Dan's Blog

Adios

This week in CDM we didn’t have a guest speaker in to talk to us so instead we were to watch a Lynda.com video in the category of creative inspiration. I chose the video which is about an Italian designer named Simone Legno who is known for his “unique characters and colorful style”. Simone has made his work/passion into a global brand. Simone works within ‘tokidoki‘ which is an apparel production company that uses art and iconic characters like Adios, Mozzarella and Sandy. I know Adios but not the others…

Like a lot of illustrators he started drawing at a really young age and was noticed to have a talent at it. He was going to go on to study political science after high school but discovered some illustrator software from a friends brother and got really into it. He decided to go to design school instead. (Probably the right decision). He then became fascinated by the growth and popularity of the web and flash about 12 years ago and decided to make a website to showcase his work.

A lot of his work is his styled very Japanese. He really appreciated the clean and visual Japanese culture so he decided to base his work around it. Most people thought he was Japanese before they met him which is quite a compliment.

As a fan of skateboarding I really liked the designs he does for skate decks. He gives some nice tutorials on designing them on Illustrator which I might just have to come back to for some ideas.

Some chat with Simone:

• He says it always important to have a logo or brand but more important to have your own style.

• He reckons a great way to start design is on t-shirts because you can get your designs notice and I figure you could get a lot of feedback.
• He reckons his cute characters aren’t just for kids because it is pop culture for anybody.
• For the future he wants to develop his style but now he wants to get back to painting more than he has time for.

Skate

His advice to anybody that wants to become a designer is that you should never feel you are finished ,that you should have a hunger for new ideas and to never stop working because there will always be someone out there better than you Until next time………

Cathal Brugha

Michael Collins

Good afternoon to my many many fans who keep up to date with my blogs every week. This week was a goodie in Creative Digital Media for two reasons. One, we went on a class trip to Dáil and Science Gallery and two, we get a nice little break for two weeks for our Easter holidays. Being a student has many benefits.

So on Tuesday the 23rd the 3 class groups met up on Kildare Street at the wee hours of 11am to visit Leinster House. The tour was arranged by our lecturer Clodagh Lynch and Ronan Mullen who also works at Itb. Ronan was able to set up the tour because he is actually a senator in the Seanad. Ronan is an independent whose constituency is the National College of Ireland and so was elected in by college graduates from the likes of Trinity, Maynooth, Galway etc.

This was the first time I have ever been to Leinster house and to be honest I never even thought I’d be too pushed to go. Politics are not something I have really taken too much interest in over the years which I know is terrible but ya know, we aren’t all perfect. It is just something, that as much as I’d like to know more about, often bores me to tears. Saying that though I’m really glad I went because it was extremely interesting and I definitely learned more about the system of Government we have. I think the one and only time our political system was explained to me was in primary school which is over 10 years now. Ridiculous. Ronan also gave us a good talk last week to prep us on the history of our republic, our constitution and the 3 powers of government in Ireland. It helped having the background in my head so when I had my wander around I knew what the two houses did. I’m not going to get into it now because I’d be here all day writing about it so heres a nice link to wet your political taste buds: http://www.oireachtas.ie/parliament/.

So yeah, we went inside so we did for a cup of coffee. I was expecting a quaint coffee shop but no, of course it was a full bar that we went into. I never would have thought there was a bar in the house. The tour guide took us around firstly to ‘An Dáil Éireann’ and it was great to actually see the place where it all gets done. It was smaller than it looks on telly

Some facts about the Dáil:

The current, 30th Dáil has 166 members.

Members are directly elected at least once in every five years by the people of the Republic of Ireland.

The Dáil also has exclusive power to:

• Propose the budget (which may not originate in the Senate).
• Ratify treaties.
• Declare war or permit the state to participate in a war.

The current Dáil derives from the 1937 Constitution of Ireland, but claims a direct line of descent from the ‘First Dáil’ of 1919.

After lunch we went to the science gallery at Trinity College. I had a very different picture of what that was going to be in my head. I was let down quite a lot. It was simply a single exhibition called

HYPERBOLIC CROCHET CORAL REEF: A WOOLLY WONDER. It’s a woolly wonder how it became a display in the first place. It was bits of crochet reef which was put together by plenty of different people. There’s also some sort of confusing science behind it so here’s a link to the site because it really don’t want to explain it: http://www.sciencegallery.com/.

So that was it. Leinster House was great and the science gallery, not so much. Thanks again to Ronan for setting it up. Later folks.

This week in CDM we didn’t have a guest speaker in to talk to us so instead we were to watch a Lynda.com video in the category of creative inspiration. I chose the video which is about an American motion graphics and visual effects artist by the name of Ron Crabb.

Motion graphics is something that interests me because so many of  the Hollywood films that have been coming out in the last 10 years are using them. I don’t know a lot about the technicalities behind it but I look forward to hopefully learning them.

Ron lives in a place called Blakely Harbor Park in Washington but works in the film and tv industry with a lot of his work coming from Hollywood. He talks about how the improvement in internet technology allows him to work from home because a lot of his work can be uploaded around the world instead of having to be done in a studio. I thought that was brilliant. Making money right from my home would be amazing.

So like many people in the digital media world Ron has a colourful background that has shaped the way he works today. He wanted to do fine art in college but ‘blew it off’  and went to California. He got into a print shop doing art for sportswear which lead to logo design. He then got a job doing graphics for a news company which lead onto computer graphics in 1985 and it all rolled from there. He talks about how now in his career he would like to define what he does rather than doing too many different things. It always interests me to hear when people in this industry are constantly doing different types of work because as someone who likes variety I’m excited to see where I end up.

Ron got to work on some big films such as Xmen and Last Samurai where he created matt paintings. Mostly they are backgrounds or add ons to sets to make them look much more realistic. I never knew this was done and some of his work is unbelievable. It look so real! Here’s one from his webpage:

Matt Painting

This guy is the king of Photoshop. He is given hig definition photographs and it’s his job to change them and make them fit into the background. He shows a painting done for speed racer which is 12,000 pixels wide! Working in Hollywood demands amazing work and Ron is fantastic at what he does.