Conversations: In the pipeline

The next two designers I want to interview are Meenakshi Chandiramani, a graphic designer with a passion for good fonts, and Brian McGee, an illustrator who works for all kinds of big people. I've been emailing Brian, which is a lot more difficult than talking. I'll go and talk to Min this afternoon.

So far in my potential podcast collection I have:
Matt Aberline - Costume designer
Eva - Advertising Project Manager
Meenakshi - Graphic designer (business cards, websites, brochures)
Brian McGee - Professional illustrator - still a maybe

Updates will follow!

Conversations: Talking to Eva

Conversations for relationship, possibility and opportunity!

This week, Tanya's part of the project is to talk to designers. Firstly, to see what they think about applications of the image bank. Secondly, to invite them to become part of the community of designers we are creating by making a podcast (video, sound and stills) about their personal design process. The easiest thing for me is to talk to people in Hong Kong, but I'm also starting email conversations with people in other countries.

This morning I booked a one hour conversation with Eva Ng, a creative designer who works as a Strategic Planner for BBDO - the advertising industry. It turned into a two and a half hour conversation with a lot of emailing of links. She uses resources like Getty and a cheaper one called istockphoto for personal design projects when she wants to buy an image with rights.

Resources for designer how-tos (Ms Eva also makes strange little sock creatures for animal charities in her spare time) include www.Blip.tv and Etsy.com. Apart from taking about our resource, we had a ripping good conversation about creativity in all our various projects. I told her about Anna Gleeson's book-binding-for-artists business, and that sent us off in another direction. i talked about my projects. At the moment I am creating two diary series of the area I live in, Aberdeen. One called 'crimes of my neighbours: diary of a complaint' and the other called 'crayonographs: diary of an illiterate', as well as a blog to document the creative protest of a group of residents in Sham Shui Po whose district is being redeveloped and who will lose their 50 year old community. So we shared all that stuff, which all has nothing to do with the costume image collection, but a lot to do with how inspiring and USEFUL it is to be in touch with people who are really up to stuff with their creative projects. It's fabulous, and it's the life-blood of Beautiful and Useful.

Some other things we discussed: Threadbanger, how to think, the from Mao to Now exhibition.

Eva has taken on starting to look at her design process and how she manages her ideas for work. She'll take notes and snapshots and then we'll get together and turn it into a podcast later this month.

What next?

Hey Gang, Matt here... Gosh but how time flies... Since the last entry, designed both Zirkus and the 30th Anniversary Mardi Gras Parade and Party, worked in Hong Kong designing several productions, visited London and New Zealand to meet with project collaborators and now I'm just thrilled to spend the next few months in front of the computer.

(You can check out how I designed Mardi Gras, including designing for Olivia Newton John and Cyndi Lauper, at my design blog Aberline Sketchbook. Lots of cool videos.)

Tanya, or Ms "Development", is coming from Hong Kong for a short period to oversee our image capture process, install the wikipedia, finish off our high school Oliver Web Quest, sort out our podcasts and the list goes on... It is going to be a really cool time which obviously involves the long awaited redesign of the web site. It seems we have a million ideas just sketched in and now we need to pull them all together. Below are some drafts of what we want the site to look like.


Obviously it will be far more interactive with heaps of resources for people to access. I wanted to keep that "story book" illustrative feel we established in the Beta site. I like the idea of almost no words, just pictures. We need to mix it up a bit though. My agenda as a designer is to illustrate my designs as realistically as possible, when that really is only a fraction of what you can do with our resources. The photo realistic style puts people off sometimes cause they think it looks too complex and maybe not a style they'd want to try. Most of the images on the website are there because they were created for a real design job. So I've got to include a range of styles...

I'll add that to my list of things to do...

In the next few weeks, users will be able to download image kits which means we'll be officially open for business! Hey - I'd love some other people's work on the site. Let me know if you're up for having your illustrations ruthlessly exploited and I'll swing you a kit to two to work with.

On with the relentless pursuit of beauty.

Matt

This month: Drafting the Scheherazade illustration project, and creating a Toy for Aberline.net.

