To set the mood for Halloween coming up on Friday, Andrew Lindstrom has a great post on his blog Well Medicated, that features 100 amazing illustrated horror film posters from the past.  Its a little sad that these days the majority of film posters seem to focus on which celebrities face should be shown on the front instead of a well thought out illustrated design that resembles the film.  Anyways, go check out the link there are some great ones in there.

I recently Art Directed and lead designed the newly re-launched mtvmusic.com website. Dark Igloo designed the awesome logos throughout the site.  This site brings the focus of music videos back to MTV and allows users to rate videos, embed them into online communities, add videos to their profiles and more.  The site is just a soft launch but is already receiving some positive hype.

Related links and reviews:
Alley Insider
Idolator
Gig Maven
Cover Awards

A couple months ago I remember seeing some ads looking to cast people for MTV’s new show Engine Room.  Curious to see what this was all about I followed the link and found out this would be sort of a reality show featuring designers from all over the world specializing in different medias and competing to win a prize of $400,000.00 USD and a ton of HP gear.  I must admit, I was thinking of possibly sending in a audition tape just to see what would happen, after all, this was a first of its kind for interactive & graphic designers.  They have Top Designer, Top Chef, Project Runway, Shear Genius and I knew it was only a matter of time before someone picked up on a show that featured a bunch of designers working on computers all day. As much as I thought it would be interesting to actually make it on the show at the same time it could end up like The Hills, My Sweet 16, etc. and that would just be a nightmare for me.  Anyways to the point, I just saw an episode online the other day and it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.  They divided the four teams into different regions of the world each team consisting of four people, the only person I knew or seen their work prior to the show was Jonathan Yuen.  I ended up watching all 5 episodes each one is only about 8 minutes long so they are rather short.  Challenges so far have been creating a website, stop motion video, recreating the HP Hands video and designing a tattoo that would be inked onto strangers.  The season finale is next week and I’m curious to see what the challenge and winning team will be. Any thoughts? 

One of my photos I took last year at Coney Island will now be part of the fifth edition of Schamp New York Guide<.  For those of you who are unaware of what this is as I was before they notified me, Schamp is an online guide to different states that features places to go, shop, dine, arts & entertainment and anything else you need to know about the place before or during your visit.  They also have a iPhone and iPod Touch version of the online guide which will definitely be helpful if you are already out and do not have access to a computer. 

While I was online doing some research on freelance agreements, contracts, invoicing, etc. I stumbled across the blog of David Airey, a logo designer located in the UK.  Within the 3rd page of his blog I came across the article “Using freelance graphic design contracts” and after reading the brief introduction I continued to read the rest of his post, after all this is something that I was looking for.  I was definitely fascinated with this topic and his post had a great amount of helpful information and related links.  After reading that I decided to go through a couple more pages to see if there was anything else that would be useful and before I knew it I had spent about 2 1/2 hours on his blog going through page by page scoping out the topics I was interested in.  There is a ton of useful information that he has posted over the years that will help out anyone from a designer to a blogger.  I highly recommend spending some time and reading through his blog. 

There are a couple of design conferences coming up in New York next month that I am possibly thinking of attending.  Pause ‘Ideas In Motion’ a conference presented by FITC will take place November 10-11 at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center. This event focuses on broadcast and film with a line up that includes MK12, Buck, GMUNK and Hush. Future Of Web Design takes place November 3-4 and will focus on the direction that web design is gearing towards.  Topics will include typography and web app interface design, all focusing on the future of course.  Some notable speakers are Daniel Burka founder of Digg and Hillman Curtis. 

Dear Science is the newest album from Brooklyn based group TV On The Radio. Personally, I don’t believe any of the tracks are up to par with their old hit Wolf Like Me, but this album still delivers some good tracks such as Halfway Home. Other songs seem to have an influence of R&B and Jazz and one song even includes strings borrowed from Enya’s Family Tree.

Glaceau> was among a few sites selected for the 14th Communication Arts Interactive Annual issue. This is one of my favorite sites that I worked on during my time at Big Spaceship. This issue is now available at most bookstores and features a wide range of work by other great agencies.

Before making the decision to freelance full time, one of the final projects I had the opportunity to work on while at Big Spaceship was Quantum Of Solace online mutliplayer game.  The film will be out in theaters in November but for those of you who can’t wait to see it, you can experience the online game here.  One of the challenges for creating this game was to make levels based off environments in the film with pretty much no assets provided. At the end of the first Bond movie, Casino Royale, there is a villa along side the ocean, this is one of the levels in the Q.O.S online game and to achieve the angle that was needed to make the game the villa had to basically be recreated from scratch. I started in Illustrator by making outlines of different sections of the villa then creating the columns, rails and the roof separately and placing it into position on the villa. I tried to texture it as well by creating bricks, shingles and shadows but it looked too vectorish.  I brought the final illustrated villa into photoshop and overlayed numerous textures on each part of the building which took quit a while to make it not look like a pattern.  The final part was adjusting colors and shadows to match that of the real villa.