Shooting Build

For three years now Andy McMillan has been running what is widely regarded as one of the world’s best design and web industry events right here in Belfast. The conference is called Build and features five pretty intense days of educational/entertaining/social activities, culminating in a main conference day of formal presentations. Build attracts the best designers and developers in the web design industry, both for the main speakers and the attendees.

So a while ago I suggested to Andy that it would be worthwhile ‘officially’ covering Build with myself as photographer. Of course there have been some great photos taken at previous Build events (most of the creative attendees are themselves pretty handy with cameras!), but those photos are usually captured in ‘downtime’ moments by people otherwise concentrating on the actual events. In contrast my attendance at Build would be exclusively for the purpose of capturing good high-quality images from as much of the event as possible, running over the whole four days.

I knew this would be a lot of work, both in shooting the photos and in the follow-up processing, but I was happy to add my support to the impressive work that Andy and his team undertake in putting Belfast on the international design map.

Build is a really significant event and I wanted to do it justice with images that conveyed the scale, atmosphere and excitement experienced by all who attended it. If you weren’t lucky enough to get to Build this year I hope my photos give you a sense of what it was like - and whets your appetite for Build 2012.

I have posted a small gallery of images in a new Photography section here on my blog. The main body of images from Build can be seen on my Flickr and Pix.ie accounts.

I, Robot

I first met Jonathan Cusick, the owner of Digital Robot Software, at one of the Belfast Xcake developer networking meetings. I recall trying to impress upon some of these nascent developers the importance of employing good design and branding in marketing their new apps. I was pleased that Jonathan seemed to 'get it' as, a short while after the meetup, he contacted me to discuss creating branding for this new software company.

Jonathan specifically wanted a fun iconic robot image incorporated into the logo, of course being an ardent Sci-Fi fan the subject of robots is close to my heart so I had a lot of fun trawling through my favourite movies, books and comics while digging up the reference material. Robot icons have always played a huge part in mainstream popular culture anyway, and never more so than in today's world, so I thought this was a good direction for the creative.

I wanted to reduce the icon to the most recognisable aspect of a character (robot or human) - the face. An image of a face is powerful and, whatever the viewer's reaction is, the connection to the image is readily made and usually memorable. I was aiming for; 'Smart and fun, with attitude' - with the intention of showing some personality in the face element of the icon. I also had some fun in 'drawing' the face using numerals from the typeface.

I chose 'ITC Avant Garde Gothic' for the typeface, trading numbers for letters in a few instances, and editing some of the letterforms further to give the complete logo a more bespoke and geometric/industrial look. For colourways a fresh green matched to a muted navy blue worked well in defining the logo elements. These strong colours also make for a good reversed-out combination, very important for the likes of website mastheads (or any implementation of the logo beyond white stationery printing).

I really enjoyed creating this logo, I was happy with it, Jonathan was happy with it - and the robot looks happy about it too!

Update on Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 12:18PM by davymac

Jonathan pinged me on Twitter to let me know he has also posted on his blog about this design project.

Thanks Jonathan, good fedback like this is always welcome.

So, where were we then?

Welcome back.

The Hiatus is over now that I've finally made the time to overhaul my design blog - and this is the result. I hope to resume reasonably frequent blogging and thought 'A Career in Creative' summarises it fairly well. I'd like to cover the creative process, concepts, design, techniques and the business aspects of working as an independent/freelance. You'll also find the odd smattering of arts, culture and photography - all passions of mine.
In an attempt to keep the peace I'll even do my best to avoid rabid Apple fandom, but they do make this so difficult!

In fact I've taken stock of all my web projects (including some dormant domains) with the result that some long simmering plans are finally taking shape, so there will be a few more developments in the (hopefully) near future.

I've also taken the opportunity to move this blog from Wordpress to Squarespace, I still love Wordpress, but for this blog I wanted to try the Squarespace platform, it does appear to have some unique features and I'm completely blown away by their iPhone app. I must also say also that Squarespace made a good (and easy) job of importing all the content from my Wordpress blog. I'm not being paid by Squarespace (quite the reverse!) but I am very impressed by their service so far.

Still getting used to the new gaff here, but it's a good sign that I'm able to concern myself less with the technicalities of managing the blog and get on with creating better content, of course time will tell.