century, i thought it might be worth looking at some yummy infographics.

the first thing that came into mind was the lovely plinky plonky moving image piece by stylewar called terrain. (taken from motion blur by onedotzero) infographics for and imaginary company, specialising in creating specialised, technologicaly advanced land and homes.







i think all the animation was done in aftereffects, which makes it look nice. it flows really well, and it feels nice and clean.

after some wondering around i found this very nice blog, information aesthetics, which is all about inforgraphics and features some links to some very nice examples. including these by Corpora in Si(gh)te, a "media architecture installation".




some of the images are quite complex, which doesn't suit the brief as we need to make it as simple as possible to understand, but i really like the idea of using an real life environment to showcase the information.

the images show the information taken from sensors from the enviroment shown in the images.

better get a move on

with all these briefs, shouldn't i?

the first one i will natter on about is the all important solar century D&AD brief.
which is important.



here's the home page for the current solar century site, which is very nicely laid out with nice yellows and greens which give the feeling of being eco-friendly without being too garish. And although this page alone contains quite a bit of information, it all fits on the screen without needing to scroll (i am on my imac but i think it would be fine on my ye olde pc too) thanks to the clever layout witch utilizes the space even with that massive image in the middle. there's drop down boxes which usually annoy the crap out of me but here they're well designed and work well, and up in the corner along with the language options (international company maybe?) there's a little news feed, which seems quite unbiased, at the moment i can see the headline "Sun setting on solar power?", there's also news links about the governments current nuclear energy plans.

the news links then link you to a page inside the site, with the article or a link to it. these pages are quite different to the rest of the site, there's a lot of text based information and links, and while the serif grey text is nice as it feels nice and soft, it can be quite hard to read on the light grey background (speaking as a person with wonky eyes.) (see below)



the rest of the site is more like the homepage, using sans-serif on a whiter background which is much easier to read, although there are some graphics that look like they've been made in microsoft word. (that was a bit harsh of me but you can see what i mean below)