August 11, 2008
I wish the Internet was an invite only thing. So many people on it that shouldn’t be allowed a finger on a mouse.
Oh the irony when his email address is indexed… it’s indexed.
— Start chat —
don-don-32@hotmail.com: just so you know, if you were wonering, i got your MSN addy off google
don-don-32@hotmail.com: wondering*
me: cool
don-don-32@hotmail.com: dont you care that your me addy is on google for the whole world to see?
me: there’s nothing I can do about it, because forums and other sites post it without authentication. It’s what you get for being known on the internet.
don-don-32@hotmail.com: ah right, how are you well known?
me: uhhh, css galleries, article writing, I’m friends with neat bloggers
me: things get around
don-don-32@hotmail.com: ahh right cool
don-don-32@hotmail.com: so what bloggers/celebs are you “friends with”
me: uhm, why do you need to know that?
me: i don’t even know who you are
don-don-32@hotmail.com: exactly so how do i know your telling the truth, and i was just making polite conversation
don-don-32@hotmail.com: its not like im asking your address or something lol
me: you did start a conversation with OH I GOT YOUR EMAIL OFF GOOGLE
don-don-32@hotmail.com: well i didnt word it like that
me: the essence is the same
me: and I am yet to know who you are or why i’ve been added to your list
me: 
don-don-32@hotmail.com: erm for the crack
me: uh..
don-don-32@hotmail.com: haha
don-don-32@hotmail.com: do you understand what that means?
me: yeah, but I didn’t find it funny enough to laugh
don-don-32@hotmail.com: it wasnt meant to make you laugh anyways
me: sweet
don-don-32@hotmail.com: okay well as much as this conversation has entertained me 
i have nothing else to say to you, so erm bye lol
me: weird.
don-don-32@hotmail.com: oh and one last thing, aha you got pwned!
me: oh wait till you see how ironic this is when this gets on the internet. Cya.
— End —
July 30, 2008
I love feed readers! It’s like making a magazine with all your favourite content ever for free! I love how much time it saves me having to hunt for interesting content and being up to date with your favourite sites is so convenient. Obviously Syndication is really old, but the content is not. I’m always adjusting the feeds I digest. Kinda cool that the content of a feed reader tells you a lot about a person, and it’s always interesting to see what other (neat) people read on the web.
Here’s what I regularly read:
Blogs
- Drawn: Animation, Illustration and cartooning blog.
- Chris Kalani: Some developing ninja and friend who blogs about life and being naked.
- Mostlylisa: Geeky blog of multi talented Canadian Lisa Bettany. Incidentally my favourite, fun person.
- JoshuaJenkins:Pretty humourous writings and opinions about everything.
- Kirupa: Blogs about the geekiest (and useful) things ever.
- Sam’s Tasty Art: Great 2d art blog
- Sean Galloway: Fantastic Character designer
- Lucas Tetrault: Movie review blog. Even catches requested flicks for review!
- Keyframer: Flash animation blog
- Bearskin Rug: Blog and portfolio of Kevin Cornell
Article and resource sites
Forums
- kirupaForum: Flash, design and development community
- CGtalk: Digital art discussion board, with activity from industry professionals
I try to keep mine to a minimum ( I know people with hundreds of subscriptions). Though I always have a surf around, I tend to return to the listed links most often. I’m curious to see what others read. I love finding new nooks and crannies to dig in and read. What are your favourite feeds to plug into your reader? Share some favourites, I want more fantastic things to read!
July 27, 2008
Most everyone who’s worked in any media for screen would (and should) be aware of the importance of the RGB value system. While it is a concise system for describing colours, it is somewhat difficult for us to describe the nature of a colour by amounts of each channel by eye.
So rather than describing the additive blend of colours, we can describe a colour with HSV which breaks colour down into more simplistic characteristics. Let’s look at each of these in detail:
RGB
Defined by listing how much red, green, and blue is contained in a single value. Being additive, the more of each colour that is added, the brighter (and closer to white) it becomes:
While it’s helpful to denote how much of each colour exists, it is not a very friendly system to describe a hue shift, saturation, or value/brightness). Try looking at a colour and try to arbitrarily dictate how much of each primary colour composes it. Not so easy right?
Enter HSV!
A colour system that describes a hue shift, saturation, and value known as HSV:
Now that’s a lot easier to describe colour with. Want a colour to be more turquoise? Scarlet? Plum? Just shift the hue slider until it hits the sweet spot. Need brightening without losing saturation? It does that too!
Natural Brightness
With colours having different natural brightnesses to each other, preserving luminosity when tinting with hue shifts poses a problem with contrast. When adjusting a saturation value in HSV, the value scale adjusts proportionately to maintain the same amount of brightness.
For example (as you can see above), Yellow has a higher natural brightness than purple which sits on the opposite end of the colour spectrum (which is easily observed when looking at it in grey scale). What does this mean? It means that simply lightening or hue shifts destroy levels of saturation when controlling all channels. This is because the natural luminosity of red, green and blue at equal saturations differ significantly.
To compensate the desaturation, the value/brightness needs to be scaled in HSV to match. It is important to maintain a strong contrast in brightnesses, so attention to natural brightness is helpful in picking appealing colour schemes and palettes. See this article on Müller’s colour brightness theory: http://www.colourlovers.com/blog/2007/09/02/the-muller-formula-or-pred ictable-color-preferences/
The Wrap Up
While amounts in HSV are not completely relevant for telling a display how much within each RGB channel is required, it creates a scale that describes useful properties of colour. And at the end of the day, it’s returned as RGB or hexadecimal; merely a different way to break down colour components into locations within a given colour gamut. The next time you are exploring your favourite image editor, make sure to check out the different colour slider modes:
Of course HSV doesn’t scale to all digital colour spaces, but in most cases you should be able to flip over from the RGB scale. Being able to apply traditional approaches in picking and applying colour opens up a more fluid and natural work flow, which can assist the transition for traditional artists migrating into the digital realm.
So HSV or RGB as a colour refining scale? Obviously HSV! Get into the habit of tweaking colour with the HSV sliders, and you will be able to control those all too often fidgety selectors and pickers in a breeze!
Extension
If you are keen, give these resources a read for more information relating to colour in computer graphics:
July 21, 2008
After upgrading to sIFR 3 beta 2, I figured it was about time I fixed something that had been annoying me a lot lately: Title widows. What’s a widow? A widow is the unfortunate last word in a paragraph that drops down below and sticking out like a sore thumb. While it is a hassle to apply it to all blocks of type, my big dorky headings needed some love.
Read complete entry…
July 11, 2008
Gosh. It came out here today(earlier because of our huge time zone gap) and people (well mostly store attendants) won’t shut up about it! I was actually looking at the iTunes store when they flicked the iPhone application download features on, and didn’t even realise it was ‘important’ till someone tweeted it. Sure it’s got a frickload of features, but it’s stupidly overpriced with plans for a device that pretty much functions as a phone last. Ick.