I thought i’d check out russel’s page since i didn’t before. Man… ! it WAS so puretty.. i’m gonna learn javascript so i can make pretty pages too. but not right now. it’s a bit too much.

I liked the video people’s pages . Drew & Pat. I liked Jean’s page.. cos it was clever and subtle…. and Lucy’s page… SO cute.

That’s all.

Happy Holidays everyone!

I’m on summer holidays…

Thanks Rob and THANK YOU Kaz (for last minute feedback on Minisite 3 today – as emma so eloquently put it, “you can always do more, but youhave to stop sometime”…

And I’m stopping … NOW.

Enjoy the site: http://people.arch.usyd.edu.au/~kmah5957/ms3/

Florry called me and informed me that a FORUM has to be associated to my product site. OK.. I haven’t sworn this WHOLE time on either my blog or my sites… but WTF?! Of course a link will exist to this blog (being the development and research blog of the product)… Apple has a blog (see Blogroll) and so do most product sites… so that users can post their experience of the product and recommendations, what new funtions they have found for the object that it may/ may not have been made for etc… That’s all well and good… and this blog will “represent” that idea.. (hehe).. ok… i’ll look into the forum thing over the next 24 hours. I’m sure something will come up.

What can I can about my site with one day to go? I feel like I have millions of little ideas still and no rope to tie them all together with. Forget a working prototype. Forget a flash prototype. We’re gonna do this ghetto styles people. Back to basics(AND LOVING IT!!) I think I’m gonna go with screen shots and explanations of the visuals. That’s probably the best way to sussing out (my own) confusion. No better way to find clarity by diving in head first.

Even though I have been working on this site every day since i handed in maya (and on the concept since minisite 2)… i feel like only in the last week have i come to decide on some sound fundamentals for Minisite 3 — before today for example, I didn’t even know what image I wanted for the “company/ product”… I’m reasonably happy with what I’ve come up with. I think it’s my own style (so if you don’t like it — you can lump it!.. haha!.. no no!… of course not..  The colour choice i’m not so sure about… I wanted brighter colours and pink .. but pale green somehow was the last man standing. (it’s a mystery to  me too-  i must like it because it calms me and isn’t hard on my eyes after staring at computers for the last 15 hours. Work-work and uni-work tag team (makes my little eyes very tired… and i think this colour is the only one i can hand to see in as many shades… green.. colour of the heart chakra..

right!

i digress!

tomorrow ALL the content (only the relevant stuff) will be moulded into something of a mish mash of poetry and explanation of what’s going on. I only hope that my ideas and explanations are consistent with each other. I wonder if i’m the only one having this qualms and reflections??

D -Day is here people.

G’nite*

 Also, it’s parent site: “Fibre” is cool as… that is probably one of the most massivest understatements i have made in this blog. Check it out for yourself:http://fibredesign.co.uk/
Their projects are… too too fine…

 ”We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotion on a global scale.

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 – 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine’s Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.

The interface to this data is a self-organizing particle system, where each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. The particles’ properties – color, size, shape, opacity – indicate the nature of the feeling inside, and any particle can be clicked to reveal the full sentence or photograph it contains. The particles careen wildly around the screen until asked to self-organize along any number of axes, expressing various pictures of human emotion. We Feel Fine paints these pictures in six formal movements titled: Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics, and Mounds.

At its core, We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone. It will grow and change as we grow and change, reflecting what’s on our blogs, what’s in our hearts, what’s in our minds. We hope it makes the world seem a little smaller, and we hope it helps people see beauty in the everyday ups and downs of life.” – Jonathan Harris & Sepandar Kamvar - May 2006.

 Check out the site

AT LEAST – I have something to work from and more ideas of approach/ ideas for representation to play with. Other than that -NOW, I have to think of an orginal way of adapting this to the iPhone… or anything orginal at all – which will be hard. But I’m optimistic.

And my layout for my home page/ index is more or less done… i just need to choose colours, come up with a nice concept (eek) and add content… ha… Hmmm… that sounded like less in my head.

