Gah, computer graphic design lectures are boring. It mostly makes sense, but the ‘rules’ for good design can really all be written down as a list of bullet points. These are from the second lecture - composition, the first lecture was on shape. What could be on a hand out and covered in 10 minutes takes the full 50.
- Balance
- you need it
- horizontal looks better a bit higher in the page
- is good, but tension makes great design
- tension needs to be purposeful, either done or not
- doesn’t need to be boring, good design can be completely balanced
- Contrast
- balance creates harmony, contrast challenges harmony
- represents choices
- contrast can be created using
- tone
- scale
- shape
- colour
- type
- texture
- (everything from the first lecture)
- easiest way is inversion
- go against the norm, if something is supposed to be small, make it big
- Positive and Negative
- positive is anything that dominates
- negative is anything that is passive to the eyes
- not necessarily light and dark
- Unity
- automatic human characteristic
- design should assist unity (few elements is good)
- close juxtaposition is good
Having a website is fun. You can find out what and who links to you. For some reason even though I haven’t linked to it for about a month I have been getting quite a bit of traffic. Looking through the referrers, most come from searches for gun names, on one of my pages I list a lot of different weapons that I would like to include in a game. Also some of the searches are for “voodoolabs”. Come on, who does a search for that?
I once commented on someone’s blog who had just procured a mac mini. I linked to this page. It appears that someone grabbed that link (which wasn’t linked to from my website at all) and posted it on their blog. It’s a weird world.
Also the msn search bot has been completely walking all over my site. I’ve had over 40 hits, way over the actual number of pages on my site.
I’m wondering, since I get so many hits from searches for gun names, should I provide more information about weapons on my site? It would be fun to get more hits, but that’s not really what my site is about. I don’t really want to come across as a gun mad freak, because I’m not. I just like realistic weapons in games, weapons have personality they have received from games which is cool.
To the left you will find some links, these may change from time to time. If you leave your mouse over them a tooltip should popup with some sort of description of that site.
I believe that the internet is a great place for entertainment, hence the large number of entertainment links. I’m afraid that I’m a linkaholic, I will often instant message my flatmates with a link that I have just found. Hopefully the number of links here won’t explode, otherwise I suppose I will have to use something like del.icio.us.
Before I continue much more, I have to mention an awesome site that I visit a lot. Gamedev.net is great. The tutorials and articles are mixed, some of them are great others not so - but the great thing that this site has is it’s forum. It’s a great place to bounce ideas around, find out what other like minded game developers are doing and generally have fun.
I’m not heavily active on the forum, but I have started a few threads and had some good discussions. There are a lot of impressive people that are regulars and have a lot of knowledge.
Well I have set up wordpress, which looks rather default at the moment. I spent some time looking through a lot of wordpress themes but none of them turned me on. So until I can be bothered making one myself (may happen, I could use my sites current design) we will be stuck with the default kubrick, which is pretty cool really.
What I really wanted was a wiki + blog piece of software, but I didn’t manage to find anything good enough (or bloggy enough) that had wiki functionality. The Tao of mac guy has a cool bit of software - I’m not sure if you can use it though. I will have to have a look.
I’m not really sure what you should expect from this blog thing, I’m not sure what is going to happen. Hopefully I will update it enough, and maybe get visitors. Which reminds me, I need to put a link to it on my front page.