Thoughtful Preparations: Media Spin Blog

Exciting times ahead for CareerElement.com, a website I took an active role in the visual design and product development beginning April 2009.  They will be hosting their first high-tech career fair Tuesday, August 17, 2010, 4:30pm at the Stanford Park Hotel 100 El Camino Real, Menlo Park, CA.

As a start up with little or no budget, the CareerElement group meets regularly at scheduled locations on the Stanford University campus.  CareerElement is led by CEO Paul Campbell a UC Berkeley Engineering graduate, and finishing his Masters at Stanford.  He assembled a strong team of software engineers who required User Experience and visual design help from Gregg Boot of west11.com design firm and me.

As part of the design team we had to start from scratch, brainstorming the name and identity of their new job hunting, social networking website, flow charting and wire framing the layout of the entire site.

There is much more in the works at CareerElement, so stay tuned and sign up for the career fair to learn more.

Shrek reaches the end of the line with the current Shrek the Fourth 3D movie release.  Let out an obligatory, exhausted, “Whoo-hoo!”

Have the screenwriters reached the end of their own creative lines?  So, why can’t Shrek lose his kingdom to a Ponzi scheme, become an alcoholic junkie in a back alley, team up with the Green Goblin to combat the Green Hornet and Green Lantern, barf out some green super slime that cleans up a giant oil spill?  Whatever happens, Shrek is really Tracy Morgan, and he will continue on just fine.

Too much brandy?

Over the last three weeks I’ve been back at it with a whole new batch of “human conditions” illustrations for my good friends at Superstock.  To justify paying for the recent Poser 2010 upgrade, I’ve been using it to set up the character poses and then outputting the files to .obj format to import into Maya (ew, geeky, gory file format details!).  Once in Maya, I set up a number of cameras in 3D space, create a few props for realism, add my favorite X-ray, flesh and bone shaders, test render, and then render my 8K images in layers.  The layers then need color correction and polygon touch up in Photoshop as part of the final compositing process.  (Spell check still doesn’t like compositing, haha.)

Below are a few of my favorites.  I’ll have done over 100 of these after another week or so.  Endless good times. (Click thumbnails to see the big pictures.)

Life is complicated.  There are many choices, paths and decisions for us to make in search of our destiny.  There are paths we follow regularly that we are not even conscious of, such as the metabolic pathways keeping us alive in our immune systems.

I had little understanding of these paths, until I began these illustrations for Epitomics, a biotech company that manufactures over 1,000 different antibodies from rabbits.  According the Wikipedia, “Antibodies are gamma globulin proteins that are found in blood or other bodily fluids of vertebrates, and are used by the immune system to identify and neutralize foreign objects, such as bacteria and viruses.”

The maps are being carefully constructed in Adobe Illustrator from Epitomics diagrams and then imported into Flash to add linkage to their many unique antibody products.  Click here to see the current Flash Pathway maps, and there are more in the pipeline, and more data to be linked using XML.

Obviously, it is important to faithfully construct the pathway maps with scientific accuracy.  The spherical antibody nodes remind me of paintings I’ve made of beach stones, whose arrangements are pretty much random and meaningless.  I’ve been thinking about picking up the paint brushes again, and working on a few more of “the rock paintings.”  To make the stones more interesting, and their arrangements perhaps more meaningful, I plan on using image processing techniques, Photoshop filters and 3D rendering before projecting the design onto blank canvas.  I’m thinking about painting layers of imagery, similar to constellation star maps and the work of Julie Mehretu.  It’s a pathway I’ll have to decide to go ahead on, while my antibodies are still doing their quiet work to keep me in good health.

My friends at elementalLED, a green business selling LED lighting products, commissioned me to create an online marketing video.  They wanted something fun and edgy, with the potential to catch on as a viral animation, passed from friend to friend, business to business.  Some of the examples they showed me were really wild, almost South Park crazy, so I knew I could let the dogs out and run with this.  As we brainstormed, we discussed the virtue of LED lighting’s low heat emission from the intense light source.  Animals, such as moths, attracted to the light would not be burned.  The idea stuck, and I was off and running, writing, storyboarding and animating the old fashioned way in Flash.

The journey of The History of Lighting According To Moths took me back to my high school days of Mad magazine and Fractured Fairy Tales on the beloved Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon show.  It was a lot of fun, and James Goode’s sound track worked wonders to bring the animation to life, and support my corny narration.  Next, maybe I can figure out a migrating bird friendly wind turbine promo.

New credit cards are now featuring something called “blink” technology.  This wireless technology was the subject of my recent motion graphics project for Silicon Valley high tech company, ViVOtech.  I converted their PowerPoint technical overview and marketing presentation into an eye-catching tradeshow animation in HD resolution.  See the online Flash video animation here.

