2011 Alter Ego Poster Illustrations

First Year Students 2010

2011 Print Design and Publishing Showreel

Maya Liepaz

Jacques Wessels

Liam Summers

Tracy Miller

Rapael Segerman

Kyle Van Eck

Gwynne Tyrell

Henrik Alm

Alethia Erchen

Nicole Harding

Greg Docherty

Jaques Wessels
http://wordpress.friendsofdesign.net/jacqueswessels

Liam Summers
http://wordpress.friendsofdesign.net/liamsummers/

Friends of Design wants YOU to get involved. Join us in building a strong, local game design community through your input. Give us your input, endorse us or even give us your creative staff to train.

Friends of Design Design – Academy of Digital Arts is a buzzing Digital Design School in the centre of Cape Town offering full time, part time and corporate courses to creatives who wish to get an education in the industry, amp up their skills or simply follow their creative passion.

Recently, we have added Game Production to our extensive list of courses, the very first of its kind in South Africa. Offered on a Full Time or Part Time basis, and developed by experienced trainers and industry professionals, the courses facilitate a wide range of skills so that students can graduate with confidence that they are marketable and employable, be it as a Concept Artist, 3D animator, Level Designer or Game Designer among others.

The Game Industry is an industry that has surpassed the movie and music industry in terms of generating revenue. Game Production is gaining recognition as a serious industry worldwide and more and more companies are hopping on the bandwagon, learning to deliver content to consumers that is entertaining, educational, interactive and fun. In addition, it is not as expensive or as complicated as you may think, Game Production is like any other technology – with a bit of education and some practice, your imagination is the only limit.

We can say so much more about this course, but, in essence, we rerally want to work with you. We need mentors, industry speakers and extra lecturers, enthusiasts and potential employers. With your input, we are confident we can bring Game Design Technology to South Africa in a big way, cultivating game designers for you to employ ultimately, with relevant and up to date skills.

If this sounds like something you would like to get involved, we want to hear from you!
Contact us on +27 21 402 0303 or email us at info@friendsofdesign.net.

Yours in Design,
Eva Csernyanszky

Director of Friends of Design – Academy of Digital Arts

Jacques Wessels: View Project

Maya Liepaz: View Project

Nicole Harding: View Project

Tracey Miller: View Project

Dreamweaver 2010 Projects

Chase Amyot: View Project

Milos Krstic: View Project

Liesl Rademan: View Project

Gareth Van Rooyen: View Project

How often has a small groan escaped your lips when presented with yet another creative brief with a web component? It’s daunting when faced with the apparent cross media skills required to meet such briefs and, whilst there is always the option of outsourcing the web aspects of a project to the nearest “propellor-head”, the frustration around the integrity of your original design becoming diluted in the process just adds further difficulty to managing such a project. What is the solution then, when code is just not your thing?

Adobe has recently unveiled Muse, a new Web design program that lets print-oriented graphic designers create and publish standards-based websites without having to write code or work within restrictive templates. The software, which employs Web standards such as HTML 5, CSS3, and JavaScript, has been released as a public beta under the code name, Muse, and will be available from Adobe’s website as a free preview until the first quarter of 2012.

Muse is a freeform tool targeted at designers who have worked thus far only in print, but who want to create interactive websites sans code. Adobe envisions the Muse designer as someone who spends most of their time working in Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. Creative professionals will be able to use their current skills to combine images, graphics, and text in a process that is similar to working with InDesign.

Danielle Beaumont, Group Product Manager at Adobe, has made it clear that Muse was built with the artist and print designer in mind, allowing designers who are not coders to create unique, professional websites as easily as producing a layout in InDesign, stipulating that Adobe has worked really hard at creating an easy to use, end-to end-solution with interactive elements. It allows the designer to do things that only a hand-coder could do.

If designing in InDesign is your speciality, then you’ll feel at home using Muse. The interface is an interesting mix of InDesign and Dreamweaver. When first testing it, an immediate concern was around how effectively the text stylesheets were converted into CSS (cascading stylesheets), but the tool appears to do a pretty good job of it. Creating a basic layout was fairly straight forward, though there were some InDesign-specific features that were missing such as giving a text box more than one column and the Align palette, features we hope will be rectified in the future.

There are some useful extras for fledglings to Web design. For example, when you select text from the drop down box, Adobe identifies a web-safe font and which fonts will be exported as images. The Color Picker will let you key in RGB numbers and return the hexadecimal for that colour. The Eyedropper tool will run over any image and provides the hexadecimal and RGB values in the Color Picker. There are also palettes for spacing and text wraps around images.

While Muse doesn’t have any existing templates, it ships with basic widgets that allow you to add rich interactivity such as slideshows, galleries, menu bars, fully customizable tabbed accordion panels for organizing lengthy information into visually appealing bite-sized “chunks” and embedding HTML source code for Google Maps and YouTube. Included, too, are web-specific palettes such as states, where you apply an attribute to elements like rollovers, actions upon clicking a mouse, and more. Tool tips and remote rollovers are easy enough to implement and lightboxes that bring special focus to an image, video or other content, add a level of user interaction that would be tricky to included without coding knowledge. The Preview mode is put to good use throughout the layout process, you can test links to external websites from within Muse and you can also preview using external browsers. The Publish section is useless unless you have an Adobe Business Catalyst account, but that will probably be addressed in future releases.

Muse requires AIR 2.7 or higher to run, which can be an obstacle for some, an Intel Core Duo or faster processor is recommended, OS X 10.6 or higher, and at least 512 MB of RAM (1 GB is recommended). Muse will be available in early 2012 for around US $15 a month via Adobe‘s subscription model, but other options will be available.

Whilst clearly still only a beta version, it’s definitely worth checking out as Adobe has promised future features such as additional CMS integration and enabling the creation of websites for mobile and tablets. Visit the official site muse.adobe.com, made entirely with Muse, and read up about planning your project, tips on designing pages and publishing your site using Adobe for hosting or a provider of your choice. Get your ideas flowing by visiting some websites already created using Muse.

With the freedom to focus on design and not technology, now is the time to get out here and promote your newly acquired web skills with confidence.

Who of us haven’t been glued to the news and social network, waiting for the outcome of Cape Town’s bid for World Design Capital 2014? Every day has brought us one step closer to the prize, and with baited breath we hoped and crossed our thumbs and fingers and toes for good news.

It’s arrived. Cape Town has won the bid for Design Capital 2014, and as I write this I break out in goosebumps. It’s a huge honor for us, and as creatives we can only benefit from the global exposure we will be receiving. Using design as our tool of choice, we will be able to transform, recreate and solve urban challenges. It’s going to be an interesting ride, and we at Friends of Design look forward to being a part of this.

City of Cape Town wins World Design Capital 2014

“The World Design Capital bid process and title have helped to bring different initiatives together and have made us realise that design in all its forms, when added together, creates human and city development.” – De Lille