80s Style Skate Deck

I wanted my main theme of the overall skate deck design was to revolve around music. The 80s was a great time for music and the pop culture was heavily influenced by the music of that decade. The boombox, or sometimes referred to as ghettobox, was the introduction of music mobility and allowed people to carry their expression of personality outside to the crowd. This similar expression applies to skaters with custom deck design, so I wanted to combine the two when incorporating to the design process.

A simple, iconic, and clean design was important as skaters were always on the move. I used two boombox speaker assets and placed them on each end to make the skate deck represent an actual boombox.

Added soft ripple designs made with Gaussian Blur as the background.

I wanted the logo to be distinctive, iconic, and to incorporate my name as an initial.
 


This logo was designed to look like a sound wave frequency, representing a music beat and rhythm. It also keeps with the theme of the skate deck design. The shape also reveals my initial NW. The color choice makes it standout from the cool and soft background.

The Vinyl Printout

Final skatedeck mount

 

 

Photo Restoration

Before

After

Character Vector Illustration

For this assignment, I chose an illustration of Ironman from *torispensor from deviant art. It's a very well done sketch I must say:

At first I was a bit intimidated by all the detail and layers, so I thought the best place to start is from the head down.

As I got the hang of it, I started making colour blotches using the brush tool for quick easy access of the limited colour palette of the character...also I started to plan out what to trace first so I know which sections to layer on top of...

When making the main chest section, I experimented with gradients and attempt to create the "shiny" effect expressed on the illustration. I traced out the main outlines and used a darker red to bring them out.

To fill in any parts that were black I made a separate layer under all my other layers just for black shapes...

 After getting used to the settings and workflow of Illustrator (and also ditched working with my tablet...works better in Photoshop for me personally...), I did much of the same things for the rest of the character. This is my final result, totaling 37 layers including the reference and color palette layers.

Final result:

I fairly enjoyed working on this character, despite the moments where I wanted to throw my computer screen out the window out of frustration... (just kidding, I'm in the school computer lab right now.) I learned a lot from this assignment, a great learning process and experience for future projects I want to do on my own.

Super Morlock Adventure Quest

Here are the photos I took from my downtown adventure~

http://www.flickr.com/photos/63371948@N07/

Members in my group:

SangKyum Dawn Kim
Jalil Majul Gonzalez
Graham Kartna
Catherine Xin Liao
Joseph Cheng

DMA188 - Blog Device Review

I did my device review on my favourite handheld portable system of all time, the Nintendo DS (Lite)!

With its unique dual screen design, it created a totally innovative way to interact with games not found on any other handheld system before it, or even any game console ever.

One thing I never knew about the design of the DS was that it wasn't Nintendo's first attempt at a dual screen handheld gaming system. The Game and Watch series from 1980 was Nintendo's first iteration of dual screen game device, which the DS took similar cues from.

The DS ran two processor chips, one mainly for 3D rendering and the other for audio output, WIFI and 2D rendering for backwards GBA compatible games.

 

The bottom touch screen is where the magic happens, it is a 3-inch resistive touchscreen used with a stylus to interact with games specifically designed for the DS. Many innovative ways to interactive with games for example, throwing a ball with a quick swipe gesture of the stylus and touching multiple points simultaneously for fast paced gaming.