Nov 11, 2014

(Still working on making a sci-fi movie-esque interface function and live on my desktop.)

The iterations of the layout designs thus far. Still no color, and a lot of ripped graphics (via Oblivion & Tron mostly) but using them to refine sketches.

Around halfway through, I committed to a layout and started prototyping elements in Processing and openFrameworks, but found I overextended myself with the design. A lot of the visual tricks that might make a motion graphic interface pretty (glow/blur, super high data sample rate for graphs) weren’t entirely feasible and without them things looked kind of shitty. I had to take things back with proper idea exploration, but now I’ve settled on another design, one that feels a lot more coordinated.

Point is: prototype cheaply. A smarter, more experienced man might have said the creative process starts with broad ideas and then is a series of refinements. I was not this person. I committed to only a single idea from the start and it was painful when it became a limitation.

Other cool things the past few days:

• I started sciencefictioninterfaces.tumblr.com as a repository for some of the interfaces that are particularly inspiring. It’s been pretty successful so far, but I’m learning a well organized Pinterest is a might be a better setup.
• gmunk retweeted me and hes one of my heroes so that was actually really cool.
• This sumarizes my week
• Blender seems to be the go to typeface for interfaces, used in at least Oblivion, Sony Mouse & Cat advert, Tron and Ender’s game.