Illusional Reality

Most everyone has heard now about the iPhone 4's antenna issue, touching the bottom left corner of the phone will result in a dramatic loss of signal. To this Apple's first response was "hold it a different way" which is a nice slap in the face for our left handed friends, then it was actually a software problem "no no, all the time the phones were showing more signal than they actually had.." and now finally they're going to give users a free rubber case, I mean come on, really?

Lets put this in a different scenario to see how futile it is, lets do a little role-play...

Man: "Hey Doctor, every time I try put weight on my left foot to walk it hurts incredibly and I fall."
Doc: "Just walk a different way!"
Man: "I can't!, look this is really bad I don't exactly have another way to walk and the pain is too much"
Doc: "Your brain is lying to you and telling you you're in much more pain than you actually are"
Man: "What!?, This is ridiculous you have to do something"
Doc: "Fine, here take this crutch, you'll be able to walk fine as long as you rely completely on this."
Man: "But my leg is still broken!, you've not addressed the problem at all, it's just temporary fix!"
Doc: "I don't see the problem..."

Medical care by Apple, you wouldn't go see this doctor again would you?

It's no secret I was looking forward to getting a new iPhone, held off for months because i new of the iPhone 4's impending release but I'm not so much of an apple fan boy that I'll over look this, I think the HTC Evo4 is calling or I'll hold off till Apple "readdress" the situation on September when the free case offer expires.

Since I'm most likely going to see Predators tonight I dusted off another of my old drawings, this time it's of a battle damaged predator. I could spend a huge amount of time doing the dreads but this will do for now.

A little while ago I was approached by Clare to help her design her new online store. I think Clare new straight away what she wanted, being such a visual artist she already had a bank of images, logos, backgrounds for me to work with it even got to a point where I had too many images and not enough space to put everything.

Once the shop was near completion Clare asked if I would redo her existing website too, which was just a photoshop slice making it impossible to update, I tried to keep to the original design as much as possible, just introducing a few new elements such as a new navigation and footer area.

This was probably one of the most interesting sites I've worked on as the sky was the limit in regards to the design and layout. if I had to be critical of anything it would be that the site is quite image heavy and even with everything optimised as much as possible while keeping the image quality it's still larger than I would like.

The site is up at http://www.clarejordan.com

I was going through an old folder when I came across some sketches I did a few years ago. I had completely forgotten they existed and as I sat flipping through them and thinking I should really start drawing again I realised that it was amazing these pictures ha lasted this long and I should make some digital copies before I inadvertently throw away the originals.

A few scans and a cup of tea later I'd manage to get my favourites scanned in and safe from over zealous cleaning hands. Looking through them I decided that I should have a play around with them in photoshop, I was never very good at drawing in colour so maybe I could do with photoshop what I was never able to with pencil.

I picked a drawing of Red XIII from Final Fantasy VII since he's pretty basically coloured and as good a place as any to start. It was near impossible to select the areas defined by pencil so i had to first outline the whole thing again then it just became a game of playing the the fill tool.

I've added the original and the edited version so that you can see the outcome.

I've had a folder entitled IR_2010 staring at me from my desktop since December 2009, this was to be the redesign of my existing site and was going to go live in January 2010, something that clearly didn't happen. It's not due to laziness or procrastination but because I was busy with other projects and so anything personal gets pushed to the back burner so over the last couple of weeks I've been putting aside a few hours a day to work on this again and now I can happily and finally say that the new layout is finally live! this is V2.5 of the site, it's not a complete overhaul hence the .5 but it's much closer to my original vision than V2.




Here you can see the old homepage on the left and the redesign on the right. There's actually quite a lot of changes although it may not seem it, I'm happy with how it turned out although ask me again in a few days and I'll probably tell you all the things I want to change.

Hope everyone likes it!