funkybrain

A great presentation that elegantly encapsulates the fundamentals of game design. You can tell it was put together by a UX designer. I was pleased to see how generously it quotes people I have a lot of respect for in the industry.

Although I’m not much of a graphic artist, I do enjoy putting together simple identities for non-professional-grade branding. A couple of months ago I designed this little piece for the first GameCamp ever to be held in Paris:

Whenever I do this kind of work, I mostly focus on mashing up existing work and then add a little twist. In the previous example, I started off from the official BarCamp identity, which is not only customary but highly encouraged to keep with the spirit of the event.

I then did my little twist. I retraced the green flame with a gradient and inserted some (bogus) binary code. I picked Synchro LET, one of my favorite fonts, as a tribute to the good old green monitors (space invaders on Apple II anyone?). To top it all off I swapped the A of game with a drawing of a world-renowned gaming icon. I actually had to draw it myself since I couldn’t find one with any decent quality off the net. And that’s that.

Over he last few days I have been working on a design for my new non-business business cards. Again, the idea was to keep it simple. I knew I wanted to play around with colors (in a Warholesque way) and include my faithful space invader figure since that is what I use for this site (and yes, the header is my own work). Well, this is what the front-side of my card will look like:

I actually have more color combinations, which I will mix and match in the box of 100 cards I’ve just ordered. Can’t wait to see the results.

The one glitch in all this is that I don’t know if either pac-man or space-invader characters are free of rights. It’s just that they are so big you end up thinking that their in the public domain. Mmm, somehow I don’t think I will appear on Namco’s radar screen…

Smashing Magazine – Beautiful motion graphics.

An amazing collection of resources (tools and tutorials) for people interested in code-based art. Thank you Smashing Mag.

Nicholas Felton | Feltron.com.

These yearly reports are unmissable. Up there with Edward Tufte. You’d think they would inspire more people in business, given how data intensive modern work has become.

VizThink » Blog Archive » Karl Gude Shows You How to Draw an Eye.

A superb tutorial. Reminds me how this year has not been a drawing year for me, too taken by my studies, reading, computer etc. But I so love the feeling of pencil to paper. Need to make time for it (sigh). I can get by doing the human figure, but never got around to doing portraits… much less the eye details.