We had crazy deadline too. If i remember correctly I was first briefed on the website on monday afternoon, had to finish design and concept by the next morning then spent the next two days coding. During that two days I think I clocked in over 30 hours of coding! It was insane and exhilarating at the same time, especially because I hadn’t been doing any coding for almost two years and it was my first time touching  jQuery.

To be clear, the key visual (the android robot) and the event concept was already set. All I had to do was take those two and come up with a website concept. This is what I ended up doing:

I had always been fond of the scroll-triggered animation that’s so popular these days. I think it’s a really nice, simple light-weight way of introducing some interactivity to your site. I want to say I’ll make a separate post explaining the coding process and whatever “techniques” i use, but we all know that’s never going to happen so I’ll link you to this article instead. It helped me tremendously!

anyway, here are some backlogged pictures. this blog is really turning into a photolog :x

On June 26, my CEO, Indi, took us to this party that was held by one of our partners. that’s when I learned that when they say something is going to start at [insert some time here], it really means an hour later. so we sat around without anything to do, and people were even still rehearsing for the event!

after about 15 minutes of sitting around, this familiar figure came in to sit at the table next to us and my jaw dropped because… it was Megawati! well, not really. Indi immediately informed me before I made a fool of myself that the woman was actually a look-a-like. she to Megawati is like Tina Fey to Sarah Palin last year… although unlike Fey, her similarity to Megawati ends solely at her looks (speaking of Palin, i was surprised she stepped down yesterday! is there a scandal brewing that we’re all not aware of?)

The real Megawati is a prominent politician in Indonesia, who became the country’s first female president from 2001 – 2004. doesn’t really say much b/c we’ve only had four presidents before her since 1945. also note that she was not elected, rather she was appointed to become president after the previous president was removed from office.

She is currently running for presidency again this year, after being defeated for re-election back in 2004. yeah, i know this may sound odd… to top it off, the guy who defeated her is also running for re-election against her this year.

finally we got to eat around 7, then stayed around for about an hour before bailing. after all it was Friday and we were all dying to go home after a long day at work…

the event was held at a hotel in central Jakarta (but I forgot which) and they had this gallery of gorgeous paintings in the lobby! i loved the paintings. i’m not sure if they were all done by the same artist, but they mostly have this similar style with very vibrant color – gorgeous!

took this on the way out. i love tree paintings / vector arts :) these are my favorite of the bunch!

tried out Sour Sally pink yogurt. Sour Sally basically taste like any other Froyo, but i think they are more sour than most (hence the name). I loved the pink one more than original.

walking around at Pacific Place, where they had this exhibition of animals made out of a bunch of gummy candies. quite impressive!

Pacific Place is a super tall mall! this picture depicts only half of the whole place

at work, we had our press conference yesterday. this is me preparing for the slide to be shown during the event. i have to admit the slide was pretty boring since i only had about an hour to make the slide… x_x but i tried.

standing next to my brother’s banner! it’s (almost) life size if they got the height correctly. can you believe i was wearing a size small for my shirt? I had to roll up the sleeves and tuck in the shirt to make it look normal.

the crew!

i drank two cups of coffee that day and it was enough to keep me going for about 24 hours… this is why i rarely drink coffee even though i love the taste.

lunch time!

and some design work i did (and printed) last week:

Indi came up with this idea of creating a one way sticker to further promote our event. unfortunately because the sticker was made in a hurry, i failed to realize that the back screen wiper  would get in the way.. thankfully it is removeable so for the time being the car has no back wiper :P (btw Indi came up with the catchy tag and the concept. i only did the photoshop work)

printed and distributed a bunch of these over the past few weeks. not to mention the poster (which looks like the notebook), press kit (which were distributed over the press con) and thousands of entry and car passes we are about to print this week.. it’s safe to say we will all be busy until the end of this month :’(

as i said on twitter yesterday: print design can be quite frustrating sometimes, but the end result is much more satisfying than web design

i’ve designed a few fliers before but never a full size poster! so this was pretty new to me. a very satisfying experience :D thank god for the printing experience i got with Phi Rho when i was in college!!

the poster is about 50 cm x 70 cm, slightly bigger than an A2. the photoshop file for this design alone was over 200mb since i designed at 300 dpi x_x put quite a strain on my poor little laptop.

Anyway, in attempt to make this blog more attractive, here is what i’ve been doing at work. we were given several ad spots by our official magazine sponsor. two pages are already designated for the event poster and our sponsors and we are left with a couple more pages, so i thought it would be nice to include something more magazine friendly.

I made these two variations based on the winners of the past tournaments:

Scott Hend of Australia, 2008 winner. I used Hand of Sean (free!) and Gotham Narrow for the typefaces. love these fonts!

Juvic Pagunsan of the Philippines, 2007 Winner. This one is to be printed landscape on the magazine.

