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2 min

Very odd indeed…

Surely I am not the only one who sees something askew with this, am I? This has actually been on my mind for quite a while now but I wanted to wait for the numbers to become more apparent before I visualized them. I think we have enough of an accumulation at this point, so here it is. I am not going to go to any lengths to explain what this is, I think it is pretty self-evident. In short, the critter appears to have biases when it comes to different countries. Some it likes,

8 min

Datavis shenanigans

I have been wanting to do this for days. It is my profession, after all. Or rather, it is a very important part of my profession – data visualization. And I haven’t pored over my Edward Tufte and my Chaomei Chen for nothing for all these years. Only reason I left it so long was that I needed a substantial number of days of both covid 19 test numbers as well as test results to be able to show what I want to show. So, here without further ado, it is: What you see in this first

1 min

Back to the fancy stuff

So, I have spent most of last month playing around with casual wear for avatars. Which is all very well and good up to a certain point, but after a while boredom does set in. I usually wait to stumble upon something to give me an idea, and this time it was a big series of vectorized vintage flowers that I saw on vecteezy, one of my favorite resource haunts. So far I have ended up with 4 skin based outfits that are based upon these drawings. As is often the case with floral el

2 min

Dress-up Games

I have been in SL more of late. Finally managed to make the transition to the mesh body and the mesh head for Alpha. Wasn’t easy to do, I still miss the scurrilous little face that the classic avi used to have and that, for the life of me, I cannot seem to achieve with the mesh head. Far too perfect. Far too smooth. So, the problem now is that Alpha doesn’t have any clothes to wear with the new mesh body. I have made quite a bit of new stuff for the store but for some reason

2 min

The big alpha.tribe update

I did not want to switch over to a mesh avatar for a very long time. I have had the Alpha shape and skin for years and I have really identified with Alpha, in that appearance. She looks like me. Or rather she looked like I looked 20 years ago. But, then a few weeks ago I decided that the switch had to be made if I wanted to keep up with SL as a fashion designer. I had to know how this stuff worked. It all had to do with what I have talked about on this blog from time to time.

2 min

And very well behaved they are…

Yesterday I finally got over all my inhibitions and went into 3D software, after remembering that Cica Ghost had once told me that she was using Sculptris. And after muddling around for quite a while, watching a lot of tutorials, I did get some results – the critters in the photo here. Had a hellish time with uploading the textures that I had also made for them into OpenSim (which is where I am testing all this before I spend a fortune in SL), at which point further investiga

1 min

Change the light – and…

The alpha.tribe sim keeps niggling at me. It is making me face my shortcomings. But something that I did today helped. Well, helped a bit. One of the things I probably need to let go of in order to move on is my love of desaturated sky presets. Tried one out that isn’t all about grey and beige, and really liked what happened. This doesn’t absolve me from tackling the real problem – which is that as a builder I am no longer up to the demands that the evolved SL platform offers

1 min

A small stage

I have been making these things. I am collecting them on a tumblr to see what they look like as a group. I am working on them at the same time as I am making the curly stuff, going back and forth between the two. They look quite different (these look more “artsy” so to speak) but to me they are really the same thing. In fact the first one was meant to be a curly thing with the faux-Japanese typography. And this one too, with the script font, although I have not put it on the

2 min

Produsage

There is this, in my view terribly misplaced, myth that while using off the shelf software is an unavoidable evil, everything that gets built inside that software should be made by you. Painstakingly. Path by path. Or writing the code (that particular myth especially). Taking your own photos. Sculpting your own 3D models. Otherwise you are not really the “real thing” as a designer or an artist or whatever. I am not a big proponent of this idea that it is somehow more virtuou

3 min

Curly Things

Logotype for Mr. Tabby’s Spice Shop (“tekir” is “tabby” in Turkish) Handwritten fonts, script fonts, gothic letters, art deco, art nouveau, faux-oriental fonts, retro stuff, scrolls, ornaments, patterns – these are all challenging visual elements for graphic designers. Not only are they very tricky to get to work as part of a layout (alignment issues and so on), they also have to always be used within an appropriate context. In fact, they are so tricky that I advise my novice

