I’ve spent the past several days reading and mulling over the current class assignment: various restoration and other tricks with photos. I’ve taken examples from the Eismann book (Photoshop: Restoration and Retouching by Katrin Eismann), and I’ve played around with several photos. I think I’ve gotten the hang of cleaning up images, but I have to admit I don’t like hand-coloring. Maybe I need more practice to get better at it, but I think the results of my efforts don’t show how much thought and effort I really put into hand-coloring. The results are poor.

My preliminary sketch for my image assignment website.

Thankfully, I had a stroke of inspiration when it came to the web design for this project page. Since I’m employed by the wonderful Center for History and New Media as a web designer, I feel utterly obligated to make a 200% effort on these design bits—that’s what I’m in the class for, right? To strive for better design? Well, I thought I would share with you part of my design process. I always start with a sketch, and this time I wanted to do something with a bit of a retro feel. No doubt inspired by the recent readings on such desgin (particularly by Cameron Moll), but also by the retro nature of my subject matter. These are, afterall, OLD photos. Some older than others, but hopefully my design can tie them all together with a fun, but still simple and elegant look.

I’m currently plugging away at it. I had to figure out a php thing I’d been trying to figure out for weeks, so can I have dynamically generated pages. Fortunately, with a stroke of luck a well-worded Google search turned up the perfect tutorial (and a pretty cool site: inobscuro.com). I’ve also been trying to create some cool artwork to go along with the page, and I’m trying to make sure it’s all coded correctly. Much work left to do…

Reading through some of the other class postings, I’m not the only one with a dislike of colorization and some difficulty with Photoshop (see Steven’s “De-Constructing History 2.0″). Discussing her process of image editing, Misha’s post “A bit of gray here and there” made me want to go back and do more…just as soon as I find the time.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 18th, 2007 at 2:25 pm and is filed under design, Clio Wired. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.