These ads are not final yet.. pending approval and space availability (we might want to put something else in the magazine instead), but i’m pretty happy with them. I wish i could come up with something catchy though.

I love the scarves and linens, but most of all i love the hand carved AND hand painted (!!) batik masks:

When i grow up and have a house, I want three of these hanging on the living room wall. there were three different sizes. the smallest one is about the size of my palm (see below) and the biggest one covers my face. the medium-sized mask is probable about 1.5 bigger than the smallest one.

I took a liking to this mask since the face isn’t as sinister as the other ones. plus, the pattern is just so pretty! I feel so inspired after seeing these. wonder if I can buy the unpainted carved masks and paint one myself!

Anyway, today my family and I also happen to pass by the christian school that all three of us (me, my sis and my bro) used to go to. I went to this school from 6th – 9th grade. It was quite a nostalgic experience. The school was a bit smaller than I remember, but they held so many memories of my early teenage years.

we talked about the places we used to hang out at, and how all three of us used to get some sort of punishment for being  just a couple minutes late to school (we had to stand in front of the whole school during our monday weekly ceremony!!), how my brother played basketball and soccer all the time and ripped his pants in front of his classmates (he didn’t care back then), how we had to change for gym in a small bathroom along with the rest of the class, so on so forth. it’s amazing how much you’re able to remember and how much you manage to forget in just.. a little under 10 years.

ahhh memories!!!

Yesterday morning, I woke up to a very pleasant surprise in my mailbox: N had bought me a license for Gotham Narrow!! All 16 styles, which was not exactly cheap for a virtual computer file… THANK YOU! ^^

I still can’t believe I am now a proud owner of this beautiful newly released in 2009 font typeface! that’s right, i also know the difference between “fonts” and “typeface” now.

anyway, my internet is really slow for whatever reason (like super slow…) so while waiting for my wordpress dashboard to load, i fired up my CS3 played around with Gotham Narrow and made these:

obviously this was made to thank the person who made it all possible. i may just love Gotham Narrow even more than the regular Gotham! it has the perfect width and doesn’t use up as much space.

A quote by Fox Mulder from one of my favorite X-Files episodes, “Paper Hearts” from Season 4, which is what my blog is named after. EXCEPT, i really can’t remember if it was mulder or scully who said it. i swear it was Mulder but then i googled it and some site says it was Scully?! i guess time for a rewatch…

love love love this typeface! :D

Later, I found out that Gotham is the very same typeface that was used on Obama’s beautiful campaign website! I completely adore the look and feel of this site and also the works they have done for the new(ish) White House website. So clean, so up-to-date and so elegant! I’m in love.

(btw, did anyone notice the sidebar menu that says “login to My BO“? my immature self totally cracked up when i saw that)

it was pretty much love at first sight. LOVE the button, the simplicity of the tabs & menus, the way it works with Vista’s aero theme… everything! sadly, i quickly discovered they don’t seem to support PNG transparency yet :( i can’t live seeing these imperfect jaggedy images on the net!

anyway, can’t wait until google chrome reaches perfection. i’ll be the first to download it.

while trying to find out what the hell it is that smashing magazine author uses (at first i thought it was firefox with some sort of custom theme) i came across an FF theme that somewhat simulates the look and feel of chrome. it’s called Chromifox, and that’s what i’m using on my FF!

the internet being down proved to be a good thing as i finally made a new layout for this blog. and, get this, i even made a comment template… yes, finally! people could leave comments again! not that anyone would cause I have no friends (really), but I quite like the comment template I made so I hope someone would.

today I finished the 3rd sequel of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, which means I am almost finished with the entire series! I actually played the series out of order – 4th, 2nd, 3rd, and now the 1st. i liked them all, but i have to say, so far i like the 4th sequel the most. although, i’m not sure if it is considered a sequel or a spin-off since the main character for the 4th sequel is no longer Phoenix Wright.

you can’t really see much change right away since the layout is still the same as before. so why did it take me so long you ask? well, that’s because i completely re-coded the whole thing, CSS and javascript and all, so that it isn’t as messy and half-hearted as before. the new coding is much cleaner and more up to the current web standard… or so i think. if you had seen the code of the previous layout, you would’ve cried :P

also, i cleaned up the mootools script i’m using for the effects. it was REALLY messy before with unnecessary syntax because i didn’t quite understand how to use it. i still don’t, but at least it’s better now. i also decided to make the boxes of each “pages” smaller. before this, they should take up the whole screen (unless your resolution is larger than 1920×1200, which i doubt). i find that making the boxes smaller adds more color to the screen, and making it not so boring.

another big thing is that i revamped the way my works were displayed before. the previous way was just… frankly, quite ugly. the slider animation didn’t even work properly (again, due to my lack of knowledge of mootools) and the page looked really boring in general. now it’s been improved.

anyway, so that’s what i was up to today! damn, time flies when you work on something you love doing. loveeeee webdesign :)