The Briefs

We were give a selection of Briefs related to our course that we could choose from. These are:
Open Brief - Aviva
Installation - Coutts
Make your Mark - D&AD
Moving Image - hp
Illustration - Little White Lies
Digital Design - Microsoft
Digital Advertising - Spotify
Typographic - Ministry of Sound


There were three briefs that really stood out to me, the typographic, the illustration and the hp brief.
hp
Brief: Unleash your vision of a creative work station. 
In our digital age of media and artistic production, technology and creativity are increasingly becoming interlinked. The workplace of today is not a fixed point; we have the tools and technology to choose to create on the move or in a dedicated place. Technology is a brilliant enabler of ideas as well as a means of production. HP knows the importance of unleashing and accelerating creativity, with the HP Workstation they provide a computational powerhouse of
possibility for you to interact and create with. Your challenge is to make a work of moving image that describes the idea of a station where creative work is made and produced. It can be based
on reality and the way you work or it could be a conceptual visualisation. The idea that you generate can be free of restriction and appear how you want it. Be bold, inventive and original. Consider your own process and your relationship with technology – avoid clichés and use your own distinctive voice and creativity in motion to deliver an engaging piece of work. There are no boundaries beyond your own expression.


Little White Lies
Brief:Create an original cover illustration for Little White Lies magazine, depicting
the main character of one of our five favorite films of 2011.

Drive 
Black Swan 
The Tree of Life
Super 8 
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.



Ministry of Sound

Brief: We require you to produce a set of three typographically-focused A2 outdoor posters (landscape or portrait) that act as a three month advertising campaign for Ministry of Sound’s iconic London event ‘Saturday Sessions’. The posters should communicate a clear conceptual theme or idea based around the club or the music, however, this can be as literal or as abstract as you like. Some guidance is given on content, logos and colour, but type choice and size is entirely down to you. Remember that these posters need to communicate the dates, the DJs and brand very clearly and concisely so typography should strike a balance between expression, experimentation and legibility. These posters are normally seen in outdoor sites and often viewed from a moving vehicle so impact is key.

I then reviewed the Briefs again and the timescale of the project and decided that the hp moving image brief was probably not the best option for me in the timescale of the project. I then decided to investigate the Little White Lies magazine cover illustration brief which i though sounded really exciting, until I had fully read and understood the brief and then i realized it was only one magazine cove and the rules for the brief were very narrow. The magazine cover was quite restricted, for example it had to contain the main character of the chosen film which limited my ideas greatly. Therefore I decided that the Ministry of Sound brief would be challenging for me but doable in the timescale of the project. 

PROJECT 4 - D&AD Briefs

D&AD


http://www.dandad.org/dandad




Home of the talented and skilled, the imaginative and the curious, the restless and the bloody-minded. Commercially savvy, sometimes romantic, often cynical and occasionally rather weird. A source of information and ideas: of professional development, support and inspiration, interesting people to talk and nice things to look at. All creative life is here.

Entry to the D&AD Student Awards 2012 is open to the following:

- All students in full-time education

- Part-time students enrolled on a recognised FE or HE course

There is one exception. We are opening up the 'Make Your Mark' brief to New Creatives as well as full-time students. We consider New Creatives to be:

- Anyone under the age of 26 years on 9 March 2012 

- and/or anyone who has graduated less than two years by 9 March 2012

Entrants can choose to work alone or in a group of up to five persons working as a team. You cannot mix entry between students and new creatives.

You can download and respond to as many briefs as you wish. You may also submit more than one response per brief.

All responses must be entered through our online entry system. You can also submit physical responses as supporting information if you wish.

Responses will be judged per individual brief. Consideration will be given to undergraduate, postgraduate and new creative entries but not judged separately.

The sponsors permit entrants to use the submitted branding for the sole purpose of responding to the brief sponsored by that sponsor.

The closing deadline for entries to be received by D&AD is Friday 9 March 2012 at 5.00pm.

Evaluation of Processing Project

For our Processing project we were given several lectures from Seb Lee and then left to use what we had learn to build a simple game. I am really please that I have managed to complete my game to a playable standard as I was really struggling with the collision detection between the aliens and the paddle/player. I could not get this piece of code to work but once someone explained what I was trying to do in english and told me to write it down and then transform it into code I really understood what I needed to do. 


I feel I have learnt a lot from Seb because I started out with now knowledge of Processing and I think I have picked up the basics well. I am able to create a simple game using example code and I know I can look through a piece of code and understand what it is doing. With a bit more experience with the code I think I could pick up a lot more in depth elements of Processing. 


