New Stuff

First up: new shoes!

On my way into school today, I had a hunch that I might get lucky if I popped by Shoe Warehouse at Lansdowne Mall. As usual, the hunch was right. I found a great pair of red and white rounded toe pumps by Naughty Monkey. They're cute on the outside, but I think the really neat part of them is the inside embroidery and details. And they were on sale for about 60% off!

I'll have a couple of photos up by next week.

Site progress

I'll be building the site over the next term, probably going for some Flash elements as well as CSS and XHTML.

In the meantime I am working on the structure and the content of the site. I will be adding an article section that will cover tips and tricks for high heels (fit, walking in them, etc.), histories of different kinds of shoes and heels, and I'll probably also have some other articles as I think of them. Probably the articles section will go live before the rest of the site, but I haven't decided yet.

Poster Design

This week, we had a poster assignment for our Photoshop class. I used this assignment as an opportunity to design this poster for rhettfoxx.com.

Inspired by the name of this blog, I initially thought I would go with a treasure map motif, but found this getting to be too busy when I was doing the production.

Some of my first real photographic experience was shooting with Polaroids, and so I decided to add some Polaroid-sized masks to the photos to reference that. Naturally, I had an old song by one of my favorite bands bouncing around my head the rest of the day. ("Gentlemen Take Polaroids" by Japan)

This determined the overall size, as I wanted the Polaroids to print at the actual size of 3.5 x 4.5". The closest available standard poster size that would accommodate four Polaroids with adequate room for other elements and white space turned out to be 18 x 24".

While the first sketches involved a dotted line path, akin to the old Family Circle comics where one of the kids is wandering around the neighborhood, I soon hit on the idea of footprints instead. From there, it was obvious to go for high heeled footprints. Of course, individual layers of teeny footprints quickly add up to drive me nuts...

After playing with the type, I decided to leave just the short captions on the Polaroids and the URL in the huge font. I tried several placements of a shorter blurb telling just a bit more about the site, but wherever I placed it in whatever size, it wrecked the unity of the design. I figure the visual elements hit a good balance of information and intrigue to entice viewers into the site.

I may revisit this design in next term's Flash course to see about making it into an interactive splash page for the site.