Warm Up With Animal Prints

Warm up your décor this winter with exotic animal prints. Many décor styles can incorporate animal themes. Animal décor can work well with contemporary décor, as well as ethnic and traditional styles. Let's take a look at how this style can work for you.

Animal themes can be introduced in different ways. You can add animal prints such as different hide designs. A few popular hide designs are leopard skin, tiger stripes, and the most popular zebra prints. You may also choose to add designs with actual animal images. You can find a number of pieces with animals incorporated on them. The most popular animal images found today are monkeys, giraffes, lions, and elephants.

If you are in doubt on where to begin, just start small. Add smaller scale animal items to your existing décor. Throw pillows are a great and rather inexp

Basics of Flash Design and Animation

In a nutshell, Flash design is an animated clip or interactive graphic file created using a program called Adobe Flash. Since it uses vector graphics, the images look clean, clear, and sharp even if the display window is resized. Many site owners incorporate Flash design and animation into their sites to make them more interesting and visually appealing to visitors. It has become a popular part of web design since it can be used in different ways. You can create animated navigation bars and banners, or even make an interactive how-to or tutorial by presenting the step-by-step procedure in Flash.

Tips on Selling Character Designs

Have you ever wondered how some cartoon characters became so famous - with hundreds or thousands of merchandise bearing their names and images? Remove the ones with animated series out of the equation since they have a marketing medium - and you still have a handful of characters out there who became famous through the merit of their designs. Examples are Julius the Monkey and Emily the Stange.

This article discusses some tips for creating and selling cartoon characters.

Cute VS Cool

Are your characters cute or cool? Cute characters easily attract the females and the young children markets - two of the largest consumer markets. Character merchandise is often cheaper and more affordable. Therefore profit through sheer volumes of sales can be quite astounding.

Cool characters are more suitable as collectibles, and often cater more to the male market. As they are often more exclusive and expensive, sales volumes are seldom as impressive as cute character merchandise.

In the spirit of games development, decision makers might simply want to pick a design that is most suited for the game concept. But as far as possible, if the game concept so allows, do try to go for cute characters because they stand a higher chance of getting licensed for merchandising.

Character Bible

A character bible is the foundation for every product that would stem from an intellectual property - be it a game, animated series, comic, story book etc. Regardless of the resulting product, everything should refer back to the character bible. This is what the bible is all about - a kind of blueprint for an intellectual property besides being a showcase for the intellectual property.

On Flash Design and Animation

Flash design is basically an animated clip that is produced in a program called Adobe Flash. Flash design and animation allows designers to create interactive graphic content or materials that are relatively small in size and are easy to manage. It makes use of vector graphics, thus the images are sharp, clean, and of good quality even if the display is resized. Because they are generally small in size, Flash animations are easily downloadable and they load quickly in a webpage. It is one of the most popular tools for web design because it can be used for a variety of functions, like full-screen animations, navigation bars, banners, and other animated features.

There are two ways to create a Flash design in Adobe -Timeline and ActionScript. In Timeline, you draw and alter frames to produce different kinds of motions, from simple blurring or reshaping motions to more complicated movements. Timeline allows designers to animate objects using set functions that are easy to follow. On the other hand, ActionScript is like a language used to create more complex animations. It provides more room for a variety of motions and greater flexibility to users compared to Timeline.

The following are the uses and advantages of using Flash animations:

• Recent studies show that websites that use Flash content generate higher traffic.
• A full Flash website design is more entertaining and interactive compared to a static HTML website. It is for this reason that FlashScript is now seen as a programming task as opposed to merely design.
• Flash content can deliver messages clearly, creatively, and with a stronger impact. It is being used for advertisements, banners, website introductions, product demonstrations, and many more.

Popular Forms of Animation Used in Media Today

3D computer graphics

The advanced technique of graphic designing is the 3D computer design which gives the 3 dimensional illusions for the designs using the geometrical data. It also uses the light, wind and other effects to give a realistic view of the graphic. It is mostly used in entertainment world especially movies to design artificial environment. Movies like Avatar, used the 3D graphics using various software like Maya that on rendering gives a realistic 3 dimensional illusion of the sketch. The stages of 3D designing are modeling, layout and animation, and rendering. Often it is a time-consuming process.

Architectural animation

Architectural animation is used for the designing of the proposed architecture or a building. This is used to provide a view of the final product with a realistic vision of how it looks. Unlike the traditional blue print which is in sketch model, or 2D designing, the architectural animation provides a 360 degree view of the building inside and out thus able to know how it looks and to understand the strategic points of the building. The software used in designing the animation are Autodesk maya, CAD, CAM.

Tips for Creating a Great Character Design

Whether be it for games, comics, animation or merchandise, we cannot ignore the fact that good character designs play an active role in driving the sales of the product in question. While good character designs help to drive sales, great character designs grow companies and even shape the landscape of the creative industry. This is the first of 3 articles dedicated to the topic of creating great character designs and some tips to bear in mind when designing your characters.

The Core Product

What is the core product or platform which your character will be appearing on? Where will the character be seen and in what medium? This will directly affect how you should design your character, as different products will have different presentation platforms. Ideally your character should translate across several platforms to maximize its licensing potential.

Target Demography

What is your core product's target audience? Have you considered the traits and personality that will appeal to the target audience and not only makes sense in the game, but also gives the game play a boost? Characters aimed at young children, for example, are typically designed around basic shapes and bright colours.

Digital Design and Animation Degrees Online

Society is filled with images, movies, games, and more that are created to get people to want the items they see. Men and women who make up the professions of digital design and animation design everything visual. The profession is wide spread leaving a multitude of degree options for prospective students to enroll in. Many accredited online colleges and universities offer degree distinctions in these areas for the interested student.

The degree options online allow students to gain an education in all different kinds of digital design and animation. These degree options can be broken down into separate categories or combined to provide students with an in depth study of how to become successful in the competitive industry. Lets look at each option to gain a better understanding of what a degree program and professional career would have students doing. Digital design is centered on creating different types of visual works that will be used in a variety of settings. Education will center on working with print advertisements, electronic advertisements, web sites, and more. Animation is focused on using computer technology to generate images for a variety of settings. These settings can include movies, video games, graphics, and more. Education in this field teaches students how to use computer programs that aid in the animation process.