Category Archives: Design

The Galway Film Society Website is Live

December 8, 2013Designbrochure website, christmas present, Design, galway film society, gfs, microsite, one pageJames Larkin

I went and updated the Galway Film Society website this morning.

It’s based on their brochure that is created by another design crowd. So this is simply a place to go to find out about the movies / link into the Town Hall Theatre Galway another three letter .ie website I still maintain :)

Does it work? I quite like it I should probably update the version of Foundation I’m using in it but personally I think it works well. I could of course try to reduce file sizes a bit more and go optimizing it to high hell and back.

Could lots of other things be added to it? No doubt.

However for a 1 page micro website I’m quite happy with it :)

So like it or hate it feel free to comment and if you have someone “close” in Galway and are stuck for a Christmas present for them you can’t go wrong with a season ticket for the Galway Film Society. That’s 10 movies for €45.

Black and white to colour in photoshop

April 13, 2011DesignBlack and white, colorize, colourize, experiments, marilyn monroe, photoshop, tutorialJames Larkin

black and white to colour header

So I ended up playing with the converting of a black and white photo to colour (color for any american english people out there) in photoshop yesterday,

I’ve actually thought about doing it for ages but saw a link to a tutorial on it which turned out to be a dead link. Anyways I needed a decent Black and White photo (to start with anyways I’ve plans to convert a few old photos once I get the knack of things) I did a quick search and who could be more perfect to do than Google Image search for Marilyn Monroe. You’ve got colour and black and white photos so you’ve go something to base things on (also some really high res images which is nice)

Selected my photo .. and basically means selecting the various areas you want with the lasso tool (I used the polygonal lasso tool for it’s clicky goodness) add a slight feather to the selected area copy and paste as a new layer. Then up to Layers and Adjustment layer -> Hue/Saturation

Adjustment Layer

Then make sure to tick use previous layer to create clipping mask

Use previous layer to create clipping mask

And hey presto .. it’s slightly pain staking cutting out the bits but so cool to start seeing the results once you start adjusting the Hue / Saturation levels ( make sure to tick colorize or you may be wondering why nothing is happening)

Hue / Saturation

And so you start to see some results … my first looking something like Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe … Second version appearing a bit more like a technicolor version but I’m preferring it.

stages-monroe

And finally adding a vignette and a gradient mask onto the image and I got the result I wanted.

Final Version of Monroe

Hair seems to be have been the trickiest part of this for me and yes I’ve left it rough in a few places hope you like the tips (though maybe they could be a bit clearer)

And of course once you’ve got all the areas mapped out it’s quite handy to tweak any colours to your hearts content

Marilyn Monroe Red Dress

Edit: Should add a video tutorial on this is available at Black and White to Colour Video obviously goes into more detail about extracting things ended up pretty much following the first few steps and go the inspiration for photo character from it as well :)

Gluas for Galway – Light Rail / Trams

March 23, 2010Designgluas, logo, workJames Larkin

Time flys when you’re having fun. It also seems to fly when you’re really busy. Its now over 2 years since I registered the domain name gluas on behalf of the GLUAS working group. Points of contact change and people come and go within groups so I was contacted a while back to start making a few updates on the system. Of course given the power I’d like to do a redesign of the site but thats something for another day.

I originally created the logo for GLUAS and I have to admit its one of my favourite logos I’ve created to date.

Integrating the track lines so to speak to the base of the text .. slightly slanted text for speed .. green for the nature of what the system and what it would mean for Galway. The gluas name of course is drawn from the dublin LUAS system only with a Galway based theme.

Recently it would appear that the Galway City Council has voted unanimously to make trams the preferred option for improving public transport in Galway. This I think is great news having had to put up with the bus routes / delays / buses that never showed up in Galway for countless years. (In the end I began walking from work up in Dangan into town regularly).

I’ve also gone ahead and created a Facebook page for Gluas – Gluas Facebook Page so why not fan it today and stay up to date. It simply makes it easier for people to stay informed on matters if they see an update on their stream on Facebook and lets face it .. social media is the way to go on these things. For full updates however go on over to www.gluas.ie for full text on whats been happening. More changes to come on the site soon hopefully.