After this project I think I could go into a designing job and design for Processing with a good knowledge of what the developer/coder would need from the designer. This could be a good skill that I may need in the future with the popularity of Processing on the rise. 


Overall this has been good learning project that I think has gone quite well. I had times when I was lost in the code but once I dissected the code I could figure out what it was i needed to do. A great project. 

The Final Game

This is my Basic Game as a final assessment piece for the Processing Project. Use the left/right arrows on the keyboard to capture the aliens. If you miss more than two aliens you loose!

Last of Seb Lees Lectures

These are the last few pieces of my processing work. I have chosen the work that best shows my abilities, the rest can be found on my Open Processing site.


Below I am working with particles to create a zooming through the particles effect.



In this example I have experimented with changing the colour and making the particles come to a stop before they then fade out. The number of particles on the screen has been limited.



Fountain of bubbles attached to the mouse movement. These bubbles have gravity as well as a distance shrink and fade. I have also used a random selected size for the bubbles.




Changing the particle shrink to a plus number means they expand each particle that is produced. These also use a random blue effect and have a drag which slows them down the older the particles get. This would make a really vivid screen saver.



I have attached an image to the mouse instead of a shape. I have then experimented with spin(rotate),fade,drag,gravity and opacity features in Processing on a for loop.

Seb Lee Lectures - Basics of Processing

My Processing Work:

http://www.openprocessing.org/portal/?userID=15231

I have learnt alot so far about Processing and the ways in which it is similar to css coding. I am really enjoying these lectures by Seb and I feel I am slowly getting to grips with the Processing code system.

Below are some of my favourite pieces of work that I have produced wit the skills I have learnt with Seb. The rest of my work can be found on the above link to the OpenProcessing website.

This is my first attempt at creating a simple character using the ellipse and line tools. The main feature of this is the way that the eyes follow the mouse movement. To do this ive used floats (which are floating point numbers) to hold the 'instructions' for my circle eyes (pupils) to follow the mouseX and mouseY movements. This code is all contained in voids. Void setup contains the setup functions for the elements of the page. These get called once when the document is opened. void draw is the function that contains the 'drawing' elements of the document. These are called multiple times each frame.



This is my second attempt at a character with moving eyes. Here I have experimented more with colouring the objects.



If statements: if the mouse is over this quater then colour the box. If the mouse is in another part of the square then colour it in this colour. These if statements correspond to the mouse movements and tell the computer that if the mouse passes this point it should do a specific thing



In the example below i am using integers and if statements. The if statements are telling the computer to do something and if this isnt right then to do something else. I have also added a random colour fill to the circle so that it is flashing through a random RGB colour sequence.



This is a very simple piece of code that runs a draw triangle function that draws a triangle from the mouse movement.Simple but fun to play with.



Another fun game that has a circle attached to the mouse that leaves a fade trail behind its movement. The circle is restricted to the size of the box and doesnt go outside ther peramters. This uses a for loop to create the circle trail.



This is an array if random coloured circles that are confined in within the perameters of the box. They use a collide function that means when they reach the size they bounce back off the 'walls'. I think this looks like a disco representation; fun and colourful.



An array of square buttons. These buttons when clicked with the mouse change colour. They are also confined in the peramenters of the box like the previous example.

What is Processing?

What is Processing?


Processing was initiated by Benjamin Fry and Casey Reas in 2001, formerly of the Aesthetics and Computation Group at the MIT Media Lab. We can see it as the follow up of Design By Numbers, created by John Maeda, a programming environment strongly oriented at beginners. It is an open source project free to download and free to use, with already a large community around it.


What and who was it designed for ?


As the Processing web site mentions: “Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is used by students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool. Processing is developed by artists and designers as an alternative to proprietary software tools in the same domain.”


Those picking it up for the first time will find lots of very well written and archived code samples, a large amount of information on the internet and answers to question on the Processing forum. The people behind Processing have made huge efforts in helping the community to grow and learn. For instance by illustrating the language reference with clear snippets of code. Thus helping to grasp basic concepts little by little, i.e. image, pixel, array, mouse events, primitive shape drawing etc.


For the more international learner you are pretty sure to find a reference you will understand as volunteers joined forces and translated the reference into 8 different languages. Even if Processing was aimed at beginners, its versatility and ease of development still is relevant to anyone wanting to write creative software pieces.