Jelle Pingen

“Happy Holidays” or “What I’ve been up to lately”.

Written on December 28, 2010

Christmas is officially over, or at least where I live. It sounds strange to me to still wish you a merry Christmas, so I just hope that all of you had a nice one. I know my Christmas eve couldn’t have been better, spending some quality time with my lovely girlfriend. On this side of the pond we don’t celebrate it with presents, because we have Sinterklaas for that. So Christmas is all about family for me, being with the ones you love. It’s nice to be together for once, have a big dinner and enjoy eachother’s company. Anyway, I can still wish you a happy new year! I’m sure 2011 is going to be awesome.

You might have noticed some inactivity from my side lately. There are simply so many things going on in my life at the moment that updating this site has had a low priority. The site was even down for a couple of days, but thankfully a simple DNS server update fixed it. Firstly there is my study, Creative Technology, which I still enjoy a lot. Even though it had quite a slow start where we could basically just sit back and relax, it is taking up quite some of my free time now. We’ve had to hand in some assignments (mostly programming) just before the Christmas break for grading. And yes, I’ve pulled the occasional all-nighter to get things done.
The programming language we’re using is called Processing, and you can do quite some nice stuff with it. One of our end assignments was to create an image gallery. But not just any ordinary image gallery, it had to be controlled by an Arduino microcontroller. Messing around with these microcontrollers is great fun though! You can hook up all kinds of different sensors and whatnot to create cool stuff. Your own touchpad? No problem. Accelerometer? Got it! Distance sensor? Why not… So my first idea was to use an accelerometer to control the image gallery. However, when I finally got all the wires connected properly, I found out that it would be quite useless. Even when lying still on a table, the values would still change too much, causing the image gallery to keep flipping through the images. Not having enough time to fix it, I decided to go with a simple joystick instead. Unfortunately I can’t give you a link to a working demo, since that would require you to have the Arduino connected as well. So I made a little video instead.

The last end assignment was to create a drum machine. A simple drum sequence, controlled by the user, which can play audio samples. I’m sure most of you have messed around with, or at least seen, one of many that can be found online. You know, things like this. Because our teachers like things that are different, I decided to make a circular one. And instead of the simple clicking on a block to make it active, I wanted keyboard input! My final drum machine can be found here (yes, it works!). The only problem is that it can’t keep proper rhythm (it goes a tad slower sometimes), but I was unsure how to fix that. Oh and the sounds are a bit crappy ofcourse, but they are just random clips I found on the internet.

So much for school. Ofcourse I still have some time left for one of my hobbies; web design! And with that comes client work. It is nice to have a new local client, makes communication much easier. It is for a restaurant/cooking studio. I can’t tell you much about it yet, but it will hopefully go in my portfolio early 2011.

Sticking with the photoshop subject, the 2010 Encide Interface Battlebay started!
For those of you who have no idea what that means, Encide.net is an “underground” design community. The underground part meaning that the forum is invite-only. You’ll have to be invited by one of the current members to gain access, and, by the same rules, you’re out if you don’t behave well. It’s not that we’re feeling elitist, but by using an invite system like this we can keep the relaxed, close community we have.
Now, last year the idea raised to do a community-wide collaboration. We tought it’d be cool to do a so-called Battlebay or art-worm. Something like the quite famous BlueSfear Worm, but then filled with fantasy interfaces.

After two months or so of hard work and a lot of interfaces, the Battlebay was finally done. Counting 56 jaw-dropping pieces of photoshop magic. It got quite some exposure around the internet and has over 36.000 views at the time of writing. It was even featured on the popular PsdTuts+, where it caused quite a stir in the comment section about the use of the word interface, and the apparently outdated style of design. We know these are not real interfaces, but merely imaginative, futuristic-looking interface-related pieces of artwork. Most of the members of Encide are professional web or graphic designers, or do some freelancing on the side. Anyway, this Battlebay project was purely for fun, to create eye candy, and an outlet for their creativity.
Anyways, it was fairly obvious (at least to us) to do the same thing again this year. With a few changes though, the most obvious being the lighter template background. This is done to challenge the more experienced designers, since light interfaces are considered to be more difficult to make. You can’t hide your interface’s imperfections in the shadow. Ofcourse, the Battlebay is open for designers of all skill level. From amateurs (like me) to some true photoshop masters. I’m happy to say that I finished my entry, and I’m quite proud of it! You can view it in my deviantART gallery or by clicking on the thumbnail on the right.

I guess that’s about it for now. I’ll be enjoying the last few days of my 2-week vacation and I’ll speak to you in 2011. Keep safe!

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