Content

I've been working on UX wireframes this month and have been reading a lot of posts on design and content. This is one of the best I found, I think it makes a great point about the role of final content on the whole development process:
http://boxesandarrows.com/view/the-content

flash junk!!

 I've been building a Flash site and have uncovered mountains of old video bits from over the years, so I thought I would share some of them this month:

 

 

Say Hey!

 

Another February is over, the end of another Black History Month and this weekend's beginning of another Spring Training made me think of trying another portrait in Mudbox, Willie Mays, the greatest Baseball player that ever lived.

I recently found myself in the West Portal District, where I lived when I first moved to San Francisco and I remembered at that time Mr. Mays, who now has a statue in front of AT&T Park, was trying to buy a house in nearby St. Francis Woods. The Neighborhood Association (or whatever they called themselves) was doing their level best to keep him out. Not the racist south of the 1950's, but liberal S. F. of the '70's. Bad for property values, you know.

I used to see him in the local shops. I did not hesitate to greet the other Giants I saw on the street back then, Bobby Bonds or Orlando Cepeda, but I would never have dreamed of approaching Mr. Mays, he always looked really pissed off. Damn straight.

Sunshine State

Here I am on the final day of January, watching the Florida primary results and thinking about getting in a first blog posting in for 2012. I’ve started playing around with an interesting app from AutoDesk on my iPad called 123D, kind of a stripped down version of Mudbox, their digital sculpting tool. 

Like Mudbox, it comes with a library of models, both figures and objects, as well as simple geometric primitives, like most 3D programs. From there the sculpting tools are easy to use, but somewhat limited. You don’t have vectors or planes that you can grab and adjust, you just use your finger to model and a malleable, clay-like substance to build up or cut into. There is also a basic brush to paint the sculpture and a stencil tool that I haven’t been able to really figure out yet.

 

I started with a basic head, with the idea that I could create something I could use as my new profile picture on Facebook, which I haven’t changed in quite a while.

Here are the three stages. First the basic head template, then what I exported to PhotoShop as a .PNG (you can e-mail .PNG images or rotating table top animations as Quicktime .MOV files or post to Facebook, Flickr or YouTube) and finally the finished image. That’s me, swimming with the dolphins in Miami.

O. K., not much of a resemblance, so to test my portraiture abilities in the program I also took a shot at one of the Republican candidates (not literally of course, but not a bad idea. I'm always surprised that no one accidentally shoots Santorum when he goes moose hunting, he looks so much like Bullwinkle). Newt Gingrich always reminds me of a great description Ernest Borgnine uses in the great Sam Peckinpaw movie The Wild Bunch…”That guy’s nothin' but a two-bit redneck peckerwood”.