HELLO, WHAT'S THIS?! This.... is my very own little newsletter! As some of you may already know I have a little history with newsletters, the memories of which take me all the way back to the cherished Greenroom days. Producing one for myself is a small thrill that I'm finding surprisingly enjoyable. This isn't at all what I remember feeling when "that" time of the month came at Greenroom. So I hope you appreciate it for what is... Just a way for me to tell you that I'm busy, happy, healthy (kinda) and still click-clacking things like "gotoAndStop()" at my laptop. Oh by the way, you're receiving this either because you have subscribed to it on my website or because I thought you'd be interested and manually added your address to the list. If you are one of the latter, I apologize in advance if you find it invasive. You can remove yourself from the list by clicking the link at the bottom of the page. Walk like a Blog Thanks to music, blogs have become part of my daily life and I've come to realize what their benefits are. I reckon my website could do with some bloggin' attitude! So! My first step has been to add an RSS feed to my portfolio that you can subscribe to. Exciting, right?! Click here if you're still not sure what RSS is about. The next thing I'd like to add is a link to post comments to each article. In any case I've come to the point where I really hate the design of my site. So when I get round to redesigning it I'll be able to plug in the extra features. I Work during the day Here's a summary of the year so far, for more details check out my site. This is Living The year kicked off when I started working at LBi, building PlayStation 3's website: This Is Living. I spent three grueling months on this, finding it a great experience in every way. James Mountford James is a wicked fashion photographer who has shot for a wide range of British and international magazines including i-D, Tank and Homme Plus. He also happens to be my flat mate who I've known for many years. I had promised to build a website for him for quite a while, so when I came off the PlayStation project we both decided that the time was right. We sat down at our desk for a few days and brought the site to life, making up as we went (just the way I like it!): jamesmountford.com. MTV SWITCH A few weeks later my friend Sam Gilbey called me up about an MTV job, so following a well-deserved break I built the MTV Switch website. Sam's illustrations as usual made it really easy to produce something that looked and felt good, they inspired more creative ideas and gave number of options every time we had to animate something. I've worked with plenty of designs that don't really do that for me! ADAM DE CRUZ In July my friend Adam De Cruz asked me to build a portfolio site for him. Adam is a make-up artist with an impressive portfolio of work for magazines such as i-D, Vogue, V and Tank. He's worked with the likes of David Bailey and Sølve Sundsbø. He also now runs his own magazine called Stimuli which launched last month. Anyway this is what I came up with: adamdecruz.com DIGITAL OUTLOOK I spent August and September working at Digital Outlook building two social network applications: - the first is a tool that lets users build backgrounds and profile pictures that they can use for myspace-type websites.: Halo 3 Toolkit - the second is a widget (apparently the correct term nowadays is "gadget") for Prince Caspian fans to embed on their favourite social network site. I don't think it's live yet! That's just how fresh this piece of news is. How lucky are YOU? I work at night I've also been keeping fairly busy with other things.. They don't involve any of the following: - advertising - offices - buses [...sitting in them] - money [...me getting any] Oh yeah, all of the following is work that I haven't published on my website, so it's 100% exclusive!! ...Hang on! ...did you just squeek in excitement? Flash Flyers Getting Flash Flyers through to the general public has been a small ambition of mine. I've always tried to convince club promoters to use flash for their eFlyers, as opposed to epileptic animated GIFs. You guys all know what potential Flash has, but some people out there in the real world don't even know what Flash is (shocking, isn't it?). So it's been pretty hard! But when a friend of mine put me in charge of the artwork for his new night Klapp Trapp, I grabbed the horn by the balls. They now have a regular Flash Flyer that goes out every two weeks all over Myspace and other sites. You can check them all out here. This eventually lead onto making Flash Flyers for a few other parties including Trailer Trash. VISUALS Working with my friend's night Klapp Trapp has also given me the opportunity to explore the magical and mysterious world of visuals. I've found that using Flash as a tool to create visuals for parties has the potential of being a lot more flexible than the industry standard software. Once again, Flash has proved a perfect "other way" of doing something that already seemed too established to change. So far at parties I've only used the basic side, a simple tool that triggers and controls animations with keyboard commands, live. There are a couple of videos here and here. However I spent the summer building a Flash interface that can make any object on screen (animation, video, text or graphic) react to certain frequencies of a live audio feed. A basic example of what this means: if I have three circles in a row, I can get the left one to throb based on the bass, the middle one to shake based on the mids, and the right one to bounce based on the treble. It gives you an idea how much else you could do. Unfortunately I've come to a standstill due to some technical issues, but I'm planning on getting back onto this whenever I'm feeling less dense than usual! PRINT WORK As well as Klapp Trapp flyers and posters, I was asked to design an invite to Julien Macdonald's after-show party, and a flyer for the opening of Nude in london. I also worked on the post-production for a lookbook for the autumn/winter collection of Future Classics. Check out the work here. MUSIC PRODUCTION This year has been really important for me music-wise, I've learned a lot of new things and met people who have inspired me to push my production harder than ever before. There are some samples here. WRAPPING UP.. Well that should be that! Thanks very much for reading, and well done if you've managed to make it to this paragraph! THAT WAS FUN! Or wasn't it? unsubscribe here. If you have any suggestions or questions I'd love to hear them from you! david@davidterranova.com