DESIGNpebble

As promised, here is a selection of my latest sketches and doodles. There is nothing absolutely amazing in here, It’s a lot of stuff that sort of just fell onto the pages, I didnt give much thought, just kept the pen moving.

And yeah, I was using a pen… I generally find working in biro a lot more comfortable for me, although it does tend to leave a lot of my sketches l a bit scruffy, since I can’t erase any mistakes, only go over them again and again. Still, It’s how I enjoy sketching out random stuff.

Got into a kind of Sonic mood here, after I’d finnished drawing, I dug out my Sega Megadrive and played the old Sonic The Hedgehog games for a few hours. Oh and the fish-headed dude… no idea what that was about but I kinda like him.

Hey all, Just a quick drop in to let you know that I am still working hard, I’ve got quite a few new sketches that I have yet to scan and post, but I will be getting that done soon (Sometime before the weekend hopefully).

I’ve been extremely busy at work and when I come home, I just feel like chilling out. I’ve been playing a fair amount of Red Alert 3 lately with Chris, going through the campaigns as a team, which is just fantastic fun.

My 30 day trial of Warhammer online has expired just the day I get the Kommisar’s hat and, although it is a fairly decent game, I don’t think I could commit myself to another MMO after giving up the life sucker that is WoW.

Keep an eye out for some of my new work soon.

Recently, I’ve been playing a lot of Will Wright’s magnum opus, Spore.

This is a game that immediately grabbed hold of my interest the first time I saw a video demonstration of it a long time ago. I won’t go into details about the game here, there is too much to explain, so you would be best off checking the Wikipedia page on Spore for all of the information you need.

I bought the “Galactic Edition” which came with a National Geographic DVD documentary entitled “how to build a better being” (which I have still yet to watch), a poster, the game (obviously), a making of DVD, and a delicious hard back A5 sized art book which I absolutely adore!

The game, from the start, totally immersed me, something which very few games have done for a long time. I think the last to really keep me hooked was probably Half Life 2: Episode 2.

After installing and booting, I managed to play for a full 9 or 10 hour stretch without realising the time, the game is just THAT gripping. Although after a couple of solid day’s play (slotting around my work schedule) I am now feeling a little, not so much bored, just burned out perhaps?

By far, the best stages are the cell through to civilisation stages. Creating a creature from the ground up is a fantastic experience and thoroughly enjoyable, especially if you try to keep a theme throughout and create a sort of evolutionary line, without making grand sweeping changes. When you go back to look over it again at the end, you can see the changes to the creature and how its grown from a cell into a fully fledged creature, and it is a wonderful experience.

Admittedly, the first play through to the space stage I just added all the parts I needed to give me the best possible edge over every other creature, Min-Maxing my stats and just powering through, however, each subsequent play has seen me take a more relaxed approach, playing the game a lot more organically and just going with the flow.

One of the more annoying and frustrating, and therefore un-enjoyable stages (personally speaking) is the space stage. I enjoy terraforming and creating planets, colonising, trading, all of that stuff. But when your home planets are constantly being terrorised by aggressive civilisations, pirates, or ecological viruses, it becomes incredibly aggravating. Most of the time spent in the space stage is fending off would-be attackers and keeping everyone happy, it’s all a bit too intense for my liking.

All in all however, the game is fantastic, beautifully crafted, wonderfully designed, and additions like the Sporepedia give a sense of community and grandeur.

Having other people’s planets and creatures within your game keeps it feeling just fresh enough each play to maintain interest.

Luckily, I haven’t had any penis creatures in my games yet, although I did notice a planet named “Minge” I had to chuckle at that.

My spore creations

After a decent amount of time spent using the newly released Google Chrome web browser, I have come to a conclusion. I do indeed really like it, it is a hell of a lot dater than any of the other browsers I have used, however, that could be because my Firefox is bogged down with a lot of add-ons, Opera is a bit bulky anyway, and as everyone knows, Internet explorer is horrible.

There are a few things stopping me from making the switch completely, one of which, is because StumbleUpon have not yet released a version for Google chrome.

