processing

One of the pieces of software mentioned in "The How the Cover Pop is Made" is a program called Processing. This is an excellent programming language.

Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and sound. It is used by students, artists, designers, architects, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool. Processing is developed by artists and designers as an alternative to proprietary software tools in the same domain.

The key thing about this is it aimed at people who want to program visual images. It is possible to create 3D images, you can zoom into images, move things around, images can slide around the page, you can peel back images to reveal the image beneath. All the stuff that I have talked to Ian about in the tutorials could eventualy be done using this progam.

Cover Pop

Jim Bumgardne who made the Colr Pickr also made this great little program Cover Pop


How it Works

Thanks for visiting CoverPop. I made the first CoverPop, a few thousand science fiction covers, on Saturday, Oct 16, 2005, after thinking about it for a couple of weeks, but not having time to work on it. It took me much of the day Saturday to make.

The 3,448 covers were arranged horizontally by time, with earlier covers to the left, and more recent covers to the right.

The covers were arranged vertically by hue.

Colr Pickr, Filckr Hacks

After getting stuck with RMagick and Ruby. I went back to my original idea for a simple colour scheme generator. So I started off by googling "colour scheme generator" and one of the first links I found was this
Colr Pickr
A really simple idea click on anywhere in the colour wheel and a dozen Flickr images that match the same colour tone form the wheel are shown.

From here I found out about this Flickr API

Flickr has an open Application Programming Interface (API for short). This means that anyone can write their own program to present public Flickr data (like photos, tags, profiles or groups) in new and different ways. There's a long list of API methods available to you to work with, and we love it when this happens, so... go forth and play!

So this now gives me more options, not only am I limited to the University as source of images and work.

Ruby, RMagick and other things

I've been trying to get my head round Ruby
Ruby
Why's Guide to Ruby
Try Ruby

After a week of trying it out I managed to get a very simple text programme that would understand when someone clicked on the correct buttons it would respond with what colour background your website should have. What I couldn't do was get images to show up.

I then found this tutorial which looked straight forward. Ha!!
Render Collages in Ruby
From here I found
RMagick which looked a great version of Ruby that reworked the language for images. So far so good.

So I start working on a couple of basic RMagick tutorials only to find they won't show up in a normal Windows XP screen, with no obvious explanation as to how to view them.

After a lot of reading round trying to find a way to view RMagick I found out about
GTK+ and GNOME Now these are interesting as they are used to design open source software such as the GIMP. The problem is they require a lot of work in terms of learning the software and how to programme them, they also lack the aesthetic feel I want. And by this point I'm moving to far away from my original idea of a simple colour generator.

Discussion with Aidan

Offshoot website for MA departments
How niche sites might work
Using words to find new stuff
Harsh
Meaning of words
Avoiding being pigeonholed
Being pigeonholed
Girls Aloud
Amazon recommends
Things you've never heard of
Boxing people in without knowing it
Finding similar people into the same things
A way for designers to find work
RSS feeds
Sky Sports News
Scrolling, updating
Constant updates
Work coming in
Last FM/Pandora How they are made?
Tagging
Meems IMeems
3D versus 2D
Social psychology

Notes from Tutorial with Ian

Ruby
Ajax
Visualizing what the site would look like
Re-using existing code from the University
Clusters
DNA
Random searches
Un-random searches
Piaxelated
Tags
Text
Google search
Image search
Finding people
Finding work
Chairs
Art design
Who people think they are
Why spend time designing a site when it is already there
Adding programmes that enhance the site
Working as a designer
Avoiding the big idea
Knowing how things work

Colour: Meaning, Symbolism & Psychology

The Channel 4 test has lead me onto thinking about adapting existing colour tests as a way of generating palates and designs. Again it would be a way of starting to incorporate a visual element into what I'm creating.

Colour Quiz
Web Page Colour

What is more interesting to a designer, is the emotive power of colour.
Colour communicates!

