It was a sunday afternoon and I was in wordpress land trying to read another blog about designing themes, when I decided to take a break. Then it hit me. I have no motivation to make a revised layout, design, colors, fonts for my personal site. Yuck. I needed to do something. This is when the process for creation began for me. I decided to walk around my neighborhood of Park Slope, brooklyn and take pictures. Pictures of anything that I found interesting. Then another idea came into my head. Why don’t I make up a day and call it Sepia Day. As you can read, I was making this all up and it got me excited. As I started to take pictures of various things. I started seeing patterns in everyday living. I saw street signs and fonts. I saw color in a new way. Shapes where more interesting and the element of being able to psychically touch it put a new dimension in the way I was thinking of designing my website. Here are a couple of tools that I use to help me get that web or print project started for inspiration:
Outdoor edition:
- coffe or tea or water
- mp3 player: ipod or scandisk or coby or any audio device for music, speech, or just audio sounds
- digital camera
- notebook or pad and pen or pencil
- a quick stop around 20 to 30 minutes at barnes and nobles and look at various book covers and magazines
Then another idea came into my thought process, why don’t I experiment and put the pictures into a slideshow and show the world what I saw on Sepia day. Below is the start of slideshow done in Microsoft movie maker. I know it is not top of the line software, but I first needed to try it out before I could make any assumptions and criticize the software. It fairly simple in terms of putting a picture, a timeline, effects, transitions, and the ability to put audio and text makes it useful. But that is whole another posting about user interfaces and applications.
The final step that I implemented was to make my slideshow viral and so I posted on my free youtube account. Below is my first attempt at Sepia Day and Slideshow.