A live brief was set to create an animated movie in Flash of around 30-40 seconds, including sound, suitable for web publicity purposes to be used by the Lee Cooper jeans company in this their centenary year, 2008. The theme had to include denim in some way and show Lee Cooper in a good light. Also the Lee Cooper Logo had to be an intrinsic part of the movie.

I wanted to make the animation fairly raw and fast moving with music to compliment this. The music I eventually chose was from a band I am good friends with, called Alsatian. This alleviated copyright issues incase Lee Cooper decided to use the animation.

I decided to stick to a red, black and white colour scheme to fit in with the Lee Cooper brand but also added blue in places as this is the natural colour of denim and as they are a British company, red, white and blue fit with their national identity and past promotional material.

Watch the movie (Requires Flash 8 or higher)

This comic strip has been designed and created in Adobe Illustrator CS3 for a project to re-create a Dan Dare comic using original character and landscape designs.

My main inspiration for the designs was from the work of Hanna Barbera. I wanted a very “cartoony” style with bright colours, thick black outlines and bold characters. The original character designs can be found on my portfolio.

All of the imagery is created using vector graphics in Illustrator and is intended to be of a publishable standard to the web or to print.

View the comic

A week or two ago I took the plunge and bought a new monitor as working with programs like Flash, Dreamweaver and Director on a tiny 15″ screen was just getting ridiculous. Granted I only upgraded to a 17″ but the bigger screen resolution still makes all the difference.

Upon switching on the new monitor I noticed the colours were all washed out and pale, adjusting the brightness/contrast on the monitor didn’t help so i turned to the graphics card alpha control and hey presto, immediate improvement but where exactly to set it so the levels are as accurate as can be? Sure you could go out and buy some decent monitor calibration hardware, but what if you don’t have the cash?

This is very important as If you design something on a badly calibrated monitor and then try it on other systems with correctly calibrated monitors the resulty can be ugly. For example, what you thought was black might actually be dark grey and similarly with lighter shades. Colours should also be calibrated so that greys have no colour tint etc.

I found the following links useful and by using them in combination I achieved a decent result:

• http://www.photofriday.com/calibrate.php
  A very simple, single-image tool to calibrate contrast and brightness. I found this to be a good starting point and it’s a 2 minute job.

• http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/
  A more advanced set of test images and detailed explanations of each one. This site checks things such as contrast, sharpness, gamma, black & white levels, viewing ange and response time.

• http://www.imaging-resource.com/ARTS/MONCAL/CALIBRATE.HTM
  Another web page with some test images and information on hardware calibration methods and tools.

If you have Adobe gamma installed this is also a useful tool to use and allows adjustent of gamma, colour temperature etc, and features a step by step wizard.

Up to my eyeballs in assignments and I somehow find time I don’t have to start my first ever blog, amazing.

I suppose you’re wondering what’s going in this blog, right? Well, the main aim is to have a place to share my thoughts on web design and such stuff. I’ll be posting links to any sites / articles i find interesting or useful and possibly posting some of my “works in progress” before they’re ready to be added to my portfolio.

Well that’s the first post over with, check back soon or add my RSS feed to keep updated!