Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Early Years

I have always wanted to create a Design related blog. The fact that younger designers all have their portfolio hosted online put me to shame. All my years in this industry makes me wonder why I never bothered. So in order to cover my designer conscience, I decided to just blog about my design, ideas, and share my best and worst productions.

Yes, I believe one should also share with the world your not-so-great productions, and not just create a make believe lie that everything you have done is perfect. Because it is just not true. I believe even the best designers makes mistakes, but what is more important is to share and learn from everyone so that one can improve and in the event, spark more interesting and creative ideas.

Before I begin, I must say that I am just a regular designer although I do have some unique ideas. I started my very first design blog because I want to learn from everyone, including non designers.

My dad never agreed I had the artistic flair when I was a boy. Whenever I returned home with an 'A' grade in Arts & Crafts from school, he'll brushed aside and claimed he did better than that when he was in school. When I said I had illustrated a dragon, he'll ask if the lizard I that I drew can really crawl. And so I always believed I am far from good. Which is quite true, because while the junior designers ratter about 'unwrapping' and what not in 3D Studio Max these days, I can only reply my version of 'unwrapping' is as far as I can get when I received a present or two (if i get lucky) during my birthday. And while the rest of the world are all doodling with Warcom pen these days, I can barely path properly using a mouse. (Don't worry, I still know what a computer mouse is, I am not referring to the rodent type)

But that does not deter me in creating my very first design blog. (I can imagine the junior but better technically equipped designers choking back their laughter now)

So I'll go easy. For this post I would like to share some of my earlier multimedia productions, and you can guys can go bitch about how outdated these designs are later.



The above is my very 1st multimedia design production when I was still an undergrad in UWS more than a decade ago. I didn't remember why I had the balls to do a 3D type cd rom project when the school doesn't even teach Flash, let alone 3D modeling & animation. But I finished the product anyway, and was proud to have self taught a super low end 3D program "Strata Studio Pro" for this project. So you can say I survived.

Below are the screenshots of a Flash animated marketing banner I created back in 2001. It was quite interesting because I learned how to use basic and minimal type and graphics to represent a campaign. It was for the Singapore Arts Festival then. This was done when I was a junior MM designer during my employee years.



Next, I will like to share a production which was a hard balance act for me back then in 2000. It was my very first CD rom production as a junior designer.



Not very nice isn't it. But it was one of my best efforts. The time line given was 3 weeks. I had to pick up "Adobe After Effects" to create the 2 min intro video, and then learned lingo and at the same time design all the interfaces. Being the young aspiring designer, I always wanted to design a funky and chic production. This CD rom put me in a fix because I had to balance what the client wants, and at the same time make it look as good as possible. This production is in fact a very boring CD rom because there wasn't much interactivity involved and the client wanted chunks of info for ppl to read and read. So I ended up using different color schemes for every interface to spice up the whole production. And it is a trick I still use these days, when I have a boring piece to work on, I try to experiment with lots of colors to add variety to the design. But it does not work all the time of course, much really depends on the objectives listed for the production.

All right folks, thats all for today. You can laugh your heart out now...

7 comments:

  1. Congrats for putting added pressure on yourself. Twilight and I have divided responsibilities now to track your blogs now. lolz

    Fyi, i didn't laugh bcoz my knowledge in design is zilcho! But hey, lucky you ..... if i created a blog on the subject of accounting, readers will die of boredom, right? :P hahaha

    +Ant+

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  2. darn, i missed my chance to be first commentor on yr blog :)

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  3. Ant - hahaha. Thats a surprise attack! Knowing I am a lazy blogger. Apologize for some of the design terms used in the post. Unwrapping in a 3D software at my best knowledge is described as a method to add textures to a modeled 3D object. And pathing is a method of drawing 2D objects in a 2D illustration software.

    I attended a biz grad dip course back in '04 at our local university NTU. Up before then I was a suaku designer. One subject was accounting. It gave me a hard time, I have all the respect for people who can balance and churn out P&L and what not. Diff ppl are meant for diff stuff, and I know I am just not cut out for accounts.

    Beng Beng - Thanks for coming here man! Maybe you might get to see some of my flop photography shoots here hahahah. Like I said, I am hopeless in photography. My only knowledge in photography is the one-third rule layout when shooting. But thats abt it.

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  4. Your blog has expired liao! :P

    +Ant+

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  5. I admit I don't know much about designs. So like Anton, I also won't be laughing. Wow! You have so much time to create a second blog? I can't even handle one blog! LOL!

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  6. Ant - Sigh... you are gonna keep at it pressuring me aren't you :) Have a great week ahead my friend!

    Foong - I am not sure how long I can keep up with this design blog man. I did it when I was real free. LOL. Hey, but I'll try!

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  7. glad to read that u pursued yr dream even tho yr dad was not in agreement.

    i like to see designing stuff as it shows people's creativity on a out of the box stuff

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