Thursday 23 April 2009

Happy Earth Day

Minor update: I'm still working on the pages I mentioned earlier, but for enhanced functionality I should also look into cookies.

Also:




Big Ideas (don't get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.

Friday 17 April 2009

Interesting

Well, I'm still working on some tech demo things - they of course won't be linked to until they are done.

That's not what this post is about, though.
For some reason, today, I wanted to see if whatsinthebox had updated at all, and it has. I then went searching to find out what other people had discovered, and found this site.

It's all quite interesting. Initially I though "What's in the box" was a Valve produced HL2:E3 promotional viral. It could have been a fan-tribute, but I wasn't entirely convinced.
After looking today, I was further convinced that it in fact must be for Episode 3. After all, so much work has blatantly been put into it, and surely no-one would spend so much time and effort doing something like this if money wasn't involved, right?

It made references to Black Mesa, and on some pages even has the Aperture Science logo as well as the Black Mesa logo, so it must be linked... But right next to them, is the Hanso Foundation logo. From Lost.

I'm not sure what to think. Is this a cross-property ARG, or a really sophisticated one that is completely unrelated to the properties it repeatedly cites?

Also, this is just plain awesome, if a little creepy. It doesn't seem to be a joke - it's there on CNN.com

Wednesday 15 April 2009

Images

So, a bit earlier today I decided to alter some pages (hosted elsewhere) so that they aren't just all using this same template - sure it's nice, but it doesn't really demonstrate what I can do design-wise.

So I looked at the Google pages WYSIWIYG ("what you see is what you get") editor in order to get some inspiration. I found a very nice one called "Branches" - it was a nice green colour for the background, with all of the contents in a blue colour, and the header had a picture of a tree-branch with some blossom on it.

It was so nice that I wanted to do something similar myself, but I didn't want to use the exact same image (what with it being copyrighted and all) so I was presented with two options:
1) Draw my own
2) Use a public domain alternative

Unfortunately I am not very good at drawing using the GIMP - it looked sharp and pointy. "Stylised" didn't seem like a good enough excuse for the quality.

So, I searched around - I found a fair few good results... but none of the good ones were free. Oh well.

I generally don't like Google's WYSIWIG editor, I felt it didn't give me as many options as I wanted, so I needed to alter the html itself... but it only let me alter the html of particular blocks, particular DIVs. Sometimes you need to be able to edit all of the html, or sections that aren't contained within the DIV (for example, the body tag.)