Motion typography advert

The words "motion typography" caught my attention when I was going around youtube as usual. After two lesson about typography in class, I'm kind of interested in how people use typography in many diffrent things besides big title.
This advetisement is really simple yet I took a liking to it very fast. It reminds me of a lot of ads I saw on TV all these time, but I didn't really pay attention to how they use the types.




This ad is quite short (30s) but the information it provide is effecient. The text is always in motion but we have enough time to read and understand them. I found the transition of text is nice, eventhough text some time is tilted, there is always some straight line for us to see alignment and read easier. They use very simple fonts and combine capital with lower case to suit the important level of the text. The most important information is displayed longer too.

Lord of the rings practice

This is my result of Lord of the rings title, I couldn't find any font that is similar enough to the font used in original logo (Basicly, I can't find font that match both the letter "O" and letter "G"). Therefore I had to edit the text a lot. I laid and edited the text in Illustrator, then export to psd file to add some decoration to the title in photoshop (the metal and grungy feeling).

The font I chose for this is called Minion Pro (the hairline in this font is thinner than the font in orginal logo, the "S" is taller and the "G" has more serif. I changed them a bit in Illustrator)

I also try to make the "Gone with the wind" title. The font is really hard to identify and I couldn't find any font similar to the font used in the film poster. I decided to try a font available in my PC called Mona Lisa ITC-normal because its decoration is a little bit like the font in poster.

After this homework, I can really see that even a very little difference in two fonts, if we used one to replace another, it still feel not right.

Vector & Brush resourse site

I just found 2 sites with free resource for design.

1) Free Brushes : this sites has quite a collection of brushes, from grungy, vector to sparkle. Many brushed there is very nice and can be useful in design. Most importantly, it's free.

2) Free Vectors: vector packs isn't easy to find, so I was happy to bum into this site. Many cool vectors (not as many as brushes but still a lot)

I'm pretty much interested in vectors cause I just can't make them in Illustrator. I wonder if these vectors can only be made by drawing or there is other ways. From Maddy tutorial last Friday, I at least know how to make silhouettes of people. However, what I'm most curious about is the vector floral decoration.

Web design - Online job agency

Link: http://unix.rmit.edu.vn/~s3153665/sem3/home.html

I'm making a layout for Web Programming course, an online job agency website. There are still some problem with alignment caused by different browser and they're giving me a headache.

After I submit this layout, a senior student (who's in internship right now) gave me some comments about it.

1) She thinks I used too many colors (it should be less than 3 colors besides black & white). I have aqua, red and orange, which is pretty many. With a simple website like this, we don't need many color to distinguise sections.

=> I'm thinking about it and trying to reduce number of colors in my page. Probably I can omit red in the title, and change it to aqua.

2) "I don't like the thin gray line on the left column, it distracts my eyes"

=> Maybe because i'm the one who make it, I didn't realize the problem. That line suppose to be a shadow but it seems like I didn't do it right, look a bit not like shadow any more. Using simple drop shadow maybe a better idea.

3) In IE6, she detected another layout problem because of browser, but I don't have IE6 and cannot test it, this is dangerous.

Because she got power-off, we didn't discuss anymore problems. I'll have to fix this many times for later assignment.

Video - Chinese Painting and Calligraphy in 3D

This video really interested me when I first watched it (probably because I don't have much knowledge about 3D, so I found this rather new to me)
What I like about this video is that people can use 3D (which I think full of calculation, usually create mechanical or industrial look) to make something look completely 2D and organic. As we can see, the feeling of Chinese traditional painting is all created by the quality of lines, they are organic and humanistic. The texture and color is those of old paper, which I think greatly contributing to its painting look.
Finally, I like it because I've always been fan of Chinese and Japanese art.

Gestalt Exercise

This is my exercise on practicing Gestalt concept.

The first one I did, I tried to achieve continuance by arranging the text running along the edge (but I'm not sure if this can be continuance). Another thing is proximity with groups of text in different size and colors. I think the color scheme of this image is split complimentary (red + orange on green background), but I break it a bit when I use yellow on the small text.

I tried a second one to practice closure. Maddy help me with this a little bit in class (same concept but with another picture, I change it when I got home) There is only yellow (dark, and almost be orange) and dark orange so this color scheme can even be monochromatic (it maybe analogous though)

Font - The King & Queen

I recently found a nice grungy script font when I was on my usually surfing for new and unique font. This font really made me surprised with it's nice curves and grungy touch. The font's name is:

I think this font is very nice and detail. The first time I've seen it, I thought it's good be suitable for something that have connection with fairy tale and ancient times. Another special thing I found in this font is the unique design for some symbol like "?", "<", ">"...
Example:

This is ">" symbol

This is "?" symbol

These symbol can be used for decoration or can even used to make brushes. Very nice, isn't it?
Visit this link if you want to download (it's free) or look at all the characters design
http://www.dafont.com/the-king-queen-font.font

Homework - Collage practice

Music Man

This is my final image for the tutorial, I think the color is not as deep as the final one in tutorial. I skipped the steps after Level adjustment layer because I felt that it's only some optional extra if we want to do more experiment. Last sunday, I did a similar tutorial about collage and masking. This is the result (opps! their color both look too hot, it's burning my eyes...)

This is the tutorial if anyone want to try some more. (Link here)
I didn't do a very good job with that tutorial, I couldn't make the decoration on the model face have as much depth.

Blogger layout (1st draft)

Layout screenshot (click HERE for the full layout)

I want to try making a new layout for this blogger and this is the 1st draft of the layout. I called it 1st draft because I encountered trouble with the texture and maybe I will have to change it if I want to make it a working layout.

The current header, I saw it in many CSS layout recently (the way they use a gradient-color banner on top and change to another color for main background. Usually there is Tabs for navigation there, but I don't need tabs for blogger so just forget about it) and I definitely want to try. The texture and puzzles is from shapes that Photoshop has. I really like the texture and want to keep it, but I had trouble slicing the image because it's so hard to make the texture of background fit the texture of header when I center it, especially with monitor larger than 1024) For the rest of the details, there is nothing special, i just created some blog-like header and footer.

I've checked the code of Blogger layout and everything should be ok (except the footer, I'm not quite sure if I can do that). I'll try to finish coding this Monday. I hope it will be alright, I really want to have a personal look on Blogger.