The game

If you live in Austria and are a fellow citizen of the Social Web, then you probably have already heard of The Vienna Project, a LARP spy game which will take place in Vienna on 22^nd of August. Until then, interested parties have to solve a series of riddles in order to be recruited as one of 16 “agents”, who will then participate in the game with the mission to unravel the mystery of a vanished colleague.

The game is mostly organised and promoted via social networks like Twitter and Facebook by its creator Roman Mittermayr and his team, all in their free time. Although I’ve never played a single LARP game, this one kept my interest and I was looking forward to the unveiling of the official website:

I must say, while I really liked the image of the hatted agent, the website just wasn’t what I had expected. But a few minutes later, Roman twittered:

“And pls don’t destroy me on usability, design or the small font-size :) Do a new awesome design for free and I’ll make you god for a day.”

Having had a few hours on my hands, I didn’t need to be told twice.

The inspiration

To get myself into the right mood, I compiled a playlist of a few suitable film scores and started to scribble.

Being a huge fan of spy movies (especially those with Bond, James Bond), I wrote down a few attributes I like about them in particular: Secrecy, puzzles, suspense, action, deception, … Now I had to decide which ones I could incorporate into the design within the limited time at my disposal.

The design

I wanted to give the viewers the feeling of already being part of the game, so I created a scene, where they slip into the role of an agent who’s browsing through confidental documents in darkness, using a flashlight. To add atmosphere, the light can be moved with the mouse on the start page.

The Austrian passport was added as tribute to another characteristic I love about spy movies: The numerous locations shown. Bond, for example, travels halfway across the world in the course of a single mission.

The resources

Providing a layout for free is one thing, having to pay for the necessary graphical material out of your own pocket is another. ;-) Luckily, SXC proved to be a valuable resource for royalty-free photos for this project. A big thank you to:

• slafko for the folder.
• rodnem for the white paper.
• Dippes for the paper with lines.
• Scyza for the Polaroid picture.
• alaahammou for the light effect (used as reflection on the iPhone).

For the moving flashlight on the start page, I used a PNG image, a few lines of JavaScript (on top of jQuery) and CSS. No Flash.

The reactions

I received a lot of positive feedback on the redesign like the one above. Thank you!!

Over at feedicons.com, you can download the well-established icon for RSS feeds in different sizes, colours and formats. Unfortunately, their PSD files are just rendered images, so I created a custom shape set for you to play with. You can download it here.

Also, I recreated the orange version of the icon just by using these shapes and a few layer styles. Download the PSD file here.

If you want to mark your design work as licenced under a Creative Commons licence and include the respective icons, you can download them as SVG, EPS and PNG files and even as true type font at creativecommons.org/about/downloads/. Since I often work with custom shapes in Photoshop, I created a custom shape set featuring all Creative Commons icons, which I wanted to share with you. Download it here.

What are Creative Commons licences?

Creative Commons licences are the right choice if you want to share your work with others. For instance: the contents of this website are generally licenced under the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 3.0 licence, which means that you can use the texts and images I created for non-commercial purposes without asking me, provided that you don’t change them and credit me, ideally with a link to this website.

Creating this set was only possible, because the icons themselves are licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution Licence, which allows me to adapt and share them.

To learn more, watch the videos below and visit creativecommons.org/about/.

The agency Bates 141 Jakarta recreated a real life version of the Photoshop desktop. It looks like as if the CS2 version served as the model. However, their Flickr set of the making of is well worth seeing!

Photoshop: Bester Freund der Werbewirtschaft und Feind aller Menschen mit schwachem Selbstbewusstsein. Warum? Weil die Art Directors dieser Welt mittels Photoshop aus normalen Menschen „perfekte” Kunstwesen schaffen. Feuer frei zum Wettlauf zum Ziel eines nie zu erreichenden Schönheitsideals.

Wir alle wissen, dass 99,9% aller Bilder, die wir zum Beispiel in Werbungen sehen, gründlich nachbearbeitet wurden. Und ich meine jetzt nicht nur Belichtung und Farbsättigung, sondern die übertriebene Retuschierung von menschlicher Imperfektion. Ich behaupte jetzt auch einfach mal, dass in einer Ausgabe eines typischen Frauenmagazins mehr Stunden an Photoshop-Arbeit drin stecken, als für Redaktion, Satz und Layout. Ich gebe mich aber auch nicht der Illusion hin, dass es bei Männer- oder überhaupt anderen Magazinen anders sei. Bedenklich, meint Ihr? Ganz und gar, sage ich.

Möchte man nun dennoch bei den eigenen Familienportraits den Haaransatz korrigieren, oder die Augenringe als Zeugen der letzten Party hinter Pixel-Makeup verstecken, dem sei Folgendes empfohlen:

Das Smashing Magazine hat vor einigen Tagen eine nette Kollektion von Tutorials veröffentlicht, die -mal oberflächlicher, mal genauer- Schritt für Schritt erklären, wie man soetwas macht.

Aber Vorsicht: Übertreibt man es dann ein wenig mit dem Retuschieren, landet man mit hoher Wahrscheinlichkeit bei den Photoshop Disasters, ein wunderbares Blog, das die besten Stücke an designerischer Selbstüberschätzung und Dilettantismus präsentiert.

Dieses Beispiel mit einem aalglatten Clive Owen zeigt schön, wie man schnell den Charakter eines Menschen aus dem Gesicht wegzaubern kann.