The Beginnings Of Something New:

The trouble with the first website I made was that it was difficult to balance what I wanted to design and build, with what I was capable of designing and building. However since the first term idat 101 has been very focused on the improvement of our sites as well as learning more of what we can achieve. Some of which is how we are able to display our latest Twitter feeds on webpages as well as how we are able to host our blogs on our sites ourselves. The advantage of this is that my blog will look exactly like the rest of my site, making it clear that it is my blog, and has the same design as the rest of my site. The issue before was that our blogs were hosted by other sites, forcing people to be navigated away from our sites to a different host. The fact that the blog is now on my site really keeps everything together.

My old Index page was extremely minimal, and by minimal I mean it was a black page with the word 'ENTER' placed in the centre of the page. I always wanted to have a fairly blank Index page, but now I have a logo designed, I also wanted to use this.

Below is the difference between my first Index page, to my new one.

Old:

New:

The new one clearly shows the domain address, my logo, the ENTER link and an image of me.

Processing Ideas:

After several weeks of tutorials on Processing it was now time to use what we had been taught to design our own sketches for an end of term assignment. There are many many different sketches Processing allows users to create, however the amount of sketches I personally was capable of achieving were minimal. The brief included having to have the Arch-os files of one of the university buildings to control the processing animation. I decided that I wanted to choose the temperature of the ground floor, and would design a sketch that fit this changing factor.

I visited processing.org and openprocessing.org I got many ideas for what I wanted to achieve with my design. I wanted a circle in the middle

of the sketch that appeared to go round, and changing colour depending on the temperature. Red for hot, green for an 'in the middle' temperature and blue for cold.

After browsing I found some code that I was able to

modify to change the sketch to fit my design plan. Below are print screens of the different temperatures being displayed. I used 'if' statements to control which colours were displayed.

If cold:

If warm:

If hot:

These are early sketched of the design. With each new ellipse drawn I changed the 'r, g, b' values to random(255) to change the shades of each of them to give the effects shown above. The circles are also constantly being redrawn so it is constantly updated and shows movement.

I still want to add other elements to the sketch, but will wait until I have the Arch-os working to control it, at this stage I have simply given the temperature a standing value to test each of the statements. So far though, a good start.

To make the circle follow the circumference of a bigger circle in the centre of the sketch I used a tutorial which used cos and sin in mathematics. I then placed the centre of the large circle to the middle of the page by positioning it to half the width and height, (height/2), (width/2).

The Paw Print:

After jotting down a few designs on a piece of plain paper I finally decided I was happy with a couple of similar logos. I definitely knew I wanted continue with using red and black as the colour scheme so decided to keep the logo red and black also.

Here are a few of the earlier designs I came up with:

The triangular shaped logo's were simply knocked up in Photoshop just for a rough idea of how they may look in different colours assigned to each of the lines. It also helped me in deciding weather I liked this particular logo idea to be my final choice. I then decided to roughly recreate the logo, but in a a circular shape, to compare and help make up my mind. Shown below:

The reason the logo ended up going in this direction is that I wanted the logo to use the name OLZA, but not by simply spelling it out. I was aiming to use the letters to make up the logo as can be seen in the images above. the white circle around the outside is the 'O', and 'LZA' are in the middle. The reason for taking the designs from paper to Photoshop is that it definitely helped me see how the end result may look, as well as being able to edit an alter part to make it something I was happy with.

After a bit of tinkering and dabbling with this idea, I came up with the final choice which is shown below:

I definitely think this logo will prove to work well with the website through its colours and appearance.

more arduino shiz:

After several weeks of tinkering with the Arduino board, light sensors and trying to get Arduino to communicate with Flash, we were finally able to get all of it working. The light sensor was used to trigger the Arduino programme to trigger Flash into displaying the projection. Once all was set up, we took a video to show this working, shown below:

Clearly this is only a working prototype as the intended environment for this setup is the crossing at traffic lights as I have previously explained in previous posts.

The Arduino board as a sensor shield attached, with a light sensor and LED. Once the Arduino board was connected to a laptop we were able to use Arduino and Flash together to create the projection that was shown in the video. The idea is that the LED represented the light displayed on a zebra crossing, and once that was picked up by the light sensor, the Arduino programme picked up that the LED was on. This was read by flash and on this trigger began a timer. The timer would count the time lapsed during the time the LED was last on. Once the LED was picked up again, flash would then display words that were had the opposite meaning to how Stonehouse was. This reason for this is we were displaying words that were not how Stonehouse was at all but by projecting positive words on the street would slightly improve it for passes by using the crossings at traffic lights. The positive words we decided to display in the projection were words like beautiful, creative, inspiration, happy, colourful etc.

Now that we know the set up and general concept works in the classroom we are now able to set the projection up in our desired location.

Arduino With Flash:

Now we have fairly strong idea of where we want to take the project, we can develop more on the stages we need to complete to get the idea into a working project. As we managed to get the light sensor working with the LED and Arduino board we can now work on how we are going to involve the projector. We felt that the best way to make the projection itself was by using flash. This can be done as the light sensor can only record two pieces of data, which is off, and on. Off and on is represented in data as zero (0) and one (1), zero being off and one being on. Because of this, we can use Action script in flash to determine weather the projection is displayed or not. An alternative to this could be a projection is always displayed, but depending what the value is of the light sensor (0 or 1), will determine which image is shown.

Corporate Identities:

Companies represent their brand through the use of logos to gain visual recognition on their products. My current identity has been 'OLZA' in red and black with the letters O, L, Z and A arranged in the style of the sign at Love park in Philadelphia, the reason for this was explained in previous posts. However, I am now looking for a different logo people can identify with me, without using the style of the Love park sign. I want this logo to be completely original.

Here is the image I have currently been using is shown below:

This was satisfactory for the website at the time but now that I have redesigned my website I feel it no longer achieves the look I am after.

To help gain inspiration I decided to look closer at existing logo's companies use so that I could produce something that fit the bill. As my website will contain a lot of skateboarding content, I decided the best place to begin was simply by checking out their logos. Below shows a mix of logos that are all very different that Im hoping will help me when creati

ng my own.

Time I think to get the note pad out and begin juggling some ideas and designs.

Keepin' it Fresh!

It has come to my attention that I really don't have long before I have to have a pretty decent looking website for this years module. The only problem is I'm struggling on what I want the design to look like. Another website I happened to stumble across was a young surfers, Julian Wilson, who has just made it on to the DC pro team. Below is a print screen that shows what the home page looks like:

The navigation menu is easy to use and simple. The main reason for me being attracted to this site is the way in which it looks. The background image looks good and immediately draws attention. Another feature about the site that I particularly like it that it has a page just for videos. This is definitely something I would like to have on my own site. Although I already do, it's not exactly a page that looks all that good. I will definitely be looking into all the points within the next 2 weeks to improve the site I already have.

And heres the trailer for his new movie coming out in september, 'Scratching the Surface'.