We all know that red is a warm colour, because it is associated with fire. Blue is a cool colour, because that is the colour of the sky, and water. Green is a fresh colour, we associate it with grass and lush foliage. All these associations are programmed into the human ROM.

Art and design tests

Not been able to find anything that matches exactly what I want to do for the initial test page.

The closest ones I've found are a BBC art and personality test

Pick A Palette
This Channel 4 one is meant for interior design, it's a simple test that would create a palate of colours and design style to work. You could substitute the text for images, the colour palate is a good idea.

A bigger bang

Big article on Web 2.0 in the Guardian's Weekend Magazine

One thing that struck me from reading all the interviews was the sense that you needed to have a "big idea" a lot of people interviewed seemed to have had one excellent idea, then didn't know where to go next. The more I think about it I'd rather use whatever I create on the MA as a starting point. Some kind of web thing the for the MA department leads onto more web design ideas, viral promotion, self promotion etc. It would be easy to get hung up on coming up with an idea rather than work or ways of working that could be used in my professional practice over the next few years.

Tim Guest

Interesting article in Edge magazine by Tim Guest who was discussing Second Life and virtual worlds. Some interesting discussion about how IBM are using this software. Virtual worlds such as Second Life limit the number of people who can be online in the same space so they differ to traditional web in the sense that millions of people can be looking at a screen but in Second Life only a limited number of people can fit into a virtual room so it means business may become more tailored to the individual.

I can't find a link to the article but there is a piece by Tim Guest here discussing Second Life

Notes from tutorial

Starting points
Testing to see what people like
Find out what tests exist at the moment (abstract, impressionists, cubist)
Developing templates form this
Options for skins
Personal space
Scrapbook but with a purpose (Archive, vanity, selling)
Adaptable elements, six templates with ten elements that can be altered
Set up a simple interactive test
Fine art versus design
Use both fine art and design MA departments
10 questions. What do you like, why do you like it?
Profiling
How people perceive themselves
Tagging, recommendations
How to tag without words
Animations, visual. Remember art and design a visual language
Amazon homepage- lastFM. Personal recommendation site. If like this artist you might like this. Pandora!
Linking people similar work, not just within the Uni. Other artists, designers writers etc.
Random
Meme's Richard Dawkins, genes, genetics, evolution natural selection
How do things survive
What makes a site popular
How can you encourage use
Popularity, viral promotion
How could these things evolve
Links to viral advertising
How things can spread
Second Life any links? (Silver Spurs movie?)
Letting go, editorial control
Have a simple test up and running in the next couple of weeks, aim to have skins by Christmas? Work permitting.

imeem

imeem is another social networking site. What is different about this one is it incorporates elements from a number of other sites. it has photosharing similar to flickr, so you can upload your photos. It has elements from LastFM, you can post your own playlist which other people can listen to (this is an intertesting feature that LastFM doesn't have) and comment on. What I like about this site is it is starting to move awy from being purely a website that does one thing (photosharing, blogging or instant messaging) and trying to combine them into something else. You can download software, similar to flickr's uploader or instant messenger to share your photo's, music, video and so on.
This is an example of how it could be used
but it still fells like an akward mix of all the current social networking sites out there.

The problem with the design of the site is it slightly bland. It's clean and simple, which is a nice contrast to MySpace but there doesn't seem to be anyway to reskin your pages. I'd like the option to do that. I've also found the user interface difficult to understand, it's not clear if you can import photos from flickr in the same way you can import your IM contacts. It seems all over the place.

But there are a couple of interesting design features
This is the "imeem tag cloud"

this is simlar to something Ian mentioned in my tutorial. It's a flash animation that has random tags which users can click on. Now this is not that different to tagging on flickr but by simply animating gives it a whole new appeal. Again this could be pushed further. If it's an animation why do the tags have to be words, why not images or photos?

Another simple thing i liked on this site was the grouping of what people have uploaded and the tags they have used.