Thursday 25 September 2008

The Biggest Drawing In The World



I stumbled upon this project several months ago. The basic idea is that using a GPS receiver one could make a self portrait over the entire world with the GPS route acting as a pen. With the project Erik Nordenankar released a video of him travelling with the receiver in various parts of the world culminating in a big pile of delivery notes and a plotted chart of the effects.
Unfortunatly the project was announced to be a work of fiction. Nordenankar had produced it as a graduation project for a graphic design and advertising degree and had always planned it to be a fictional piece due to budget constraints
Even so the project was one that put a big smile on my face when I saw it and the fiction was good enough to make me think the whole thing had been done as a publicity stunt for DHL

Thursday 18 September 2008

It has the power to move you


Its strange how a simple story told well has the power to move so many people. This comic has been doing the rounds since about 2006 and is still bounced around from time to time. The original story can be found
here. From here it was converted into a comic and made its way onto ytmnd.

I first saw it it struck me as a lovley little story not only focusing on the love of a parent but also how games can be a real aid to those who are housebound.

That was a long time ago, before my father passed away. Now when i read it its the last line that really gets me

"Show your parents as much love as you can, while you still can guys"

Because its true

Friday 12 September 2008

Riceboy (or how i learned to stop worrying and love the one electronic)

Over the past few years I have aquired a pretty big reading list of webcomics, ranging from simple dilbert updates (there funny because there true) to the rambling epic that is Megatokyo. Although many of these have become firm favorites I can think of only a handful that have held such grace and wonderment as Rice-boy.
Riceboy itself takes place on a surrealistic world known as Overside. Here agents, The One Electronic and Calabash on a 3,000 year quest seek "The Fulfiller" a mystical figure who will unite the world.
The figures in the story are to say the least surreal with all manner of multi legged creatures aiding and hindering our heroes thoughout the jorney.
The author Evan Dahm has succeded in creating a strange and enchanting tale, an epic that uses its sheer strangeness to combat the po-faced seriousness that often plagues fantasy epics.

Sunday 7 September 2008

The lost art of the low rez


When i was a kid games had pixels the size of a babys head, 800x600 resolutions were this weird holy grail and PC screens were about 15" and an 8mb graphics card was the talk of some kind of babbling futurist madman.
But these limitiations caused a strange thing: good bright designs. Think about your favoite games pre 2000, think about the mario games, the sonic games, theme hospital/park. these were games where being bright and clear to make things out wasnt just nice, it was vital to there funciton. Now look at Gears of War, brown men on grey worlds killing brown and grey monsters.
I've herd software designers working in 1990 talk about how starting small forced them to make correct design decisions. maybe we in our world of high-def screens, phong shading and textured bump mapping have indeed lost something: how to make a good, simple design

Tattoo Woman


Tattoo Woman, originally uploaded by C0nt1nu1ty.

Its been a while since I put a post up on the blog, i suppose nothing really has caught my eye, nothing has screamed out at me. So I thought that I would blog about something old rather than something new.

This photo is something that i feel has come to define my career, the hits it gets on flickr outnumber any other photo i've taken at least 10 to 1, its been submitted for competitions and was chosen for last years photobook, in shot it has dominated everything else. And yet it happned just by chance.
I used to work in a nightclub in Reading called the Fez, basically i took pictures of drunks for there website and got paid in alcahol. Most of the photos were ok, mostly pretty good group shots of people to show to there friends the morning afterwards. But this one came out by chance: I took it in the middle of the dance floor, first one was a dud so i took another, the woman thanked my and dissolved back into the crowed.
So i uploaded it to flickr and immediatly people seemed to warm to it, more and more people viewed it, now it gets between 1 and 4 hits every day.
The thing that made me think of it again was that i saw her this morning, she was standing in front of me at the supermarket and i just diddnt twig to who she was untill i saw the tatto as she was walking out. I couldnt catch up with her and now i'm in a bad mood as i couldnt get her name or more importantly a release form.