XELER8R

You may have noticed that as a designer - you’re constantly fighting file management. Fonts are missing. Images changed but not updated - “Why are the links to media broken again? Oh yeah - that .aep needed THAT missing plug-in!”

It’s kind of archaic isn’t it?

Well get ready for something entirely new. The good folks at Grid Iron have been feeding me enticing hints at this revolution for over a year now - and now ‘Flow‘ is finally unveiled.

Flow keeps a visual record of your projects. Their assets, the timeline and revision history, and the relationship between all related files.As you build up your project, Flow’s Real-Time Asset Tracking System automatically tracks your workflow and maintains the relationships between your pictures, movies, sound-clips, fonts, plug-ins, and color swatches on all your local, network and removable storage devices. By understanding the file formats for all popular creative professional applications and tracking all Import/Export, Save/Save As and Copy/Paste actions on both Mac OS X and Windows, Flow can show you how your files are related regardless of where they are stored.

The best thing is that it does this all behind the scenes - you don’t have to tell it to do anything.

Here’s some full screenshots

download a pdf about flow

PS: if, like many others, you think that Flow’s interface kicks major ass… it’s because my good friend Mark Coleran designed it. You’ve already seen his interface work in films like ‘The Island’, ‘Tomb Raider’, ‘Blade 2′ and ‘Mission Impossible’. Now his work finally comes to us on the desktop.

Depending on my schedule, there’s a possibility that if you’re at NAB in April, you’ll find me showing a few things at the Grid Iron booth (SL6220) - so be sure to come by and say hi.
// jayse

Filed under: Announcements, Design Technique on January 23rd, 2008 | 5 Comments »

The future of research - faster and, more importantly, fun.

1. Install the new browser plug-in called PicLens
2. Restart your browser
3. Go to google image search and search for your favorite artist or model (my good friend, designer Daniel Palacios, suggests trying his favorite model ‘vida guerra‘ if you can’t think of anything else)
4. click the new ‘play’ icon on each thumbnail.
5. Enjoy

Credit to Danny for showing me this thing… It’s become my new favorite way to search since it’s so fast. Many more technologies from these guys coming soon that will revolutionize the way we research and interact with images.

// jayse

Filed under: Design Technique on January 16th, 2008 | 7 Comments »

E-mail from Javin: “Hi jayse, I notice you have an excellence sense of unique color harmony in your work. Can you please share with us how you learned this? Or is it just from birth?”

I believe we’re all artists from birth, and it’s always good to learn as much as you can about everything else. Knowing your basic color theory is a must for any designer and any self-respecting visual effects artist. It’s both a learned skill and an innate ability.

Intelligent color choices can REALLY improve your design, compositing and sex-life.

Here are my main areas for inspiration and knowledge.

1. Fashion - I like looking outside ‘graphic design’ for inspiration as much as I can. The fashion industry LOVES color. They have the best exotic names (Where else can green become ‘Ice’d Glass’, or a soft-blue become ‘Innocence’?). Fashion designers are always predicting the hot colors for the new year - so that always makes for a good read. For those of you with girlfriends like mine who love shop for clothes - now you have something to keep the designer in you busy: notice those colors.

2. House-Paints - pick up free combination cards from Hardware-store paint sections - These have more useful/descriptive, less-emotional names than fashion like Lemon-Grass, Java, and Navajo-white. (which also happen to be the interior-colors of my house.)

3. Books - there are many color-books - but only a few greats.

One of my favorites is called ‘Color Index‘ because it has color schemes based on genres such as ‘Art Nouveau’, or artist such as ‘Monet’ - or moods such as somber, etc. No images - but a huge array of unique color combinations. Definitely a good reference - and a great way to learn from the master-artist.

My other favorite is Pantone’s Guide to Communicating in Color because it is context based and explains the psychological effects of color (this is good for expaning your color choices to clients etc.) Not to mention it gives many real-world examples of great design with the colors mentioned. (something lacking in most color books)

4. Sites

Some of my favorite sites are community based - and have some interesting combinations. Two faves are:

colourlovers.com

The new Adobe Labs’ Kuler: kuler.adobe.com which allows you to pick a base color and select buttons to immediately generate four additional colors as analgous, monochromatic, triad, complementary, compound, shades etc. This is one of my favorite play-toys for color combos.

There are, of course, many others - but these resources should give you a really good foundation to start building your preferred palettes.

Filed under: Design Technique, Uncategorized on January 7th, 2008 | 5 Comments »