Drawing tablets are fun!

Today I *finally* got my wacom tablet. Courier Post had it for almost a week, didn't deliver it correctly, were rude to me on the phone and so much for next day delivery aye! But that's another story - just don't use Courier Post if you want to get your stuff delivered professionally!! :-P Aside from that - the tablet is awesome it is so nice to use. (For anyone not so techy - it's a sensitive square and a special pen that allows you to write into your computer and also has pressure sensitivity.) I just got a basic wacom graphire, the cheapest on the market at $160.

By far the best is Photoshops understanding of it, the paint brushes are so much easier to use with the pressure sensitivity and it is so much faster to cut photos out of their backgrounds. I did this little photo cut-out and drawing this afternoon.

I have to say that this also made me discover something that I like about Vista - the built in tablet stuff is really useful. You can write in any application. To start with it couldn't understand my handwriting so well, but in the short time that I did it either I was learning or the computer was! it is still a much slower method than typing tho and too easy to make mistakes. One thing did dash my hopes tho - you can set customisation for an item and so i was hoping to set the right-click method to be Ctrl-click cause that's what I'm used to on a Mac and found I was doing it by habit on Windows. But no, the customisation in Windows seems to be limited to a couple of pre-setup options :-(

On the mac, the input is brought even another level cause the mac understands the pressure sensitivity as well as the handwriting. it is much easier to do the handwriting on a mac, not sure why but it comes out less scribbled. But unfortunately the character recognition is really bad, it could only understand one in every few words I wrote. But then I do have an older version of Mac OSX - I'll be excited to see if there has been development on this.

It will definitely be something that I'll use day to day instead of a mouse and for painting/drawing. :-D The writing thing is cool but typing is just faster and more accurate for me.

Illustrator night class - week 4

Well the final night of the Illustrator night class! We did 3D work, which was fun.

It's been such a good course, I've really enjoyed it. And most importantly, I'm not getting frustrated at Illustrator anymore!!

More Illustration

Recently I found the web designer wall site, and like many others instantly fell in love with the illustration in the header there. I was *so* happy when I found the tutorial on the technique. But after all, it's just pen tool tracing!! So I made my own, using the water colour painting I did for our wedding invites.

Good practice anyway. The pen tool is my trusted friend! :-D

So then I checked out Veerle's blog and followed her tutorial on making badges in Illustrator.

This was really good because a lot of the stuff like clipping masks I've learnt in the night course, but the use of layers in both of these tutorials and the depth effect in the badge one were new and very useful tips.

Oh and yes, I've been enjoying illustration so much that I've created a new category for it.

What would Aaron look like if he was staring in Sin City?!

This one was actually done in Photoshop, following this tutorial found via Photojojo.

Illustrator night class - week 3

Voila! A glass of red wine!!!

And a cute little birdie done on the side... :-)

Illustrator night class - week 2

We covered some new stuff this week and I came out with some things I think are pretty cool :-) Gradient Meshes are an automated way of taking an object like an eclipse and giving it some points to play with 3D type fills. The end result looks quite airbrushed. You could get very detailed if you wanted to, but I just started with some basic points and fills and came up with some stuffed olives!

Then we moved onto brushes which was cool. I'd heard great things about Illustrator brushes, and you can indeed come up with some very cool techniques. I ended up drawing a toy rabbit that had been left behind in the snow and gotten dirty (playing with the splatter brushes!). It was all drawn freehand with a mouse which is rather tricky...

Next week we're drawing a glass of red wine - exciting!

Illustrator night class

After using Freehand for so long, Illustrator is really frustrating to use! So I'd come up with a list of things that were bugging me, and enrolled for a night class at Natcoll. I felt so sorry for the tutor Claire, as she thought that she was teaching an Introduction to Illustrator, but everyone that is on the course are either full time designers or Mac operators! So she was a bit thrown and ditched her lesson plan for a quick overview of the tools in Illustrator. She did such a good job of it that all of my questions that I'd saved up were answered in one night!!

As expected, there were not the most beautiful results after the first night, but everything we did was really valuable. And one little personal victory - I drew a (purple) page with a curl *yay!*

Full Code Press

*Excited eeek!* I just found out that I'm a finalist for the Full Code Press NZ team for the design role!! Pretty exciting being one of three finalists, alongside Romain Perin and Steve Dennis! Like Steve, I applied for both the HTML/CSS role and the design role, and am a wee bit nervous about designing a site in such a short amount of time, but hey - challenges are good right!?! :D

Sneak peek - new website design

My wool still hasn't turned up for my cardi, I've finished Aaron's birthday scarf, can't do any gardening in this weather, and there are only so many cakes one can bake... so my creativity banks are fully charged with no other outlet than drawing, painting and design. When the weekend comes around I am sick of looking at a computer screen, so I grabbed out the water colours and started painting, cutting and collaging a new design for my website. It was so refreshing designing a website by paper.

