cmyplay

The Thomas@ series by Carina Diedricks-Hugo is a popular title amongst Afrikaans teens. LAPA Uitgewers approached Etiket with the desire to make a more engaging reading experience for the next title in the series. In many ways, this project came along at the perfect time for me.

I found out about JC Hutchins & Jordan Wiseman’s book, Personal Effects: Dark Art, on Adam Christensen’s MacCast. Despite never having seen the title in the flesh, I was immensely inspired by the big ideas that form part of the storytelling.

I had just finished an initial brainstorming sessions to conceptualize the rough ideas for an ARG for a locally produced feature film. All I could see was possibilities. Alongside a couple of colleagues we threw around ideas on how to make this book interactive and engaging in meatspace.

The project progressed to a point where I had to bring together all of the ideas into a concrete way to extend the reading experience without changing the story for those who didn’t have access to things like smartphones or internet connected computers.

In certain places Microsoft Tags and URLs appear alongside the text of the book. The reader is prompted to scan these tags, at which point they are taken to an element related to that particular point in the story. The collateral created for these sections include photos of characters in the book, chat conversations between these characters, audio clips and a video performance of the characters’ band, webpages and Flash games.

For budgetary reasons approximately 60% of the initial ideas made it into the book. Etiket submitted the Thomas@ Augmented Reality reading experience for 3 categories of the Pendoring Awards 2011 and we got 2 nominations for it. I’m very much looking forward to the awards ceremony later this month.

As an introduction to fully-fledged WordPress design and coding from start to finish, I’m glad that I had the Etiket website to practice with. I managed to overcome a number of technical hurdles, not least of which was creating separate sections that are automatically updated according to how a post is categorized.

The design evolved as a reversal of the style of the Voluma.tv* site created by my colleague, Jaco van Der Walt. I set about using elements of the design and applied them to the 960 Grid System. The Grid System is incredibly useful as a framework for constructing layouts.

The work that I put in on this site has helped us win new work for a number of companies. It turns out that they’re all looking for similar solutions for their online presences.

Hospitality Marketing hope to offer smaller B&B’s, Guesthouses and Hospitality business a range of online solutions for their logistical business operations. I’ve been doing many website designs over the last few months, but this is a design that takes it’s direction from very pragmatic needs.

The site is geared towards being open, clean and easy to navigate while also demanding the viewer’s attention. The logo is done in a style that is more natural and photorealistic than I am used to creating.

I had fun creating the contact form because it gave me the opportunity to further explore the style put forth in the logo. I also like how practical it is to have a contact form directly on the landing page while not dominating the layout.

This is the final product of the style experiment I went through over the past couple of weeks. Considering the corporate toning down of the image, I think it came out rather well and I’m looking forward to seeing it in print.

Fight Club was released in America 10 years ago today. Director David Fincher’s 4th feature-length film immediately stands out as a gem of darkly comedic, angsty drama. No doubt helped in large part by the daring novel by Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club is an unmistakable critique of modern American society. At least as modern as it was in 1999. Palahniuk’s fantastic debut translated well into celluloid. The performances are peerless, the humour is palpable, the Dust Brothers score is inspired, the production quality is faultless and Fincher’s vision is clear and unapologetic.

It’s only the little things that betray the film’s true age. The nameless Narrator’s point-and-shoot film camera, Space Monkeys erasing VHS cassettes  and  cremating Power Macintosh G3′s.

It must have been so much fun to design for this film. The visual detailing in Fight Club is great, from the anarchistic in-flight instructions depicting an emergency landing procedure to the tongue-in-cheek plug for fictitious furniture brand Furni. The attention paid to these elements pay off in the utterly convincing portrayal of a city that is inhabited by an under appreciated and disillusioned working class.

In addition to promotional material and a fake online store for fashion and furnishings found in the film, the film’s website used to host a feature that played out rhetorical fights between historical figures. Clearly the site predates the wired-generation’s coding and design standards, nonetheless it is ahead of it’s time in the thought that went into the masterful way that the content communicates the spirit of the film.

The Public Service Announcements screened at cinemas are dark in their un-PC hilarity. Edward Norton and Brad Pitt – in character – ask viewers to turn off pagers and cellphones while commenting on molestation and scatology.

Despite it’s age, the film has a lot to offer: a strange love triangle; some important philosophical questions regarding masculinity, family and modern society; and legendary one-liners that’ll make a sailor blush. If you haven’t seen this film yet, do yourself a favour and pick up a copy, you consumer, you!