If You Have a Soul - Kill Me

Other things kept me from starting sooner: lame I know. But this is my progress so far.

The purple represents white. I'm doing a find->replace after I'm done.

I am not going to bed until this logo is done. It's doable. Totally doable. But really, really fiddly.

I'm hoping a series of Google-owned logos will emerge tomorrow.

EDIT: Hour and a half later

Well it looks pretty good so far. What sucks about doing it the CSS way (I couldn't resize the cells in a table) is that you can't just up and move the 'Google' bit to another part of the page. If you wanted to move it you'd have to start all over again. Not fun.

Thus I'm thinking I might just make this a really, really big mosaic of logos owned by Google. They'll be scattered here and there across the screen. It looks like I can make one of these in just under two hours, so I might be able to do... four more? Five?

I'm wondering if white is the best background to have this against. You can't see all the hard work I've put into the many white squares in the logo. Then again if it stays white it looks closer to the Google homepage. I might experiment near the end.

But for now; bed! Good grief!

Next Artwork - GIFstyle!

Confession: I've been avoiding this blog. Animated GIFs, for some reason do not inspire me at all. I took notes in that class and everything and the best I could come up with was drawing my own cartoons in Photoshop.

I sometimes draw my own cartoons in Photoshop, did you know that? Well I do. They are pretty good even if I do say so myself, but to animate them would take oodles of hours worth. I think I could only do one, and the thought of it being unimpressive after all the work that would go into it makes me feel slightly uneasy.

Although... the thought of Random Chicken and Black Duck having a faceoff warms my little heart. Just, like, a little bit.



Although drawing in their wings and angry faces is a daunting prospect. Perhaps I'll animate something else - like the giant green ant?


The possibilities are endless, limited only by my technical incompetence.

I'll figure something out surely. Maybe I'll just animate a whole little scene of a flashing TV sitting in a livingroom which makes the room change colour with every flash? Is that enough work for a good enough mark? I guess it depends on the time involved.

Yes. I'll work something out.

Web Artwork Idea

Ever since the dot.com boom there have been all sorts of companies that have only ever existed online. They are nebulous entities which buy and sell and provide services, but they do not have a 'storefront' that the general public can walk into in the traditional sense.

Also, companies which previously only existed in 'real life' have now moved to digital format, either to compliment their real life formats (such as online news services) or to completely replace them.

One of the most important things online is site branding, so that the user can tell 'where they are'. One of the best ways to achieve good site branding is to have a logo. Usually logos reside in the top lefthand side of the page (on pages where script is read left to right).

How much of the information in the logo is important? Could, say, Blogger still be recognised as Blogger if it were reduced to dozens of equally-sized squares?

My idea is to take logos found online and try to roughly recreate them using HTML tables full of hexadecimal colours. The example I have here isn't very good, but it displays my idea. I couldn't recreate the "Blogger" text because I couldn't easily make an equally-sized grid in photoshop that I could fill in. Also in this example you can probably see that the 'squares' I used weren't exactly square. The brush I used didn't neatly fill the canvas so I had to fudge it a bit. But like I said, it displays my idea.

Also, what would happen if I combined a pixelised blogger logo with other pixelised logos of online services owned by Google - like YouTube? I can imagine mosaics of bright colours, spattered with black and white squares. The Google mosaic would be rather eclectic, considering its habit of buying out small startups but keeping their old branding. Microsoft's mosaic would be rather more uniform, considering they start up their own services and brand them all the same way (the "Live" brand).

Microsoft are acquiring Yahoo! and all its services (such as Flickr) - how would that affect the Microsoft mosaic?