I read the first material that Petra gave to me “Encoding and decoding reality”… it’s very interesting. I’ll write up my thoughts tomorrow… it’s so late now. HTML has tired me out
Also TO DO tomorrow: read up on “Lorenz Attractor” & “Stranger Attractors” .. oh yea – and also about that new sony phone that changes the playlist when you shake it. Thanks Michael for the heads up on that one! Should be able to find out a bit about the technology that they used and how it works.
Aww… so much to do tomorrow..boo!

I like this new graphic. Even though it won’t be my final name of my application, I like the idea – i might modify the name when i think of a better one. For now, you can just admire the prettiness of this page

hihihi…

anyway, woke up, a little disoriented – i wanted to be at uni, “concentrating” right now, but that’s not happening… so things to do by tomorrow:

1. finish splash page

2. experiment with flash for

a) higher interaction with my website

b) to see if i can create a prototype of my visualisation

3. don’t get so easily distracted by trivialities on the internet

4. finish my layout (:-/ … eek.)

ok… better get busy now!

Tonight, i had dinner with FLASH MOON. For those who don’t know. He’s a pro wrestler from Osaka Pro.

Pretty sick huh? Well, he’s in Sydney for a holiday. I’ve decided that masks are cool and more of them should be worn (not the plastic phony masks that smiling superficials wear everyday, but actual colourful cool masks.

I saw this (below) in the paper yesterday from The great robot festival:

They modeled prototypes of face robots using a Japanese kabuki actor. Looks ca-razy… I have actually been thinking about how to use this for another application… but that’s another story. More in the inspiration department, I designed my very first stencil tonight, and it is so fun. Looking at Banksy books, make me want to be more daring with my ideas about interaction and contradiction and predictability… but they’re just feelings and thoughts, nothing I can call an “idea” yet.

Droopy eyelids and all this colourful input is inspiring.. but I can’t think properly about what concept i want to use for my next minisite. My concept of “Origami” that I created a splash page for has been canned (officially). But I like the image, so I might go with it, but just as a splash page, unless something else light-bulbs over the weekend.
Hopefully after handing in Maya-boo-hoo (what i have decided to call the next assignment due) my mind will clear up and be able to convert all this inspiration into more “tangible output”

OK… I started writing this blog on FRIDAY (last week) and it’s almost TUESDAY…. So i decided that even if it’s gonna be shorter and less detailed than I planned – the reason why i was delaying it’s much anticipated release (not) … I don’t want it hanging around. And I’ll just blam DECP1005 – the current pain in my backside and brain.

So feedback from Minisite 2 – yea – a few comments about the artwork. Rob said it was a little “too” organised and lost something that Minisite 1 had. I would say that I have to agree with him… To fit in line with his remarks about my idea development… the original “Maltese Falcon” kind of got lost when I got all bright eyed and dreamy.

Things to do/ include for Minisite 3 + personal feedback for Minisite 2:

1. Don’t use “height” attributes for content unless it is “auto” – otherwise I will have to include 4-5 (i.e. too many) “contentcontainers” in my stylesheet.

2. include an FAQ page in Minisite 3

3. Challenge myself with flash (since i didn’t have the time to do this for Minsite 2 and I think a flash presentation would be helpful when i present my protoype of the “conversations”

4. Think of a title for my website and more importantly a name for my application. My favourite words so far are: Beat, Climate, Origami, conversations, Me, reflections, “Reflex-Ions” (ha,,, i just thought of that one)… anyway… keep thinking of what would ring true to the concept and be catchy too.,

5. Keep the iPhone section since Minisite 3 is supposed to be the “pitch” of the product. (Can i just say – I have seen a bit of Kristian (“i’m too cool for school” ‘s Minisite 3 – and it looks really professional… Can one of my goals be “Try to look professional”??

6. I supposed that means research minsites for product launches… and techniques they have used to make the site look professional and slick. I realise that the inclusion of flash gimmicks isn’t necessary. Things to consider are font size, font family, size of page container, borders?, javascript to heighten interactiviy, layout.

7. Remain more “true” to my idea. Stick to themes of choas, interaction of sometimes opposing yet always interlaced elements, “emotivity”, conversing entities, unpredictability, engaging content/ images that provoke curiosity.

That’s all I can think of/ remember at the moment. This post was somewhat disjointed… I have this portfolio to finish so I can’t concentrate properly on my iPHone project – even though How i will express the visuals seems to be constantly niggling at my brain!!