From what I understand, a lot of people at the tradeshow stopped and blinked at the ViVOtech booth.

This video makes outstanding use of Flash ActionScript programming of video object and overlays.  And, it’s funny! On Facebook my profile photo appears in the video.  Due to terms of service with Facebook, it does not appear within this version.

One-sanfrancisco.com is now live and ready for business!  Educating and promoting the .TEL address, a mobile business card, is the website’s mission.  As Jake Widman, writer for Information Week puts it, “SMBs can use .tel address to put all their contact information in one accessible, mobile-friendly location and easily organize and update it.”

One-sanfrancisco is the sister site of one-vancouver.com , developed as a .TEL initiative for their local business community by webnames.ca.  Just like one-vancouver.com, we will highlight our own Bay Area .TEL community members with .TEL Of The Day postings.

Another exciting development by webnames.ca are their innovative .TEL Gift Cards.  We look forward to placing .TEL gift cards in local Bay Area businesses for point of sale transactions of individual .TEL addresses.

For only $19.99 you can own your .TEL listing for 1 year.  Get started here. What are you waiting for?  Want to learn more before you buy?  See our Discover .TEL FAQ section.

I have over 300 computer-generated images in circulation through a stock photography agency, most of them are 3-D images modeled, textured and rendered using Autodesk’s Maya software.  I receive monthly statements and royalty checks for sales made, and at times they have been substantial.  It’s a very good business relationship. The trouble is, the agency never tells me who purchased the image or where it is being published.

Today I was thumbing through an investment magazine, SmartMoney, and I saw an image in an article about disability insurance and carpal tunnel syndrome.  The image looked familiar, so I checked my computer files, and sure enough, it’s mine.  The trouble is, my stock agency didn’t attach my name to the picture credits.  Not a deal-breaker, but it might help my sales if I had a credit next to my images.  Then clients who like my work could ask for more, and I’d know for sure if it was one of the many I’ve done.

Another similar image appeared in one of those catalogs full of gimmicky personal and household devices, and those images rarely get credits, and that’s OK with me.

A recent web-based training project in After Effects produced by Splitvision Digital required adding visuals to narrated coursework scripts for NACCHO (National Association of County & City Health Officials).

The project included many detailed modules and important text information for training and co-ordinating public health emergency teams to respond with organized readiness.  The idea is to enhance and compliment the text and narration with interesting photos, graphics and animation without distracting or biasing the intended course material to be communicated and learned by those using the online training.

Coincidentally, or not, the contract I took on following this, was an even larger instructional design project for PG&E Academy, produced by The Mosaic Company.  Flash is the common denominator in both projects.  Splitvision compressed the AE movies to load into a Flash interface, and PG&E uses PowerPoint plug-ins to extend its features and export to a Flash end product.

See a sampling of the training videos here.

Catching up on a number of projects completed over the last few months.  In late August I got a call from a client asking to quickly put together a website that he could use for his affiliate website, to resell “dot tel” addresses.

Dot tel addresses, or .tel, is a new top level domain extension, defined by the Telnic site as:

The .tel is a service that allows individuals and businesses alike to store and manage all their contact information and keywords directly in the DNS without the need to build, host or manage a website.

I found a Wordpress template that I liked, and modified it to give it a fun, “Twittery” look.  Then to help my client drive customers to the site through his Twitter expertise, we created a mascot, Peppy the Porpoise, and assigned a dot tel address to Peppy: peppy.tel.

As you can see, peppy.tel, or any .tel address contains all your information and links via a mobile phone, without setting up any web pages or HTML.  It’s very simple and handy!

Of course, I had to have some fun, as I often do.  So using Flash I designed, animated and synced up a singing jingle soundtrack, that I wrote and performed the pitch-modified vocals on.

The client is negotiating to become a major affiliate with a few top .tel domainname providers.  When that happens, Peppy will make a very big splash all over the Internet.

Here’s an online video about how to manage your .tel address, once you get one.

Fortunately the WordPress upgrading process has become familiar enough, so there are few worries.  WordPress is now up to version 2.8.4. Upgraded this blog as well as greberadio.com.  Part of the process is to de-activate and update the various plug-ins that extend WordPress functionality.  Both sites now have a new Contact page, enabled by a PHP plug-in.

It’s good to see the progress WordPress software developers have made with this free web publishing platform.  I’ve worked with it long enough to feel comfortable with it for use in developing a variety of new web sites.

Here’s a few cool articles from Best Design Options covering top WordPress plug-ins and themes.