Here's a sneak peek. The photo is very poor so it really is a peek instead of a preview ;)

Web standards presentation

*Wow* My boss told me last night that I've been asked to speak at Microsoft's Tec-Ed conference in Auckland on Web Standards in a .net environment. I think he's already accepted on my behalf! ;-) It would be a 75 min presentation - quite a bit longer than the Webstock one!

Yay for Safari!

:-D I feel slightly happier with my work computer today because I can now use Safari on it :-D Every day I get so annoyed with Windows and I really miss my little Mac at home, so this is like a slice of home at work! *A true Mac person at heart*

Safari for Windows is currently in beta (testing release) version, but the finished version will be ready later this year when Leopard is released. That is also when Aaron and I will be getting ourselves one of those gorgeous little macbooks *yay* :-)

Maori Market opening

Last night Kirti and I had the opportunity to go to the opening of the Maori Market exhibition. We had literally just launched the new website for The Pencil Gallery who are one of the exhibitors, and so Matt got us both tickets. They opened the exhibition with speeches from parlimentry ministers and some songs, which were really quite amazing. The majority of the people there were Maori and so everyone who knew the words joined in too, it was beautiful.

The art is breathtaking - a huge range of style and pieces - some stuff very traditional like carving and weaving, and then other stuff that is very contemporary. I have always had a liking for weaving and so some of my favourite stuff was the woven kite bags and in particular Alexine's woven bodice and skirts. She has woven beads in too, they are spectacular!

Something that always strikes me with artwork is when you see a piece in a book, magazine or in this case on a website - no matter how high quality the image is - there is nothing that compares with seeing the artwork for real. The amount of detail and texture in these pieces really blew me away, I think especially because I had already been working with photos of the artwork for the last couple of weeks.

Photojojo and blueberry pancakes

Today I got an email from Amit - one of the guys from a brilliant photography email newsletter called Photojojo. One of their upcoming projects is making a photo notebook, and for it they want to use a photo from the Flickr Photojojo group - and this photo of mine has been picked as one of the three possibilities. They're doing a trial run to see which one suits best, wouldn't it be cool if this one works out!? :D

A quick wee post with a cute wallpaper

Sorry everyone - I have HEAPS of entries to make on here, but haven't got around to it yet *so slack* But in the meantime, here is something for everyone! I have made a wallpaper of Cookie looking through a goldfish bowl. This is exactly what she does to our goldfish tank - very cute!

• Download 1920 by 1200 resolution (widescreen)
• Download 1600 by 1200 resolution (normal)

I did the illustration in Adobe Illustrator. I found a tutorial for doing glass bowls, and it kind of followed on from there. I am used to using Freehand, but have started teaching myself Illustrator - and am completely loving it so far!

If anyone else is keen to do something with the tutorial, I'd be very keen to see what you come up with :)

Visiting Otatara Pa and my thoughts...

As we were leaving Napier we stopped in to visit the site of the Otatara Pa. A large town used to be on these hills in pre-European times, and this area used to be very close to the marshlands and inlets that were in the area before the Napier earthquake. Now all you can see is farmland. The tell-tale sign that there used to be a town is the terracing that was typical of Maori villages. They have erected some fences and carved poles, I guess more for the tourists than anything else (?), but it does give you a sense of the history of the place.

One thing I find the saddest is that the sites of old Pa are all around the country - and yet typically we don't even know about them. We happened to stumble across this Pa - it was not featured in any tourist brochures we read about Napier and the Hawkes Bay. Sites of battles, wars, and things that should be important to New Zealanders are now privately-owned farmland and the only way you can typically spot it is if there is noticeable terracing on the land.

We have a huge problem in our country as the government tried so hard to forget our past - it isn't taught in schools, and general NZ public don't know anything about what has happened and shaped our country. I feel this has a huge part to play in the general lack of identity that a lot of New Zealanders feel; and definitely obvious as you see so much ignorance about Maori rights, equality and land rights. For example, I think all New Zealanders should know about events such as what happened at Parihaka, and yet most will look at you blankly if you bring it up.

I think it's awesome that the Otatara Pa is open to the public, it's definitely good to visit. The whole walk takes about an hour, but even walking up the first hill is worth it (about 20 min return).

Photo series

These were taken at the Botanical gardens lighting exhibition. I thought they made quite interesting shots.

Webstock mini

Last night Webstock had a mini conference, a 5-9pm thing with three speakers and networking drinks between. It was really fun! It was great to catch up with CJ, Natcol people and meet new people like Dale. And the speakers were all really great!

First up was Natasha Hall who talked about some usability examples on Trade Me. She had a huge line-up of their top traders who they had visited to better understand how they use Trade Me and manage their business selling on there. I was really amazed at just how much some people earn on there, the average gross income of her examples was like $700k!

Russell Brown then stepped through his recent trip to California, and ohhhh I wanna live in San Fran now!! LOL I'm so easily impressed, but it was a very exciting talk because it seems that there are just so many possibilities and initiatives there that are made possible by funds that are so much harder to get here in NZ.

