Week 09 
Web Space
After our last lecture with Chris on "The Art Of Saying Hello" I decided it was time that I got some web space, registered a proper domain name and get a proper portfolio web site up and running. You may remember last week I discussed my online name. I've decided to stick with my actual name for this as I feel it would be best suited for what I am looking for. After Chris's very high recommendation of dreamhost, I thought they would be a good choice to go for. I couldn't exactly say no to 500 gig of web space, could I? So as of now I am the proud owner of JonathanGribben.com. There is nothing up there as of yet but within the coming days / weeks I plan to get a bit of work up and use it as my main portfolio site for any prospective employers.
Site Re-think
Now that I have a proper web site to show my work on I think I should change this site to make it a bit less "official portfolio-y" and a bit more "weekly blog-y" if you know what i mean? I'm planning on getting rid of the navigation along the top of the page and using it to display some form of banner, and hopefully also change the background / colour scheme. As each week goes by I am less and less convinced by the background / colour scheme and I think it's definitely time for a change.
So here it is, my new improved blog site. I've completely re-built it from the ground it to try and get my CSS a bit tidier and easier to read, last time it was a total mess. I've kept the same basic layout but changed the colour scheme and added a banner along the top. The only navigation on this blog is to the other weeks and a button on the banner taking you to my portfolio site (JonathanGribben.com)
Character Creation
I briefly looked at characters back in week 6 and now the time has finally come to try creating my own. First of all I want to look at a few characters already created for my target audience. For this it's back to the cbeebies web site, in particular their page containing all cbeebies characters. There definitely is a wide range of characters, from simple line drawings to very detailed 3D characters. I want to try and stay away from 3D graphics, firstly I don't think it would fit with my theme overly well and also I still have nightmares of our year 2 3D studio Max module, but I'm not going to rule it out just yet. From the cbeebies web site I can see that bright colours and simple drawings is the key and if I want to I can break the ordinary rules of real life, i.e. if I want a talking dog a can have one!
I think because my project is Irish based I should try and incorporate some sort of Irish theme. So the first character I want to try is a leprechaun. Then I'm going to try a cool guy character, i.e. sunglasses etc. Finally I want to try some sort of animal, like a dog. My plan is to create the outlines for these characters this week and then properly create them in Flash next week. Once I have several complete characters I want to try out a questionnaire with some children, obviously in my target age ground. This will be a very simple questionnaire with one question, "which character do you like best", hopefully that will give me a good idea of which characters to include in my project.
Scribbles
The best thing about the time that I'm spending creating characters is that I get to use my new favourite app Scribbles which is an easy to use drawing tool. As my drawing skills normally aren't that great this is a perfect app for me. So far I've found it easiest to draw an outline using scribbles and then export it to photoshop to fill it in with colour and features. Obviously, from the picture on the right, this is not the final character. This is simply a reference image that I am going to use when creating my characters in flash, like was done in Chris Georgenes's flash character animation tutorial that I looked at back in Week 6. This week I want to concentrate on creating these reference images and then next week take them into Flash. Completed characters can now all be seen via image on the right. Obviously these are all references images and will be completed to a much better standard in flash, I hope.
// 01 // 02 // 03 // 04 // 05 // 06 // 07 // 08 // 09 // 10 // 11 // 12 // 13 // 14 //
Jonathan is an enthusiastic web designer with a great passion for all things technical, extreme sports, photography and the church he attends. After spending almost 18 months in Dublin Jonathan has returned with his sights set on making his mark in the multimedia industry.