James Larkin gets a make over

February 11, 2010Designblue, hybrid, james larkin, logo, photoshop, theme, update, WordPress, workJames Larkin

I installed the Hybrid Theme Framework the other day and must admit it took me a little while to realise what was going on with it. Once I did however I immediately threw the man the 25 quid subscription fee for access to the forums. Why Pay ? well he’s putting a lot of work into it so he might as well get something back. 25 dollars equates to 17 euro so I’m happy to help and getting support to questions in a timely manner is a major plus for me (he’s rather active on the forums on there as he should be)

So you’re here and you’re probably seeing blue .. a whole lot of blue. Don’t worry it was intentional :) The design is based on my work site though obviously different colours. (I’ve another site design / branding to do with the same style as this shortly for another personal project … consistency and code re-use should be good). I had wanted to do some retro style design that I was tinkering and playing around with in my head on here but in the end I said screw it. The logo is similar to an earlier version I had on the site with slightly updated colours.

Forbairt Site Design and Colours

So why not let me know what you think add a comment give some feedback. As with most of my personal projects its going to be a Work in Progress.

Devine Building Services Gets renovated some new cladding and an extension

February 10, 2010DesignDesign, logo, photos, photoshop, revamp, templating, update, workJames Larkin

Pardon the pun of my post title but I thought it appropriate after staring at construction terminalogy the last few days.

So I was approached to do a simple enough move of hosting and a few updates on a website for Deeside Building and this turned into them changing branding / company to Devine Building. They were happy enough with their existing logo and colours but I made a few suggestions and one thing led to another.

Take their old site and see what I changed.

Now I immediately didn’t like the site. I’m not getting a warm vibe from it .. I’m not getting any professional edge to it. I’m not getting hit with what they do apart from the graphic with the keywords. This would have been fine for me a few years back but once you start to consider what you’re trying to do .. impress end users you’ve to change the way you think slightly.

The site had links to the Recent Projects all listed on the one page so the first thing to do was a bit of a rethink of their branding. Now I think their signage works perfectly well on a construction site but once you move over to a computer I found their colours strange to say the least. I suggested toning it down. Now with sites where you’re trying to highlight a product / photo I find that black is a good colour it works well with warm images. ( Take Safari Club as an example of this ). So keeping their logo (slightly updated with the DEVINE wording) I put it against a black background and changed it to white. The front page of the site while linking to Recent Projects / Available Services / Health and Safety .. wasn’t really doing anything and just adding in an extra click to get to what the customer really wants to see the completed projects. So I opted to include a random display of their recent projects on the front page. The other options are still present in the menu so you’re not really losing anything but we’re now showing some high class construction work on the sites front page. I removed the generic house building image as well from the front page and hey presto you’ve got what I think is a rather nice clean and straight to the point website.

The projects were given individual pages. I ended up creating some banner images … got some text for the projects .. added in some nice javascript popup effects for the photos (and some touch up work with the photos removing artifacts in them that take away from the image .. changing the levels on the images and so on)

You can see an example re the artifacts here ( I do love photoshop )

And so to the final design. Simple, clean and hopefully to the point and highlighting their construction work.

Carlow Business Directory Carlow.biz goes live

February 9, 2010Designcarlow, Design, logo, templatingJames Larkin

Just catching up with some posts I should have made at the moment.

A little over a week ago Michele Neylon came to me with a small project. Logo design and templating for a website he had acquired Carlow.biz. I love pet projects like this as they are fun / interesting and up and running fairly quickly (at least I hope so when I get involved in them). He has a blog post on it over at Carlow business directory now live

The design is drawing from the Carlow County Crest and its associated colours. The crest features the Red Dragon (also on the Welsh Flag) and the Ermine ( a Heraldic fur representing the winter coat of the stoat … you learn something new every day) Though I must admit I knew about the Ermine already as its one of the key elements on the Breton Flag.

Hopefully for people from Carlow the colour choices make sense (black / red / white), I chose to steer clear of the yellow from the lions. I’m a Galway man at heart and the Galway Colours / Crest always influences designs there so I would guess its similar for Carlow.

Anyways there may be some minor tweaks on the site design over the next while it’ll depend on any feedback thats given.