And last, but no way near least, was Nat Torkinton who talked about 7 points of Web 2.0. Over the last few months I have been getting throughly sick to death of this buzz-word, especially when it is mis-used by marketers who have no idea what they are talking about. But Nat's talk was really great because he sought to clarify "Web 2.0", with real emphasis on the sharing of data and cross application of it.

It was a thoroughly good night! The next large Webstock conference isn't going to be until 2008, but there will be many smaller events such as this through 2007 - a great idea and I'm going to look forward to each one!! :D

Web Directions Day 2

Andy Clarke's presentation was a great way to kick of WD Day 2 - he talked about Creating Inspired Design, really pushing creativity for all members of a team, even code developers. How can we use design to convey a deeper meaning about the website? And how can we start to think outside the square of web design into the level of creativity that you see in strong Flash designs? These days the tools are no longer a hurdle, our imagination is the limit (although I think he may have been thinking ahead a bit to IE7's release ;) ). One idea I especially liked is the collecting of anything that inspires you creatively - like keeping a scrapbook. It has been a long time since I have done this, and after his presentation I took a little crappy disposable camera and took shots of everything! The highlight of the day was meeting up with Andy over morning tea. We had a quick wee talk about stuff, but I can't believe it - he remembered me from leaving this comment on my blog!! Then after that he editted the connection thingee to say crush and cute lady! Cheeky!

Laurel Papworth's presentation on the business of online communities was great, there were some really good stats there that I shared with the others; such as 9 times more visits that last for 5 times as long when you have a genuine online community on your website.

Jeremy Keith did a presentation of implementing unobtrusive Javascript practices with AJAX (aka HiJAX). I found this really valuable as I have spent so long teaching myself the best practices with CSS and seeing the major advantages that come of seperating presentation and strucutre, I would love us to apply these theories to the Javascript too. I just wish that Damian was there to see this presentation, cause I don't think he believed Kirti and I LOL! ;)

Poor Kelly Goto was loosing her voice by this stage!! However she powered on and gave a brilliant presentation on using the SCRUM practices alongside her Workflow practices. I first saw Kelly a year ago at the Web Essentials conference, and since then we have changed the way we approach our projects entirely. So it was very interesting to hear her developments, and I'm really looking forward to getting some time to look further into the SCRUM stuff. This is where you break your projects into three week blocks and at the end of each block there is a working functional result. She also gave a few more pointers on how to implement this succesfully.

What an awesome conference!! We didn't want to leave...! :( Kirti and I were too late to the after party though :( because we kinda got distracted by the shopping en route *blush* but I bought a really cool top for $10! *blushes more*

Web Directions Day 1

Day one of Web Directions conference was awesome! There was a lot of focus on microformats, accessibility and workflow; but here are my favourite points: Kelly Goto kicked off with a great keynote focussing on understanding your audience and the possibilities of the future (what about one personal avatar and setting across all apps, all hardware you own so you only have to update it once if you want to change).

Jeremy Keith did an awesome intro to AJAX. For a designer like me who is not into programming it was very useful. It was also nice to see that our using AJAX so far in Go Fetch is appropriate - not too much, but enough to make it easier to use (although we still have more to implement). Always ask yourself why an I using this - why is it useful? why does it make a good difference?

The Campaign Monitor guys talked thro what they had found developing their apps. A lot of this was directly tanible to us developing our apps and in particular Go Fetch - a small team building an app on the side for a specific use.

Unfortunately the catering and venue isn't as good as last year IMHO, as the whole thing is quite spread out on the UTS campus. But the reception tonight was good an it was really cool to meet more faces over some good nibbles and drinks!

Now it's time to hit the late night shopping ;)

Sydney day 1

We caught the first flight to Syndey, landing at 8.05am. After an hour through customs, we got to our awesome hotel (highly recommended!) and hit the town. The weather here is amazing, it feels like our NZ summer, not too hot not cold. I decided to check out the Rocks, Circular Quay area and Botanical Gardens cause the last two times I've been to Sydney I really wanted to visit these but didn't make it.

I saw an awesome exhibition at the M.C.A. - a collection of young aussie artists. There were a number of pieces that stood out - grafetti art, a scene made inticately from polystyrene balls, and a map of Sydney overlayed with Paris. One collaborative piece of Bart Simpson drawings drew me. The piece is the artists' comments about Evolution vs Intelligent Design theories and even though both have just as much merit as each other, we are taught Evolution as fact because we live in a materialisitic society. The Bart Simpsons had been drawn from memory, which was a comment on mass media - even though they were wonky everyone could still instantly tell they were Bart Simpson because of media. And then there were LCD screens hung up showing a spa pool bubbling away - which was the artists' way of telling everyone to just relax about these big issues. I love it! To me this is a brilliant piece of art - one that comments on something important, but is still fairly accessible to the people viewing it.

The Botanical Gardens were breathtaking, it was a lovely relaxing area. I especially liked the herbal area - it was so informative about all herbs: culinary, dyes, medicines, etc. and I learnt so much there.

I LOVE SYDNEY!!! :)