Character design workflow and technique

Let me first start off by thanking antzFx for giving me the honour of being a guest writer at their blog. The blog has been an excellent read and I’ll keep following it till the end of internet. If you are reading this then I suggest that you bookmark this blog, because it will be a gem in your design information arsenal.

When the ‘ant people’ (a.k.a antzFx) approached me for this post, they gave me full freedom to choose my own topic. I chose character design because I am as passionate a character designer as I am a product designer.

The web however, is full of stuff that will teach you how to paint and present an awesome looking piece; these are tutorials that will tell you more on how to work on Photoshop rather than the character design itself. Another thing that always seems to lack is the context. So, here’s what I’ll try to do: I’ll present some steps that I follow, and talk about the workflow of character design. That way we leave enough room for me to write more stuff on the topic, if this post gets the hits. Maybe then the ‘ant people’ will give me some money for all this
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Here is the secret to creativity… Reloaded

‘Good artists copy, great artists steal’

— Pablo Picasso (Later made popular by Steve Jobs)

“We are turning two!”

“Everything that has a beginning… needs a start!”

Right hand bottom corner of my screen shows 6:08AM IST, Wednesday, May 21, 2008. This is an auspicious time to start the first blog in my life.

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CyberPark Logo Designer: Anas K A

Before beginning, I would like to narrate an incident. All of us know that the song ‘Jai Ho’ is composed by A R Rahman. We also know that the song appears during the closing credits of Danny Boyle directed, eight OSCAR winner film ‘Slumdog Millionaire.’

But do you know who choreographed this song? The answer is Longinus Fernandes and his name is left out in the end credits of the film.

“There’s one guy I should mention, we’ve mentioned a lot of people, I forgot the guy who choreographed the dance at the end of the film, he’s called Longinus [Fernandes] and I forgot him off the credits, and I only found out about it two weeks ago. I’m an idiot… and I apologize from the bottom of my heart Longinus”.

This is how Danny Boyle made up with Longinus while receiving his Oscar for Best Direction.

Why I am saying this here? Because, like Longinus Fernandes, I also had an experience.

You know that I was unhappy over the fact that CyberPark Kozhikode is using my logo for some time without my knowledge. When I accidentally found this goof-up a month ago, I contacted the authorities and I was promised that they are working on a plan to recognize my success in the competition.

I am very happy to inform that CyberPark officials recognized me as the ‘Designer of CyberPark Logo.’

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7 Essential Tips to keep in mind while writing a post in wordpress

“Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder”

This holds true for blog posts too. Not only does great content matter, nice layout and presentation is equally important. Writers pour tons of hours sprucing up the looks; but many hardly give consideration to the web crawlers that index those pages. Clean HTML is a vital aspect in making crawlers fall in love with your posts.

Giving attention to a handful of rules can make big difference to the way crawlers see and index your posts. Given below are 7 golden rules to keep in my mind while composing a post in wordpress.

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My tweets in April, 2010

The best finding of this month is “Pencil versus Camera” by Ben Heine.

The real idea came by coincidence while I was watching television and writing a letter at the same time a few weeks ago. Reading my letter before putting it in the envelope, I saw in transparency the television behind the paper. I then realize it would be great to make something similar in a single image showing 2 different actions.

Read my other findings too…
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Design – Logo for CyberPark Kozhikode

A surprise on 21-Apr-2010

I was reading the newspaper ‘Malayala Manorama’ and trying to have an afternoon nap. On the ‘Opportunities’ page, I saw the following advertisement.

The logo looked very familiar. Then I realised – it is my own design! I designed this logo as a part of a competition organised by TechnoPark Trivandrum, some 18 months ago. Since then I have never heard from the authorities about the contest results or the fact that that my logo is being used by them for about a year.

This post is about the experience of designing a logo for CyberPark Kozhikode. CyberPark is a Government of Kerala organization planned in the lines of Technopark at Thiruvananthapuram and Infopark in Kochi to build, operate and manage ITparks for the promotion and development of investment in IT and ITES industries in Malabar region of Kerala.

My tweets in March, 2010

Whenever I find a relevant and interesting design related links, I tweet them so that I can refer to them later. Recently when I had to look for a particular tweet that I’m sure I did, I spent some time in doing a search in Twitter. I didn’t get any satisfactory results, so I went to my Twitter page and pressed the ‘more’ button many times and finally I fished out the link.

To make matters easy, I am going to archive my tweets at the end of every month in this blog. I will be grouping them under headings for easy retrieval.

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Design — Poster for Science & Technology Run 2010

The shoelace was great. So. this year the expectations are higher. Can I pull it off?

On 11-Apr-2010, IISc Alumni Cell is organising ‘Science & Technology Run’ or better known as ‘SnT Run.’ I got a chance to do the branding work. I have handled the branding of SnT Run of 2008. People liked the banners and posters very much: especially the ‘shoelace’ one. Read the full story here.

So here I am, trying to outrun myself.
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Here is the secret to creativity…

“The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.”
– Albert Einstein

I realized recently that I am a regular visitor of some websites that offer great design insights in branding, identity design, product design, graphic design… These seventeen websites serve as my source of inspiration. I am sharing the following links with you and I hope that you will benefit from them.

(a). “Anything under the sun…”

The following four websites share unique miscellaneous designs: Product Design, Graphic Design, Package Design…

1. Notcot.com

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