Step one:

Create an evocative piece to announce the contest and encourage those with great grandparenting stories to go online and share.

For this a cadre of Owenites and Consumer Cellularists brought their families to the shoot, which took place in Portland’s Laurelhurst Park and on nearby Sauvie Island.

Step Two:

Produce video profiles of the three contest winners.

For this one we had to venture a little further from home. Peter Dean and a crew from Kamp Grizzly travelled to the wilds of Wisconsin (Ogema to be precise), the Maine hamlet of Topsham and the wilds of Los Angeles (Redondo Beach and Torrance, actually). They met some amazing people, heard some wonderful stories and wound up with three pieces capable of warming even the most cynical, seen-it-all of hearts. Even Poppi Jones approves.

From left to right – Victorian, Peacock, Fire, and Andante.

There are two parts to the process of making these. The first step is all about the design, and the second step is preparing the designs for manufacturing with Ponoko. It seemed pretty straightforward until I realized Wendi’s elaborate, organic curved drawings are not easy to recreate in Illustrator, due to the curved tapering her designs emply. I had hoped I could use the variable line width tool on simple lines to create the flows correctly, but it just didn’t look smooth enough, especially at some of the more extreme angles. Next I tried manually drawing all the shapes, but, again, it just wasn’t quite right due to me not being able to taper a curved shape properly. I ended up using the blob brush to create the initial shapes, then tweaked the shapes by hand, and made liberal use of the pathfinder to smooth out the corners.

After the vectors looked the way we wanted, submitting to Ponoko was an effortless process, and I received the 80 spoons within a couple of weeks.

More pictures on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lucas-swick/sets/72157627418494850/with/6036608280/

All in all I really enjoyed the framework, mainly because the examples and documentation are really easy to work with. I hope to see a way to attach mouse events to individual items as opposed to deriving the item clicked based on hitTest, but perhaps I missed something there. I’ll definitely be keeping my eyes on the framework to see what others are doing with it.

You can play with the experiment here http://labs.lucastswick.com/isogrid/. What fancy pictures did you make?

Owen spent the past few months developing and producing an online video campaign for our longtime friends Prometheus Real Estate Group. The mission? Expand the group’s I Am Home brand while avoiding the doldrums of real estate video content (boring property tours, low production values, lame music). Oh, and come up with a solution that’s repeatable for all of Prometheus’ more than 70 holdings up and down the west coast (without getting repetitive or predictable).

Writer Peter Dean and Art Director Brandy Shearer set upon the task. The solve in this case was a series of how-to videos, each highlighting a difference aspect of the brand experience from an unexpected angle. After storyboarding, Production Manager Michelle Majeski enlisted our partners from previous video projects, Kamp Grizzly.

The one-day shoot happened in and around one of the Prometheus’ Portland properties, utilizing both Owen and Kamp Grizzly staff as talent. The first series of three videos served to prototype the production process for future rollout to more cities and more properties. Mission accomplished? We think so (and so does Prometheus).

Nervous System has implemented this idea and is now manufacturing genetically-derived lamps. They’re quite beautiful, and perhaps a glimpse into the future of manufacturing where mass production doesn’t mean generic.

More info about the project can be found here, along with a gorgeous photoset.

This lovely ampersand was built C4D in by Ryan based on an AJ Joseph sketch

Sometimes you get a call to do something fun. And sometimes that needs to happen super-fast-like. This was done from first phone call to final delivery in 24 hours. Ryan had fun, AJ at Adobe had fun (and liked it a bunch). We hope lots of people get to see it in upcoming Adobe work. Thanks AJ. Thanks Ryan.

It was raining today so I built an image processing application. It builds on an old flash experiment I did a few years ago but now uses processing.js, jquery, some ajax, html5 and css3 all instead of flash.

So what does it do? Well, to get a better idea of how Circle Art process images, compare the source image (top left) with three processed versions:

Look at all those circles! Essentially, we’re using the source image to paint a new interpreted image, where the brush is affected by the contrast in a given area. If it sounds complicated, just give it a try and start clicking. You’ll see how it works in no time.

You can see it in action here: http://labs.lucastswick.com/circle-art/

It may look like the app is just randomly placing shapes around your mouse cursor, but that’s actually a bit more to it. The size of the circle is derived from the contrast within the area around your mouse. For instance – painting over someone’s eyes (high contrast) will draw smaller circles and result in greater detail, meanwhile drawing on their cheek (lower contrast) will result in larger circles.

You have some options to control the app more specifically as well:

Randomizer affects how big of a range around your mouse the app will pick as its starting point. You’ll notice if you click and hold in one location the app doesn’t always draw on the exact pixel you’ve selected. Generally, the larger your Max Size option, the bigger this should be so even big circles can look adequately scattered.

The Iterations is a hard working slider. Turn it up to draw up to 50 circles each frame. You’ll be a Circle Art making machine!

Max Size defines the largest circle that can be drawn. It’s often nice around tight areas to impose some limits. Know your boundaries!

Threshold defines how much contrast is required before the app draws the shape. For painterly effects, turn this up, but realize you will lose some detail in your drawings. I sometimes crank this on a first pass and then slowly add layers of refining details with smaller circles.

You can also choose whether to draw outlined/filled/outlined+filled circles and rectangles, along with the alpha of each. I’ll probably add some more shapes in the future. After all, pentragrams never go out of fashion. Compare the circle outlines (above) to circle fills (below) here:

Well what are you waiting for? Give it a try now!

Circle Art is built by Lucas Swick

What I did yesterday for creative inspiration: Two new shirts for the closet… Experimenting with my serger and cover stitch machine a bit more.

Both are from a bamboo/jersey/spandex blend fabric that was on sale so I didn’t care as much if something didn’t turn out (I try to experiment with patterns on cheaper fabric for obvious reasons). It’s kind of an odd turquoise color but not bad and the edges/hem are in a neutral taupe color that is a nice compliment.

Asymmetrical design shirt: First time using this pattern… I altered it only slightly (made the neck opening bigger in the front and back and used rolled edges on neck and sleeves) and am pretty happy with the pattern overall. There will be some small fit alterations next time I make it but in general it fits pretty well. I was surprised at how well the asymmetry works… It gathers really nicely on the left side when wearing it and is just about the right difference in length to look nicely asymmetrical as it sits on my my waist/hips (looking at the pattern initially, I though it would be cockeyed and unflattering, but it’s great).

* Every third Friday of the month Owen shuts its doors to regular business and offers up a day for people to explore creativity and find inspiration however they like.

The cover stitch machine is awesome for hemming.

Rolled edge sleeve from the serger.

TANK TOP

This is a pattern I created based off an purchased pattern combined with a shirt I own that I like the shape of. It took a few times to get it right, but now I really like the way it fits. This is the second shirt I have made from this pattern now. It’s great with nice pants for a Wednesday night dance and I can also wear it climbing… Love it is when my clothes are multi functional.