Category: Design

Brigham Young University, in conjunction with Omniture, is sponsoring an iPhone development competition open to their students. I was involved with the same competition last year when Myself and two others produced the game BattleDot, which won third place.

The competition is won by a team producing a brand new app, getting it into the app store by the deadline, and having the most unique users per day in 3 weeks. This is not an easy task. It is very difficult to get noticed in the app store, and is therefore difficult to get many unique users without some serious marketing and attention.

At any rate, our application this year is very different from our previous year’s attempt. We have created a simple gaming system that relies on networking. Basically, the user needs to make friends in the app in order to play 2-player games. These friends are tracked, and as more friendships are made, more games may be unlocked. As part of a social experiment, the user’s friends are tracked and plotted on a map as well as their friend’s friends, and their friend’s friend’s friends out to six degrees.

You can find out more at it’s official website, and you can download it directly from the App Store!

Another thing I like to do when I have nothing to do is to recreate recognizable icons. I like to see how closely I can approximate the original look, and often I can find new ways of using the tools available to me in Illustrator.

The Finder icon. This was simple really. Just something fun to do.

The QuickTime 7 icon. I made this one to practice using blend modes on gradients more effectively.

The new QuickTime X logo gave me an opportunity to use radial gradients, and customize their shape and placement.

The iChat icon let me try doing some more gradient blending modes, like the QuickTime 7 icon.

In this day and age, most people are concerned with their own vanity and “Photoshopping” away their imperfections. I however had an opportunity this past week to do quite the opposite. For the first time, I was asked to age a photo so that the subject looked a tiny bit older and more mature. This stock photography was destined to be used on an advertisement targeting middle aged women. The client loved the photo composition, but felt that middle aged women couldn’t relate to the youthful subject. They asked that some minor modifications be made in Photoshop in order to make this photo acceptable.

It may be hard to tell, but I added some wrinkle lines on the forehead as well as a few crows-feet around the eye. I tried to make the skin a little less shiny as well. Finally, I removed the black nail-polish for a more sophisticated french tip style nail-polish. I had to get this done quickly, so I did what I could. It was fun though to do something completely new.