My Simple Character

I had a lot of fun making my simple character! In class I did a very simple sketch of a little girl, but once I started playing around with illustrator, I changed a lot of my ideas and ended with a little red head. I originally wanted to make a bobble head character with a small body and big goofy head, but I ended up giving her a proportionate body. I Googled little girl clip art and took ideas from different cartoons to make my own unique character. I am still playing around with animations. I want her to wave and eventually to blink. I am not sure yet how I am going to do that, but I will keep playing around with Flash. I have been looking at some cartoons on TV to see how they move and definitely got some ideas. I want her eyebrows and mouth to move to help change her facial expression. There is still a lot that I need to learn in Flash, and hopefully once I get better, I can have my cartoon do a lot more.

One of my Favorite Banners

XV Rescue Banner

http://www.bannerblog.com.au/2010/08/subaru_paperclip.php


As I was going through the banners, this paperclip banner stuck out after I was getting doubtful. This XV Rescue banner is an interactive banner that catches the eye of the audience. The paper clip is a very simple idea and when it asks the simple question.. “What can you make of this paperclip” and “Click and bend it however you want,” you can’t help but want to bend the paper clip and see what the banner is all about. Surprisingly, I found myself wanting to continue this little mission until I was done and figured out what I made of the paper clip and why I was bending it. Unfortunately, when the banner was finally finished, I had no idea what XV Rescue was. I decided to go further and look it up on Google. There was an entire website about it and it is connected with Subaru, but I am still confused at exactly what it is all about. One thing I may change about this banner is to tell more information about the product/service at the end. The beginning was very catchy, but it didn’t finish with a clear explanation of the product or service.

There was a lot used on this banner that was made in flash and other adobe software’s. They use a lot of motion throughout the entire banner, but what I found to be most interesting was the fact that it was interactive to the audience. As the audience, we were able to play with the banner and make the paper clip however we wanted. This is what was so catchy and made me like it so much. I also found myself doing it more than once and seeing how many different positions I could get the paperclip in and how many seconds it took. When I scrolled over the buttons, they changed so that you could tell you were scrolling over them, and all the text had action incorporated into it so I was never bored with what was going on.

Little funny things like this might be more useful than you think. I had no idea what this service was before this banner and I went further and looked it up just because it was catchy and funny. I thought this was a very cool banner!