WE'RE ON THE COVER OF A MAGAZINE!

...as Mike Wazowski would say. Just found out that our Space Girl, an image we collaborated on with D.C. photographer Cade Martin is the key image for the new Photoshop website, www.photoshop.com. And not even a bar code over the face! How do you like that, Sully?

VIRTUAL BLOOD

This is the blood that an oath for good design was signed with. It's virtual blood, Virtual like the blood that thankfully didn't get spilled on Times Square. Thank you, Mr. T-Shirt man. Can't quite believe we stood there, right in the middle of it, my daughter and me just a few days ago, thinking how great... this City. I LOVE NY.

FLASH BACK

This is a bit of a Silicon Valley type post, to give you fair warning. Not sure how many of you readers are old enough to remember what the web looked like until Flash came around. For those who don't, here's a screenshot of Netscape's homepage I took... I don't know why... back in 1994. Yes, Netscape... Mosaic... AOL... Mozilla... FireFox. Those guys:



What about Flash though? A little "flashback" might be in order... it started as FutureSplash... a neat little plug-in that allowed you to create and display vector animations. Animations that downloaded really fast over those slow dial-up modems. It became Flash when Macromedia bought it. They were king in tools for making interactive CDs at the time. And yes, one could actually play tiny little videos over the web... using Apple's QuickTime mainly... that's if you were a coding and video compression Ninja. But you never knew how or even if it would play. It was trial and error. Just like everything else about making pages for the web. Needless to say graphic designers, who are by nature control freaks, were not the early adopters of the World Wide Web.

Flash allowed designers to design once and play everywhere. Something that Java promised, but never delivered. It is also the simple reason why (click on link if you're not familiar with it) YouTube succeeded, which... and you'll find that hard to believe... started out only 5 years ago. What was it they offered that had never been done before? Simple... your video would play! You uploaded it and no matter what format you sent it or who you sent the YouTube link to... they were able to watch it. Anybody could just post a video now and it could be seen by anybody, anywhere. Guaranteed. It wasn't about standards or technology, it was simply about predictability and removal of the need for expert skills. Come to think of it... not unlike the Mac in 1984. Ironically it's the iPhone and iPad that are the only platforms your Flash video won't run. Interesting though that Apple didn't ban YouTube also. Wonder why that works ;-).

Now Adobe... these are the guys that gave us Illustrator and Photoshop. Adobe... who has been making the best graphic design tools for 20 years now. So if HTML5 is really the present and the future, where are the graphical authoring tools? I've you've seen them, please let me know. I did find aa MUST SEE design tutorial video (in Flash of course) on YouTube if you want to get a head start on the future...

NEW WINDOW TO A HIDDEN WORLD

In the course of working on a project with Erik and Scott involving some CGI insects, Diana, the art director, shared this great link with us for inspiration. Miroslaw Swietek is a photographer in Poland who goes out in the pre-dawn hours and flashes sleeping insects covered in morning dew. Just when you think you're familiar with the world around you, someone opens a window and shows you the world in a brand new way. The brilliance of these photos is just stunning. Here's the link to the story.

POSER 8: FIRST IMPRESSION

Just installed the new Poser 8 and I have to say I am excited to see that they finally got around to clean up after the mess they made of the interface over the last ten years. If you're old enough to remember when Poser was taken on by MetaCreations, you know that Kai put in one of the most amazing, intuitive and clean interfaces on the Mac, or any computer for that matter, and quite some time before his ideas started popping up in the OS X betas. Anyhow, so I just gave this new version a quick spin... some new alien character by the name of Andy is the default figure now... I wonder whether that's a hommage to the amazing Andy Murdoch. He sure looks like the flying chief that kidnapped the baby and put him into a glass jar.



Either way, I kind of prefer a semi naked fist fighting blonde.



I really like the new folder based navigation system for poses, figures, parts... the library... now that there is so much content, the old way of browsing the library really became tedious. To that end, it's great that the new Poser gives us a search function now. How about groups of poses, morphs, or hair belonging to a figure together or highlighting related content in bold if it relates to the selected figure?



Looks like the sketch render has been worked on too. Fun stuff. Hope to find some more time to sink into this new release soon.

ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK

Kate stopped by today to say Hi and drop off the new 7x7 magazine with the flying whale in Erik Almås' picture of supermodel Maggie Rizer. Not up to speed with the who's who in supermodelling, I had to google her name. Turns out she moved to San Francisco from Manhattan and is working on a comeback after being out for a while. The reason? Her stepdad gambled away her fortune of millions of dollars she had made in supermodelling. With Lotto Quick Picks. Wow. You'd think that the guy at the corner store would have told him that this isn't his game, after he spent the first million there. It's almost harder to believe than her flying out on a whale ship.

ANYBODY HAVE A BANDSAW HANDY?

Working on a series of images with photographer Robert Schlatter that are combination of our CGI and his iconic photography. One of the shots involves half of a retro soda pop bottle, the other half a CGI component that's still under wraps. Although the final image is really a pure front 2D view, Brian Gunderson, the art director showed me a sketch of the sectioned bottle in a 3D perspective view to get a better understanding of what's going on...



I didn't notice his little camera in the corner and misinterpreted the sketch as the view he was actually looking for. Since the bottle is photographed, I asked him how he was going to cut the bottle and keep the soda in it... jokingly... then went ahead to render some takes... and I think it works quite well, no OSHA necessary.






Here's a look at the final image...


And a closer look at the detail...



Probably the most fun we had with this project however was the last minute design and illustration of the artwork on the cans themselves, originally to come from the client but instead added on as super fun side project in the making of this image. And yes, Waldo is in there somewhere.