I decided it was time we created our own range of designer T-Shirts, so I’m proud to announce the launch of ‘Insults‘ By Funhouse Graphics.
As the name suggests, everything we have created for this new online shop is insulting, that is, it’s a small compendium of quotes designed and laid out on T-Shirts, mousemats, mugs etc and utilises some of the greatest putdowns of all time.
Queen Karaoke is responsible of course, and those of you who follow her Twitter account will already know the savagery of her wit. But there are also famous quotes from Groucho Marx, Oscar Wilde and others, and a section devoted to Shakespeare’s greatest insults.
I’ve created lots of flash animations over the years, many of them self-contained websites. But the trend seems to be away from these all-in sites and more towards using flash banners or just bits and pieces of flash sprinkled through a website. I think this has happened partly because flash was always absolutely hopeless for search engine optimisation – the designer always had to put in all kinds of alternate content specifically for search engines – and partly because there is hope that there may be a newer, easier technology on the horizon.
Whatever happens, animation on the web is here to stay and if there’s a better way than flash of incorporating moving elements I’ll be working with it soon. In the meantime, flash is still very much alive and well.
I could show you lots of examples of flash banners that I’ve made but they’re a bit meaningless outwith the context of the websites they belong in. Instead here is my favourite piece which is a little front page insert I created for Internet Karaoke, the online karaoke player. Queen Karaoke is the site’s ‘virtual hostess’ and the purpose of the animation was simply to tell customers they had to purchase credits before singing along. However, beyond the simple instruction to ‘Get Credits’ I decided we could have some fun.
This is a 3d event plan for the International Asian Fashion Awards (IAFA) event to be held at London’s Hilton Metropole. There was a lot of detailed information both for the event space and the stage set elements. The event planners were also very specific about lighting, so I was able to find visual references for the particular lights and simulate the effects. I sampled the carpet and the ceiling from photos on the Hilton website, so that is pretty much what the suite looks like.
This is the new website design I created for Scottish painter Carolynda Macdonald. Carolynda has a serious eye for detail and her most recent paintings, such as the one above, have featured blown-up images of individual pieces of candy with every fold mouth-wateringly portrayed.
The website design is extremely simple and lets the paintings speak for themselves, but I think provides a sympathetic backdrop for these very strong images.
Cairn Energy held their Annual General Meeting this week and had been looking for ways of spicing up their annual reports. As the reports detailed their oil and gas exploration work in the Indian subcontinent and in Greenland, it made sense to illustrate these areas with maps.
There are a hundred ways of making maps, and apparently last year they did it with Powerpoint slides, but this year I created these animated 3d flythroughs for them, complete with fluffy clouds.
Overnight their share price soared by 8%. I reckon it was the clouds that did it.
This is a selection of shots that I treated for Sky HD using extreme slow motion and time distortion techniques which are part of their ongoing promotional campaign.
The technique involves manipulating time by accelerating and decelerating speeds in various ways on specific bits of footage. The shots here are unedited and I’ve just included various clips that I liked. Obviously these were rendered in high definition and are meant to be viewed on a large HDTV screen and not in a miniscule browser window, but you get the idea.
Sadly there’s no way of actually slowing down time in real life.
Goal line technology is a hot topic in sports circles as accuracy in goal decisions is vital. This simple animation illustrates a not-so-simple piece of electronic gadgetry that could make any such difficult decisions a thing of the past.
Bob Jamieson developed the ‘Superpuck’, an ice hockey puck with a tiny electronic chip inside (currently shortlisted for a John Logie Baird Award for innovation). The technology clearly had implications for other sports and is now attracting interest from FIFA, the international governing body of football. See the Superpuck website for the full story on Goal Line Technology.
The idea of the 3d animation was to show in under a minute what it could take ten minutes to communicate verbally, and to a potentially non-English speaking audience. The three elements involved are clear – the electronic chip, the sensor strip around the goal and the decoder box. Watch this space.
Edinburgh-based production company LA Media asked me to produce an animated ident for their video creations and this extended version above is what I delivered.
They had fairly set ideas about the design style – that it should be monochromatic, gritty and urban – and even had some animation examples to show me. This was a bit unusual, but what was more unusual was that they didn’t want me to use their existing logo.
An ident without a logo was not something I was sure I could do, but I enjoy a challenge. Like other idents, you only use around 5-10 seconds worth but when they gave me the music they were using – by Mike Jameson – I kind of liked looking at the whole thing.
Scottish painter Alan Macdonald asked me to design the catalogue for his current exhibition, now on show in Amsterdam, entitled ‘Message From The Dark Side’.
Alan’s paintings show bishops on mopeds, Dutch masters drinking Coke and all manner of other surreal juxtapositions. I’m a big fan. One of my favourites is called ‘Windbag’ and shows a classical landscape with a Tesco bag blowing freely in the centre.
The catalogue was an exercise in graphic design restraint. The images are so strong, they need a lot of space and as little interference from other design elements as possible. I kept it really simple. I’m not normally known for my restraint.
These are examples of scenes that I created for the History of the Devil a while back. The idea was to show little stylised vignettes of various demons, angels and fairies as they were discussed. The documentary used a toy theatre theme throughout so it made sense to put the characters within the theatre.
We used front and back projection screens to create the effect, combining live actors with virtual sets. The 3d graphic theatre backdrops were designed and animated then back projected from a dvd onto an enormous screen behind the performers (Lauren Lamarr and Mark Donnelly).
We also placed a second mesh screen between the camera and the performers and used front projection to cast another layer of motion graphics onto. The set looked amazing. What you see here are the basic rushes, there’s nothing added, and the overall effect is a bit like moving 3d stills.
I'm Greg Moodie, a freelance graphic designer based just outside Edinburgh in Scotland. I've been trading as Funhouse Graphics since 1998 and specialise in 2d & 3d animation with a heavy dash of quirky.
