Fast Food Logos

I did this logo as a parody. While driving through LA, I noticed donut shops everywhere. I mean there are tons of them, and they're different ones too, not chains. Even still, they pretty much all have the same sign.

It makes sense though, the sign follows the same red and yellow design philosophy of fast food logos. If you don't know what I'm talking about, this article offers some good insight and examples. Basically, the colors red and yellow have been psychologically proven to induce hunger. Deep reds found in nature tend to represent ripeness or are associated with raw meat. Yellows in modern culture tend to be associated with speed (i.e. lightning is always drawn yellow). I'm not gonna get too deep into it, google searching color theory articles can get you the same information and more. This is what happens when I spend too much time driving in the city.

Flying Lotus VJ set

In January, I was asked to do a VJ set for Flying Lotus during his performance at the 2011 UCLA Design Media Arts undergrad exhibit. I collaborated with my colleague and good friend, Max Chang on the project. Max collected stock footage from the internet, while I created stock motion graphics in After Effects and Maya and static images in Photoshop. We then pooled our resources together and prepared a few pre-mixes before the show started. We did the rest of the mixing live along side Flying Lotus' performance. We had a little setup behind the scenes where we used modul8 to do our performance. Our good friend Jon Dallas was kind enough to record almost the entirety of the performance, which can be seen below.

World population density

A quick and dirty visualization of the world population density. I made this during a discussion on spatial mapping. I used the map below, found at http://www.ethiojps.org/PopulationMaps.html.

I then adjusted it in photoshop so that the color gradient was in a form more to my liking, darks representing low density and lights representing high density.

I brought this bitmap representation into modul8 and used the transformer - patch function in order the achieve the final result. Below is the same effect mapped to a plane.

What makes you smile?

Just playing around with some typography. Gotham rounded <3

Pika-droid

Just a simple little Illustrator project. I noticed a lot of variations of the Android Droid mascot, especially as mascots for individual apps, but no poke-droids. So I changed that. Problem solved!

Shirt Design

For a while I've been interesting in designing shirts, but since the majority of my work takes place behind the keyboard I never quite got around to doing it... until now. I had been sketching a few ideas for shirt designs and eventually decided I was going to use this one:

The sketch had a sort of cutesy Japanese feel to it, a style I'm a fan of. I decided it would be fitting to ink and color the image as a vector in Adobe Illustrator. After inking, coloring, and choosing a stylized brush, the resulting design came out like this:

The next step was getting the design out of the computer and onto a shirt. I looked into screen printing, fabric printing, transfer paper, and I even checked how much it would cost to do it through a printing studio and what methods they used. I ended up deciding to use transfer paper was the most accessible and reliable for a design with this many colors, even if it wasn't the most durable of options.

I had printed a shirt using transfer paper before and I had learned a number of things. First of all, there are two kinds of transfer paper: transfer paper for white or light colored shirts, and transfer paper for dark shirts. The difference between the two is that the transfer paper for white shirts transfers negative space onto the shirt as a transparent print, while the latter transfers negative space as white. I decided to go with a white shirt and the appropriate transfer paper in order to assure the cleanest edges for the design.

It's important to understand with transfer paper that just because you print a design onto it, does not mean just that part will be transfered. Transfer paper is made up of a layer of film stuck to an ironing paper. Whatever film is ironed will be transfered onto the fabric, even if it is blank, will transfer either as white or a transparent film. This lead to the second thing I learned: cutting out your design in order to assure only the areas you want are printed.

The problem with this though is that you still need a way of gripping the design so that you can peel the paper off once you have ironed the design on without tearing the edges. To solve this problem, I left a tab on the side of the design, but carefully cut the transfer film off the paper. If you are able to separate the corners, the film peels off like a sticker, even without being heated.

I ended up printing a little self-emblem logo as well, just to add to the overall design and make the shirt look a little more professional ;)

After that it was just a simple mater of ironing the design on according the package instructions, letting it cool, and trying it on. And voila!

Robots on my desk!!

For DESMA 156B, the advanced 3D class, I decided to do a motion tracking experiment. I got a simple point and shoot camera and took some footage of my desk, using some tape to mark where i wanted to Rubrik's Cube to be. I then used Autodesk Maya 8.5's Maya Live tool to interpret the footage into 3D space, creating a 3D camera in my scene that would match the movement of my hand cam. After that it was simply a mater of modeling and animating some robots and putting them in the right place in the scene. Below is my first pass render of the animation!