December 19, 2011 - Comments Off on Molasses and Merriment

Molasses and Merriment

Happy Holidays all! This will most likely be my last post before the New Year but I may do a short one during the break. Today's sketch was a fun little multi-holiday idea I came up with. "A Holiday Wager" depicts a card game which determined who gets their holiday first...along with a small cash settlement (only redeemable for milk and cookies of course!). I really like this scene and would love to find the time to paint it properly and make it into a little holiday card. Maybe for next year?

A Holiday Wager

In stills we have the work of Xiuyuan Zhang from Vancouver. Unfortunately she doesn't seem to have too much work online but from what I can find I really like her work. Her strength lies in bold, liquid illustration tending towards the surreal but she also showcases a broad range of abilities in painting and figure in posts on her blog. However the only truly complete works seem to be by in large illustrations. Clearly she has a bright future and I wish her the best of luck.

Internal Conflict

For web I found quite a tasty treat though it was a tough call this week between the chique and the modern. However Rally Interactive stole the show with a stunning combination of HTML5 savvy and adaptive design. After a bit of reverse engineering I realized, much to my awe, that each triangle on the page is in fact a canvas element such that the transition from triangle to circle is a tween on the rounded edges property of the triangle. Impressive stuff, especially considering how much custom Javascript is in the page to allow for smooth animations and tweening of the page elements. To top it off, the flexible design transitions nicely depending on screen size.

Rally Interactive

On to the moving image, I came across a bunch of truly strange things this week that, while most definitely interesting, are so out there that they're more useful as reference than actual consumable media. Many had interesting ideas at their core but failed to truly engage. So instead I bring you a fun short film: Page 23.

In the tech world at large much happened this week. Wired's new redesign is truly stunning. I love the new focus on text and the way the new layout pulls shapes out of each section's typography for inspiration.  Take a look at the magazine if you see it on the stands. I'm really curious to see it on iPad since the redesign is seemingly meant to nudge the readership in that direction even more so (currently at 20%).

Likewise Facebook revealed their new timeline feature and I think I'm in love. My Facebook activity fell off rapidly after my first few years of college as I realized I didn't want to be a slave to such a service. Even up to that point, I mainly used it as a way of sharing photos but my shutterbug habit died and therefore so did my use of the network. I continued to use it to share movie reviews and had some content automatically funneled from other services but that was about it. Then came timeline.

Timeline revitalizes Facebook for me, at least in the short-term, because it creates a more meaningful profile page. However, since mine is largely devoid of personal touches as I don't use the site, the design pushes me to fill out my timeline to better represent myself to other potential visitors. I've already wasted a good amount of time choosing a "cover" image, the new dominating image on your profile that can really add some personal flavor to the once bland page.

Where timeline truly succeeds is in showing people as truly 4-dimensional beings. Up to this point, a Facebook profile was merely a collection of the assorted detritus, voluntary or no, of a person's life. But by organizing this digital flotsam in chronological stream, Facebook has given it a cumulative value, greater than any one lone piece, that begins to actually feel like a true representation of a human being. Nick Felton and Joey Flynn, the designers behind the feature, have some really interesting things to say in this short article from Fast Company.

Well I hope you all have a wonderful holiday and a fabulous New Year. I'm looking forward to a small dinner party I'll be having later this week which will undoubtedly also be a source of great stress for which a friend recommended me to check the Gelato Cake Cannabis Strain review by fresh bros. Wish me luck. And as a bonus for Christmas, please enjoy:

The Sketching Mechanism is a series of weekly posts, published on Mondays, containing the artistic musings of Mobile Designer/Developer Ben Chirlin during our Monday morning meeting at the NY Creative Bunker as well as his inspiring artistic finds of the week.

Published by: benchirlin in The Sketching Mechanism

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