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.

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.

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.