Simon Young - Designer

iTunes 10 UI changes.

Simon — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 03:46:35 +0000

Apple announced iTunes 10 today, and after an unusual delay in actually releasing the application, we are now able to download it and examine what UI changes they’ve implemented this time round. It seems they are forever changing the style of iTunes – perhaps it is their testing bed for new designs; either way, it can often cause annoyance and frustration.

The biggest difference seems to be that they’ve removed almost all traces of color – not sure about that, it seems very bland now…

The new iTunes 10 icon.

New vertical traffic light buttons for expand/close/minimize

All icons have been grayed out… looks quite boring

New PING icon for iTunes Social side

The new AirPlay icon – replacing AirTunes

Even the iTunes Preferences have been desaturated.

What do you think of the new iTunes 10?

ELI.

Simon — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 00:29:04 +0000

My latest artwork is for the ELI series.
This was a very open brief, only requesting desolation and despair within the artwork.
From there we were to create one video Teaser and 3 Scripture videos for 3 chapters of Elijah’s story.
The process:
- Storyboard the scripture passages by grouping common locations/people/elements for artwork
- Create each element separately, using Tracing Paper to allow scene layering
- Scan the drawings in
- Paint each element separately within Photoshop

From there the files were taken into After Effects for the animating process.

I’m really happy with the results. The style is some weird hybrid of cartoon and realistic textures, while the elements have their own character as they swap in and out of the scene.

Check out 3 of the 6 created videos below.

Icons.

Simon — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 21:26:02 +0000

Have you ever found yourself requiring some decent quality Adobe icons?
I did last night… and I could not find any anywhere! So I made them myself, and thought I’d share.

They are 300dpi, 600x600px images of InDesign/Illustrator/Photoshop CS3 icons.

An hour of Design – visually

Simon — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 22:30:55 +0000

This is my work travels for an hour’s worth of Brochure Design today! I used IO Graph to track the movements from 11:30am – 12:30am.

Fun to checkout the Mac OS Expose corners, my side-screen toolbars and the frequent travels to the top File Menu structure.

Also where my Dock is on the bottom of the screen.

You can find a larger pic here.

Liquid Mobile – Guided Tour

Simon — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 16:33:17 +0000

We’ve finally launched the Liquid Church Mobile site so you can carry “Church in Your Pocket!” Check out this video for a Guided Tour through the new site.

Facebook and Skittles

Simon — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 04:35:18 +0000

So today Facebook celebrates six years of booking faces!
Six years since Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes huddled together around some computers in Harvard University and created a fun college website for their friends.

Happy Birthday.

And now, six years in the making, Facebook has literally exploded into a thriving, opinionated, and interconnected network of 400 million users – making it the 3rd largest ‘country’ on the planet!
What’s more impressive is that Facebook’s population growth is actually accelerating. It took 3 months to grow from 300>350 million and a mere 2 months to then reach 400 million.

I spent a few minutes breaking the 62 days of growth down to more manageable numbers, and converting them into packets of Skittles. I like Skittles.
- 806,451 Skittles eaten per day
- 33,602 Skittles eaten per hour
- 560 Skittles eaten per minute
- 9 Skittles eaten per second

9 Skittles eaten (sign-ups) every single second of the day, and that number is still increasing! Could you keep that up?

This post should have only taken you about 1 minute to read so far… during that time, 560 people joined Facebook. In my world, that’s 10 packets of Skittles eaten. Wow.

Have you joined Facebook? What’s your favorite Skittles color?

Barbie Stop Motion

Simon — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 02:16:07 +0000

We were going through some old files in the office today and found some equally old videos from a previous series in February 2009… okay – so maybe not that old.

They were my first effort at stop-motion photography, and they had me hiding in the office basement for days playing with Barbies. Hrmm… The final result turned out much better than expected, though! So after hours of careful Barbie manipulating, hundreds of photos and a dash of Photoshop & Final Cut, we arrived with 3 series promotional videos: Beach, Night-Club and Anniversary.

If you’re interested, you can check out the rest of the Heat series here.
Enjoy.

Liquid Church Mobile

Simon — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 20:41:08 +0000

We’ve just previewed a sneak peek of the new Liquid Church Mobile… check it out below.
I’ve been working on the design of this site for a while now, and it’s finally going into early user testing before it’s rolled out for the start of 2010!
Exciting stuff!

One of our biggest goals with the Mobile site was for it to be accessible from all Smart Phones, not just the usual iPhone application, so we’ll be working hard to get this onto as many phones as possible! If you own a smartphone that can access the internet, you will soon be able to:

- view Message and Worship Archives
- sign-up to Liquid events
- interact with the Online Community
- watch Church Online LIVE from their phone
- take message notes during a service
… and much more!

Other aspects of the design will allow you to share videos and links with friends via the Liquid Church Facebook/Twitter/Vimeo accounts, as well as have differing tools and options depending on whether you are ‘New to Liquid’ watching ‘At a Campus’ or doing ‘Church Online’.

If you want to sign-up to help us test this new side of Liquid, checkout this link here.

Meanwhile, here is the sneak peek graphic…

What are your first impressions?

The Internet is Boring.

Simon — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 17:23:41 +0000

I read an interesting article this morning in The Australian Online Newspaper titled, Everything old is new again to nostalgic, internet-weary young adults, which discussed the growing trend that 16-30 year olds are losing their internet drive and are beginning to return to old-school cultures. Have a read through and gather your own thoughts, but one sentence in particular absolutely jumped out at me as I was reading;

“They [16-30's] want technology to assist rather than dominate the way they communicate.”

This is exactly where I stand right now… I am getting pretty bored with Facebook, it doesn’t entertain me at all, I’m only hanging around so that I can stay in touch with people/photos… that’s all there is left to do on it, besides those annoying quizzes. The only real reasons I use the internet right now are for social networking/connecting/blogs or researching etc for work purposes. If I’m ever using the internet for any other reason, I can now see that I am looking for ways it can ‘assist’ my everyday life.

The internet isn’t a feature anymore… it’s a tool to be used.

How do you use the internet?

Green Air.

Simon — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 01:59:26 +0000