Scheherazade Update:
And while that's not really a Form Finding Function topic, I thought the evolution of some of the illustrations for Scheherazade are kind of cool, and they involve components from Aberline.net.

For Scheherazade, I started making the images by doing some photography that I could base the finished image on. I know this sounds like a infomercial sell, but even I was surprised how the work improved when I started using components from Aberline.net.

You'll see how for the first 4 drafts, my ideas were locked into place, but with the help of these new resources my last draft took a radical departure into a much more free form. Also, it was great working with an image knowing that I had at least 10 other views of that object to work with - rather than trying to make just one image fit a variety of forms.



You can look at the Scheherazade project in more depth here: http://mattaberline.blogspot.com/

Or look at Aberline.net here:
http://aberline.net


Toy:
We just completed a major shoot where we improved all our image collection factors and decreased the image editing time from about 7 minutes an image, to about 2 minutes in most cases. I can't tell you how cool that is - normally editing my standard 60 images a day would take all day but now I can knock it over in the space of a few morning coffees.


This shoot also included the photography for our new toy, above. My good friend, and otherwise very useful man Matteo, agreed to pose for our new dress-em-up game and we've finished the graphic components for this. It's a bit camp I know... Here's the looks you can get:



This new toy will be different from the one we've currently got at Aberline.net under "fun", in that all the image layering can be done online as opposed to downloading the Ishell mini program we have now. Should be online in the next month or two... stay tuned!

Can we do a blog quiz?

We are trying out some ways of communicating and being interactive. This is one of Tanya's ideas... Still working on the beauty part. Possibly it's useful.

**I am removing the link for the quiz as it's suddenly been targetted by spammers! - Tanya, 3 Oct 2007**

l, tan.

Is it fun to have a blog-based competition or poll or survey?	Yep Nope
What genre(s) of costume do you want to see as a downloadable?
Email Address:

Please Unlock The Doors...

Hate to say it but image editing sucks.

My chinese star sign is an Ox - which means I'm supposed to be good at hard slog work - but the relentless boringness of it seems to have done me in... So edit-Matt is taking a few days off editing and doing something much more creative instead - revamping our websites. I'm putting some concepts together then sending them to Tanya in Hong Kong to make work. I was thinking something fun, but elegant (or just clean), and definitely "work in progress"...


The good news is - the image content we're getting at Hero Frock Hire is probably the best we've ever got - and we're managing to standardise the approach which is going to make all the packaging done later a lot easier. But same old story, some of the ones we did first, just aren't as good technically as the ones we're producing later... so I'll have to make that annoying-tough-call about reshooting some things. Also, we've had the lovely Anna Gleeson visiting from New York in the studio as a model, and a mini-film maker before she dashes off to her exciting life in Tokyo. That means heaps of new blouses and garments that require sleeves! She certainly puts the old wooden manniquin to shame.

In addition to this blog, I also have my own blog where I talk about any sort-of external projects and at the moment is the Scheherazade Illustration Project. Basically I'm putting both the illustration resource and my illustration skills through their paces.

So the end of month deadline for the first downloadable has been well and truly missed - but we have:

1. A general idea how to package the files
2. A 3rd party digital asset distributor that can process payments for us
3. Some great images with our best ever technical standard
4. Some footage for a little "making of" film!


Back to the beauty... Matt

Lock the Doors!!!

Tanya and I have set up a few outrageous goals to make happen by the end of this month and subsequently, I think the best thing is just to be locked in front of the computer for the next two weeks. We're aiming to produce our first DOWNLOADABLE by the end of the month. We're aiming for 1200 images on a particular theme - and in this case: Victorian-Period Female Working Class. The means producing three hundred and somethings images a week, and each one takes at 5 - 10 minutes to produce... The good news is, despite the passing of summer into autumn, it is still warm enough to go swimming at the beach!



The picture shows one of our packaging tests - the new plan is for the user to download all images of each object as opposed to the one by one method.

We're also looking at producing our first offical toy, like the paper doll game on the Use It page - but this time we want to do Farmer Boy goes to Mardi Gras. The idea is to have two distinct looks and I think we'll get that! I created a costume with Matteo Olivi, who assisted me at Mardi Gras many-a-time, and we'll be using that as a base.