Hello and welcome to Red Chess, the mind child of Ed Symington, a young chap of 22 whose favourite thing is doing design on the web. Ed is currently at university doing his Web Design BA (Hons) degree but in his spare time he likes to do websites for people who require them. You can see these websites via this website. If you would like to view his latest university work, check out his university portfolio (it's quite nice).
Ed also likes having friends, indie, electronica and experimental dubstep beats, good sandwiches, the summer and sleep.
The drink of an angel. 07/11/07
I've just finished developing the micro-site for Drink Angel, a new drink awareness software application. This makes up a portion of the Client Orientated Practise brief for my degree. Have a look-see.
Also, the new Trident website went live last week which I helped build last semester for the Marketing Methodologies unit of my degree (Web Design BA(Hons), don't you know). I did the design, the graphics and the Flash and got an awfully good mark for it.
Monkey business. 06/11/07
Okay so I'm gonna stop making promises on this 'ere blog that I just can't keep. I've been extremely busy lately and since I last spoke to you I've been back at mN doing XHTML/CSS, designy and Flashy things on sites such as Minute Maid, Kellogg's King Tut and Robert Horne. I am now back at uni for my final year so there's literally tons to do.
In pursuit of the perfect menu for my final major project, and falling way short, I've been playing around a little with APE, an open source physics engine for Flash. The idea was to have wooden signs attached to the rope for the menu buttons and the user would be able to throw the rope around as a nice little toy to play with. However, after experimenting I realised it wouldn't really fit with the rest of the site so I scrapped it. But you can play with the prototype and download the source files below. Oh and the onReleaseOutside function doesn't work which is why the rope sticks to the mouse sometimes, something I've not yet resolved. For more information and updates on my final major project you can check out the blog which I will be keeping throughout its development.
Download source (773KB)
I've also been having a play with Papervision3D. As an example of some of the things it can do, I produced a prototype using videos from 15x15 which I mapped into a 3D environment. You can see the results here and download the source code here (excuse my rudimentary coding, I'm just getting used to Actionscript 3 at the moment).
Download source (7MB)
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand we're back. 31/07/07
Massimo apologies for my absolute lack of contribution and consummate abundance of absence to this here blog for the last, blimey, almost 2 months. My neglect, however, is not without reason. I have in fact been doing actual things in the big, wide, real world.
In June, as aforementioned in my previous post, I worked at a magical place called magneticNorth where they grow and nurture little seedlings of brilliance in the form of website and interaction design pieces. During my time in theNorth I worked on various projects including the new Kelloggs website whereinst I did CSS and XHTML things. I did similar things on the Urban Splash Tutti Frutti competition site and also did some designy bits for the Kelloggs Healthzone site. I had a top time there, met a lot of very talented people and learnt a duck load about my potential career & profession.
So that's June. In July I went to Kenya (see picture below), home to some of the most impressively beautiful animals in the world, fantastic coffee, really juicy fruits and 32 million extremely friendly Kenyans.
I know there are at least, well, 3 of you who check back here every now and again and so I assure you that normal service is resumed and I will post up the second part of Multi-Story in the next few days. It's going to be a corker. Thanks for being here. Peaces!
Introducing… 02/06/07
…Multi-Story!
I have decided to start an experiment in creativity, the idea for which came to me this gloriously sunny of afts. From this post fourth I will be writing a story, adding a new bit every time I update. I want to see what magical nonsense the pink bit of stuff between my ears can produce. It will most likely make no sense but it might be that something profound, or at least passable as fictional prose, will emerge through my muddled ramblings. But my thinking is that through doing this, my creativity will be sharpened, polished and ready to be put to good work. I’m going to set up an RSS (Really Sexy Sentences) feed as well when I get the chance so that you can stay up to date and that.
So here goes…
Multi-Story Part 1
In the days of old whence goats wore blue waistcoats and pixy-fish spoke Yiddish, there was a big-small Scottish man called Jumbo Goliah. Jumbo was a sensible soul who never stood in one place twice. His reasons for this were unknown to everyone but him and many people, when questioning his methods, found that an answer to their enquiries was not to be had. Instead they would receive a proclamation of his shoe size in both UK and European measurements. Although baffling, this behaviour, as far as Jumbo was concerned, was perfectly normal and something that all people should practise. He had mastered the technique by the age of one hundred and forty and now in his early two hundreds he considered himself to be the world’s foremost expert in single-spot-standing. This was something that he was extremely proud of and he would often congratulate himself when he strolled merrily down the little lane to his place of work, the monkey bean factory.
On Tuesday the twenty-thirsty farm of Yar, 27ABCD, all was not quite as usual as it usually was.
To be continued…
magnificentNews. 18/05/2007
World class interactive agency magneticNorth, home to interaction design pioneer Brendan Dawes and the creators of the Webby nominated Diesel Submit Yourself site (amongst many other gems) have offered me a work placement for June! I’m proper chuffed like.
Many thanks to everyone who has shown support for the new design of this site. Much love and good things to css mania, css heaven, css elite, css clip and everyone who voted for me on May 1st Reboot.
Anyone who’s a fan of vinyl art should check out Vinyl Abuse. My favourite are still James Jarvis’ Amos bunch but check out mimoco who have jumped right on the vinyl bandwagon. I don’t know about you but I want them all!
Voot for Reboot. 07/05/2007
The voting phase of the may 1st reboot has started today. If you like my stuff please go and vote for me over the next week. As well as this site my university portfolio is also on there (edward symington). Any support is monumentally appreciated. Thankyou.
In other news, the Bible is LEGOized and the secret ingredient to Heinz tomato ketchup is finally revealed!
Flash Origami. 05/05/2007
Just been having a peek at what people are up to with papervision3d, an open source 3d engine for Flash which is currently in beta. Check out Lee Brimelow's North Face kiosk demo in which he uses Papervision to map video onto an interactive 3d spinner. It's really quite ace.
Oh, and play tetris...
Wow there! Get Flash!
May the Fourth Be With You. 04/05/2007
Okay, it's a very geeky blog title but for good reason, the content is even geekier! I've just finished a piece of Actionscript code which I'm very proud of (I know) for a uni brief I’m currently working on. The project entails the production of a new website for a pre-press company called Trident for which I was given the role of creative director.
One of the cool features of the new CMS we have built for the company is that they will now have the ability to add new languages in order to maximize usability and target audience. So using a clever concoction of Javascript, PHP, XML and Actionscript we devised a way to detect which country the user is viewing the site from, automatically translate the website content into the relevant language and provide a slick little Flash language selector. If the client wishes to add a language, they simply add the new translation in the CMS and upload the new flag image. The Flash movie then reads the XML, finds the locale, loads the flags in and makes them into buttons which pop out when the user rolls over the top flag. And, of course, the top flag displays the language that the site is currently presented in. Bosh!
So have a look at the code. It's pretty. I'll post the link to the new Trident site when it's finished (it's very almost there).
Well, well, well. 01/05/2007
It would seem something quite drastic has happened around here! Well, in conjunction with May 1st Reboot, Red Chess has had a complete makeover. Now much more playful and dare I say it, bootiful, it has transformed into a fantastic space for me to vent my creative urges.
Keep checking back for updates, I (tentatively) promise many.
© 2007 RED CHESS ~