2 min

Companion Species

The term “Companion Species” was coined by Donna Haraway who examined a very particular relationship between human beings and animals – specifically domesticated animals. A relationship, which according to Haraway, is built on a “significant otherness.” A similar relationship, says the author, also exists between the cyborg and the human, something she talked about in her renowned “Cyborg Manifesto,” which is a text that is much more widely known than her writings on the rel

2 min

About Graphic Design

I decided to become a graphic designer in 1970 after seeing an exhibition of Polish theater posters. And although I found out very quickly that the job wasn’t really about designing cultural posters and book jackets, that instead it was really all about the advertising industry, that was still perfectly acceptable: All those brilliant British commercials back then? And – yes, of course one put one’s services to Capitalism, but Capitalism was not the monster that it has become

1 min

So, as predicted…

I have had a whale of a time making things for the imaginary alpha.tribe RL store. No idea what this store is supposed to be all about at this at point – they seem to be selling everything. It is a bit like making things for a doll’s house, playing around with these mockups inside photoshop. And I am not even done yet – more stuff out there that I can slap my “identity” on to. Pathetic for a 65 year old woman, you would say? You may not be too far off, I am saying it quietly

1 min

alpha.tribe branding

And now for something completely different… Why would I do a ‘real life’ branding for alpha.tribe – a virtual fashion store? Answer: Tutorial for my students on how to assemble a behance project page, complete with an issuu flipbook whereby they show their branding manual. Which I ended up really enjoying. Obviously alpha.tribe does not need letterheads and what have you. But, it was so much fun doing them that I think that I will go ahead and add some more while I sit here t

1 min

From Azimuth to Cypher

Once upon a time there was a great free app called Mural.ly with which one could create boards. I assembled the material of a research project on just such a board. The full board looked like this: And here are the detail screenshots: No other place to really put this, so it goes on this blog. And also, it kind of plays into my ‘minimalist and yet not minimalist’ musings. #Design #Influences #Research

1 min

Curio

Curio is playing into my ‘minimalist and yet narrative’ obsession in a way that the others aren’t. Here, the ‘tale’ is in the steampunk textures with which I clothed the basic prims – mostly cubes actually. And the avatar, of course. I am not sure I want to do it with lots of textures when it comes to this new thing rummaging around in my head. But still… Could something this elaborate be combined with dot arrays and nod and link abstractions? No idea. But then I usually get

1 min

Going back to minimal?

While I was putting together images for the new ShapeShifter 2012 site I re-rezzed some of the stuff that was on that sim in order to photograph it (yes, don’t ask – I was inexperienced and silly enough not to have made an OAR). And I remembered that I really liked what I had done back then. I am not sure if this stuff was as popular with visitors as the more ‘storyworld’ type of stuff that I also do. I am fairly certain that when this stuff was rezzed at alpha.tribe there w

1 min

The Symmetry book

Thinking of things I could do next, I keep coming back to graphic design. I made these pages a year ago for a project that was later published as an insert in a Turkish art magazine. We did not use this set but something else entirely. But, I liked these. More so than what the curator actually decided to go with. So, I sometimes look at them. So, maybe I should do an imaginary picture book? But, no, somehow I do not think I want to do this. Too intellectualized. Too artsy som

1 min

So – what next?

During these past few years that I was away from virtual worlds, it wasn’t just making things in virtual worlds that I lost interest in. I lost interest in making things – period.* What has been happening recently however is that my appetite for making things has been coming back with a vengeance. The island is now done and I am scrounging around as to what to do next. And, probably also because of what I wrote about my lack of 3D modelling skills for present day SL, I keep g

2 min

Self Evaluation in SL

The new island is more or less done. It looks OK, but it is nothing like what I achieved with Fool’s Gold in 2015. The dark sky level is probably the best part visually speaking, and the ground level seems to work, if not entirely from a design point of view (lots of flaws that I see but can’t figure out how to fix), then in terms of being a weird little playground. However the thing that makes me write this is not really about my building skills. It is the way in which the

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