A Guest Post From The Cobwebs Crew

While Part Three of the Cobwebs Movie is being made, The Cobwebs Crew is redesigning the Cobwebs Website. We are making the website feel as though you are reading the Book of Knowledge, and we are also fixing bugs and adding new features!

A basic idea of what the website will look like based on a visual design by Evelyn Jennings.

At the next Cobwebs Meetup, we will begin implementing this design in HTML and CSS. We’ll need a layout that works for both the home page and the secondary pages as well. We have decided to start with the About page first, so we will modify Evelyn’s book design to work for pages that have a lot of scrolling content such as the layout shown at left created for the New Artists Productions website in 2011. We’ll also tighten up the home page design to accommodate navigational elements and other content features like we did for the animated theater stage.

The original mockup for the animated stage for the New Artists Productions website.

* We’re excited about this next phase of development on the site, and it looks like Cobwebs — The Movie — Part Three will be completed in time for The Oregon Coast Film Festival!

Stay tuned for more Cobwebs News!

Greetings from #rdcHQ! We’re back on earth after a fun-filled Fourth of July celebration with family and friends plus a grand finale at the annual Jubilee event in Port Orford, Oregon. We started what could in fact become a new tradition at #rdcHQ – we documented the parade with time-lapse video shot from the media lab crow’s nest facing the town. It came out quite well despite the fact that our video camera took a tumble due to the very strong winds that day.

The photos below are from our 351-Archive Project and were taken very near the spot where we captured our video footage. The first image was taken circa 1951 and is the view looking south down Highway 101 from our vantage point in the crow’s nest. The second photograph is undated and pictures the local theater.

Click on the images to enlarge. Images courtesy of The Port Orford Historical Photo Project.

The second photo was taken around the curve from our vantage point traveling north on Highway 101, the building in the center of the photograph is now the Savoy Theatre. The building to the left of the theater, Norms Market, is no longer standing. On July 4 2014, a mysterious chess set appeared in the spot where it once stood …

About The 351-Archive

351-Archive is scheduled to launch this September as the “Port Orford Historical Photo Project”. It will be an ongoing initiative of The Rural Design Collective and will continue to be updated with new and historical photos, animations and videos … some even of the time-lapse variety! All of the material will be released into the public domain under a Creative Commons license that will allow others to remix and reuse the content in their own creative works.

Stay Tuned!

The Cobwebs Blender Artists have been experimenting in Blender building backgrounds, and will be learning how to animate 3D objects. While we were creating Part Two last summer, we made this cool animation of a chrome donut with a background of an alien world sourced from the internet.

We are also making Cobwebs Cards during OpenLab which we have currently hidden in Medford, Coquille, Bandon, and Port Orford. We sell these cards in our store at Point B. Studio to support Cobwebs, and will soon offer them online on our website.

PROJECT RECAP: First came the imaginative Introduction from 2012 that we made in Pencil. Then you saw the awe-inspiring Part One from 2013 and the exciting Part Two from 2014. Now the Cobwebs Project draws to an end as Part Three comes around the corner.

Stay Tuned, and thank you for watching COBWEBS, THE MOVIE! — Sincerely, The Cobwebs Crew.

Greetings from #rdcHQ! The Codes of the World Track for 2014 is well underway and we have a new set of documents targeted for the summer. This month, we are working on a set of safety standards that focus on childcare and bicycle safety. It is a challenging set to work on as well as an important subject with plenty of gears and cogs and spinning wheels to animate.

Tools of the Trade

As is customary this time of the year, its a good time to review the basic skills needed to create production-ready vector art. Our tool of choice is Inkscape with a bit of crossover into Adobe Illustrator for specialized tasks. In the first year, our illustration techniques always involve basic diagrams and schematics, typographic controls, and working with blends and patterns. These simple concepts are practiced in our media lab and have created a platform for more advanced illustration, design and animation pursuits. See the list below for a “Quick Start” primer developed during our first year: