Website and Journal Cover WIPs

The last few weeks of school have been mostly focused on getting sketches and mockups done for the various projects that I'm working on. I've mocked-up my website in Illustrator and Photoshop, and that's currently being implemented in Dreamweaver (well, to be honest, really the only feature of Dreamweaver I'm taking advantage of is the auto-complete). Chrome is simply brilliant for checking out my website progress. RMB > Inspect element lets you see a whole ton of info and do some crazy things to boot. You can see html on the left, css on the right, and metrics lower down that give you visual cues on how the padding, margins etc. are working on the page. You can uncheck bits of css and see how that changes the page, and even change values in the browser itself. That works on any page, by the way, so I spent some time unchecking bits of facebook and twitter css and royally messing up the page. A refresh will get it back to normal, if you're freaking out. Sorry, I'm not going to post any images from my site mockup yet, so you'll have to wait for the grand reveal in a few weeks. I've been wanting my own site for years and never got the momentum to make it happen on my own (despite getting books on html and css, downloading dreamweaver demos, and making several false starts), so this is pretty exciting.

The other project that I'm really getting excited about is the 3D journal cover in Cinema4D. Here's my sketch of a fake journal cover advertising an article on transgenics in hamsters.

It's an editorial piece, so I get to be creative with the style and content. The background is that hamster cells (CHO cells) get used to produce human enzymes for use in therapies for people with non-functional copies of the enzyme. The idea was to represent this process somewhat conceptually using laboratory equipment motifs, but more in an old-school style mixed with mechanical/factory parts connecting it all together. Hopefully the final product will be visually interesting and engaging, while allowing for a few levels of interpretation. That's my goal, anyway.

Well, I always end up writing long posts infrequently. I'll work on more frequent shorter updates with a better picture to word ratio. This blog is getting close to 10,000 views as counted by the google counter thing. So, again, thanks to all that read! Here's a TL;DR cat for you.

Later,
Stuart