The previous design’s been archived.

As always, the previous design has been archived.

I can now hold in my hands the physical result of half a year of work, the freshly printed book for children called Jugosa cocina para niños (juicy cooking for kids) that, in addition to containing plenty of recipes meant for them to prepare by themselves (with an adult’s helping hand), includes all sorts of trivia about ingredients and the culinary art, and which, the author says, is meant to help the children recognize the value in the food that they eat, think about nutrition, and put their creativity into practice. It was a fun project, in which I was involved as an art director and layout designer.

The author is Mónica Pardo Blum, who once got an award for another book of hers, called Cocina chilena (Chilean cuisine). The illustrations were made by visual artist Cecilia Andrews, and the photographs taken by Eduardo Banderas. Truth is, being fresh out of university, I wouldn’t have been able to get the position I got if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s a family project; my dad served as an editor, since the author is his mother-in-law, and, in turn, the illustrator is her daughter-in-law. Working like this was bound to cause some problems, but we managed to finish it, after some delays. I’m quite fond of the result.

Below, the cover of the book. Here’s two pages, and a couple more.

It was a pleasure to do this sort of project, because I like working on educational stuff. It’s difficult for me to give my best when my work’s ultimate purpose is to make some fat rich guy get richer. I will hopefully do more of this kind of thing in the future.

In 2006, for my workshop course in that year’s first semester, I created a graphic work that ironized technology and how the Monkey King (humanity) wreaks havoc on Earth through its lack of restraint and its egocentrism. The next semester I was to base an animation on that work.

This was a semester-long project (it kind of doesn’t show, due to a long preliminary process) for Sebastián Skoknic and Bryan Phillips’s course. Other than being my longest animation since, it marks the first time I ever did anything resembling sound design; I even splashed a bit in the tub to get some water sounds. The most interesting part was using the Game Boy Camera (thus the Game Boy sound hardware) for the electronic noise, which I think worked very well.

The subject of this piece remains the same as the one it’s based on, though I didn’t make any specific references to video games this once, just computers.

The previous design has been archived.

As of today (yesterday), I am a professional graphic designer. My final project, which I now refer to as Campodecolor (Spanish for ‘Colorfield’), was the same videogame I have been talking about for some time, the one about visual composition. It’s not finished as a project, but an important milestone has been reached: its first purpose has been accomplished, which was to get me my degree. Of course.

Here’s my project report (in Spanish), which is a bit out of date and a bit incomplete, but I guess it shows the main arguments that support my project. I have touched on these a bit in past posts, and I might do it further in the future, because they are based on my opinion that videogames, as an artform, can be a relevant contribution to society.

For my defense I had to —evidently— show the game, and do a presentation of basically a recap of the same points already covered on the report. On top of that, during the past week I recorded some playtests, and edited a brief video with that material to show to the committee that graded my work. It was pretty funny to watch the testers stumble around and finally grasp the mechanics a bit, though some came to the conclusion that the game was more about the music than the visual aspect, which, I suppose, is a compliment to the sound design in the end.

I have uploaded the version of the game that I presented today (yesterday). The algorithms are still lacking, I’m afraid, but I plan to make them my top priority now. The dynamic audio is created using the minor pentatonic scale, with the sound of a Rhodes piano, as recorded by Guy Cockroft. I’m glad it sounds as well as it does, considering the notes are selected randomly from the scale. Since it seems to be crediting time, I have to thank Stephen Lavelle and muku for their invaluable help and suggestions on all aspects of my game. Also, of course, my teacher throughout this whole process, Eduardo Castillo.

There is something I still don’t understand, which happened in the old design too, and that is some Firefox rendering glitches when it first loads the page. After refreshing, it goes away. My guess is that it’s a bug related to blocks with the CSS display property set to ‘none’, which is how I make the popup effect. Well, nevermind the jargon, but the point is that it somehow screws up the design.

Chile has a rather rich mythology, particularly from the island of Chiloé, from where the better recognized mythical figures, such as the Trauco and the Pincoya, originated from. That was the subject for the final exam of my workshop class, the second semester of 2007, with Jennifer King and Ximena Undurraga. What we created was a (loosely termed) dictionary of local mythological beings, a full book of them—since we were around 20, and everyone had to create ten, the result was around 200 pages worth of illustrations.

That was the final cover, I’m not sure whose design it is, but it showcases some unfinished illustrations pinned to a cork board. I created two concepts, but they were not selected (one, two).

And that is how the book looks on the inside. The page on the left is my own work. Some are better than others, but here are all of them:

• El balsero
• Brujo tonto
• Cahuelche
• Chinifilu
• Deñ
• Haucella
• Huala
• Piruquina
• Sietecolores
• La voladora