I use StumbleUpon extensively when I am at home. I find a lot of new and interesting things because of it, and after using Chrome for a while I felt the urge to stumble and couldn’t. Of course if StumbleUpon release a version for Chrome, I’m pretty sure that I would switch to using it full time when at home.

Work is different, as a web designer, I have to test every site and make sure it works in Firefox 2, Firefox 3, Internet explorer 6 (it’s disgusting how many people still haven’t upgraded from that shameful browser) and Internet explorer 7. I don’t test for 8 yet, as that is still in beta.

The problem is, for some reason, Chrome doesn’t want to load files from our internal server. I’m not sure why that is, but it just doesn’t. I can’t say I’d need to test for Chrome at the moment anyway. Chrome will most likely render pages the same way Firefox 3 does, and besides that, most of the end users of our sites won’t be the kind of people who would use, or even know about Chrome.

One of the features I find both useful and kind of odd, is the “most visited” home page. I like having my bookmarks laid out there for me, and it really does a good job of keeping my most visited pages there for easy access, but really, they are just the same pages that I have on my quick bookmarks tool bar, and since I am using the iGoogle homepage to have my feeds displayed, it doesn’t really seem all that important to me.

Another thing I noticed, is that pages seem to scroll a LOT smoother, which is nice, but takes a little getting used to.

Personally, I do think that Google Chrome is a truly fantastic web browser, and I would love to see it grow and have all of the features that user’s want, but still retain it’s speed and simplicity. But as for if it becomes a widely used browser, only time will tell. According to Net Applications, it’s not doing so well.

One final thing. What is the icon all about? I just don’t get it…

Every morniing I find it very difficult to break out of my deep sleep. When my alarm goes off, most times I tend to roll over and switch it to snooze without even thinking about it. Then, there are the few rare times that I miss the alarm completely. Alarms are so jarring to me that I’ve had a few of my favourite songs completely ruinned for me by setting them as alarms.

This morning, I has that very problem. I woke up late, too late to have a shower and too late to have my morning coffee, which I sorely need in the mornings.

I hate getting up late for work, it sets me up for a terrible day, time seems to barely pass and I have trouble staying focussed. Honestly, if I had the choice and I didn’t need to, I wouldn’t ever sleep again.

I do love the act of going to sleep when I feel really tired or worn out, but I hate that I find it so difficult to wake up in the mornings.

Hopefully tomorrow morning I will manage to wake up without issue.

After much faffing about and many crashes, I think that I have finally got the new WordPress iPhone app to behave and actually work.

I only got my new iPhone 3g a few days ago and I have already fallen in love with it. The predictive text in combination with the onscreen qwerty keyboard makes typing out messages and, in this case, a whole blog post extremely quick and easy.

The app store is really cool and I am loving all of the silly little apps on there, like iPint. What surprised me the most, was not only that there are a good ammount of free apps on the appstore, but also there are a lot of actually useful and fee apps on there.

So aside from playing with my new toy, I have also been suffering from extremely horrid toothache. I believe that it is a small crack in the tooth and requires a dentists attention. I will be putting this off for as long as possible.

Now I go back to playing with my iPhone.

Okay, so I checked out the vido of the Fallout 3 Gameplay footage.

After my initial disappointment by the first screenshots, I was praying that the video would prove to me that everything would be okay, and that Fallout 3 would indeed rock.

I feel worse then ever about it now. I mean, I can appreciate the idea and the craftmanship of it, but it really doesn’t look like a Fallout game anymore.

There are some really clichéd things in there, that really are all flash and no bang. A prime example is after targetting an enemy with the advanced system (you can aim for arms, legs, torso, head etc as in the previous games) the shot that is fired is “filmed” from an off-side camera in slow motion. The whole thing looks like it should be in a movie.

You know how after The Matrix was released, the bullet time style was grossly overused, and to some extent, still is. That is exactly what this “addition” to Fallout 3 feels like.

I am so totally underwhelmed by the footage, I really am. I’ll still play it when I get the chance, but most likely, I’ll play for a couple of hours, get bored and play something far more enjoyable.

I have been working hard on some new artwork (most of which you can find in the gallery) As well as some slight modifications too the website design. I felt that the site was a bit too dark overall, so I’ve re-done the background and headers. This is an ongoing process and I’ll be making some more changes adn tweeks as time goes on.

The first piece of new art that I want to talk a little bit about is the Nebula wallpaper. I have made three versions of it, one in 1440×900 (My resolution of choice), one in 1280×1024 and the last in 1024×768. I really do think it’s a beautiful piece, and I was inspired to create it after seeing a lot of the fantastic nebulae photos from NASA, as well as other wallpapers of the same ilk.

You can download the Zip file with all three resolutions here

The next piece is a Digital Matte edit (I believe that’s the proper term for it) of a photograph of the Syndicate Bank in London. This took me quite a while to produce, as I was learning new techniques and styles.

Working with custom brushes made from photographs that i’d taken I applied layer after layer to create a brooding, darkened, post-appocalyptic version of the bank. I’ve shown the original and my edit (credit for the original photograph is not mine) so that you can clearly see the difference.

I do love this one a lot, a lot of time and effort, and a lot of learning too, which is ALWAYS a plus.

As a sort of side note: I’ve also added a twitter box to the side bar, as well as a funky little library utility, so that (if you are interested) you can keep track of what I am reading.

-Steve

Walking up my local high street today, I almost got attacked. Not by person, but by Pigeon. Now normally, most “flying rats” have the common sense to steer well clear of people, some, on rare occasion take to flying towards people but ultimately loosing their nerve in enough time to swiftly wing it 90 degrees and away from the somewhat flustered but otherwise unharmed person.

Today, for the first time in my life, I had a dirty black Pigeon decide to enter into an unprovoked game of chicken with me! Out of nowhere this beast came, flying straight towards me, naturally, I stood my ground and continued forwards, with the firm belief that this bastard Pigeon would have the good grace and common sense to not even attempt such a daring feat as attacking a human. I was wrong. This winged demon would not be swayed, it aimed straight for my face, eyes glinting with firey wrath, it’s beak aimed sharply at my eyes. I actually had to duck, I bowed my head as this black feathered monster screamed just a hairs width from the top of my head.

Of course, that’s not the horrible part. it’s the aftermath, the humiliating eyes of Joe public watching you as you bring your head back up, and carry on going. Oh they saw what happened, they saw the man duck from a harmless little Pigeon, they saw the once proud gentleman be reduced to such a fool, that he was scared of a mere bird. But they weren’t in my place, they didn’t gaze into the maw of hell as I did.

I guess at times like that, all you can really do is chuckle to yourself, mutter “bloody Pigeons” under your breath, and get on with it. But you’ll always remember that moment when you were confronted by the abyss, and you backed down.

Now THAT’S Sensationalism!

I haven’t updated my site in a very long time. I guess part of that was due to shame caused by my unsucessful atempt to quit smoking. I honestly didn’t feel much like returning here to report that I was and indeed AM still smoking to this day, but alas, I must.

I managed to last a week or two without cigarettes, not a massive success I must admit. However, I now feel confident enough to admit this on here. Yes I didn’t stop but I realised that it wasn’t as important to me as I felt it was. Maybe sometime in the future I will try again, In fact, I am pretty much certain that I will. For now, I can at least admit that smoking is my vice, and I accept that and don’t need to worry about it.

As far as other updates go, I have been very busy, working on projects here and there. I have launched www.hewhodareswinsguild.com which is the official website for the World of Warcraft guild that myself and two other close friends run. If you are interested, we are on Bloodfeather-EU and are doing very well. So I’m pretty proud of that achievement.

My design work has been steadily improving and I have been working on so many unfinished projects. Little scraps that I just do, just to try out new techniques, new ideas, and to generally learn more as I go. I’ve picked up Illustrator and I’m learning so much with that. I have to say that vector graphics look stunning, and being able to produce my own, really feels great.

That’s all for now folks.