Art on Disk Webmasters

Looking forward to the summer . . . Metro Atlanta has been kinda’ chilly lately. We love the beach and the ocean and wish we could live near there.

These images were made from a photo of vacuum hoses at the local carwash down the street from our home. The original image was made with my new Canon PowerShot SD1000 camera.

The abstract image above has been run through Alien Skin’s Xenofex’ Classic Mosaic filter.

This second image was enhanced with Flaming Pear’s "boss emboss" filter and then reprocessed with a plugin called Mezzoforce Ice.

This third image is a close up taken from the second image.

This simple image or one similar may become part of an e-commerce website project we are working on to promote a brand of special lotions used by cancer patients. The image was created in Photoshop with a simple blue rectangular field processed through a cloud filter.

The central circular selection was converted with a free plug-in called Mezzoforce Ice. AlienSkin EyeCandy’s BackLight and Perspective Shadow filters were applied to the resulting image. I used Mezzoforce Ice last year on a photo illustration called Chilly Peppers which also appears on this site and in the Art on Disk photo gallery.

It’s always fun to make something out of nothing. This image goes one step further in that it indicates the idea of "layers of protection." Patients who have undergone cancer treatments are very sensitive to the sun, and the products we are hired to promote protect sensitive skin from harmful light rays during the treatment period without interfering with medical procedures. The intent is to show the coating concept in a sensitive, soothingly pleasant manner.

Recently we began work on a major fund-raising web project involving e-Commerce and CMS (content management systems) for American Fire & Rescue and EMS Organization, Inc, a new nationally-focused non-profit organization. Their mission is to procure funds to bolster the nation’s infrastructure by providing equipment, supplies and training for initial responders to emergency situations throughout the United States.

The logo rough draft on the right was provided to us by Mr. Guy Scull, president and evangelizer for the charitable foundation. It was designed by Lieutenant Matt Holston, the Hazardous Materials Coordinator for the Alpharetta Fire and Emergency Services (AFES) headquartered in Alpharetta, GA. Matt has chosen a traditional fire service symbol, the Maltese Cross which is a "red badge of courage, honor and dedication." He has superiposed it upon the Emergency Medical Services (EMS) Star of Life for his composition.

As designers and artwork producers, our job is to interpret and computerize designs like this to create a long lasting identifier that can be re-purposed in many ways. The finished logo works well rendered in black and white as well as color. It can be scaled from small to large while maintaining visual clarity. Though the individual symbols are traditional and well known, we have tried to make this particular arrangement distinctive.

We wanted this logo to emulate a "shiny red fire engine" but also tried to contrast hard edge strength with a softer "cushion" feeling. EMS technicians often stand right beside and reassure the Fire Services personnel in the initial responder support system. They are there just as much to serve and administer aid to the firemen as they are to serve the original victims of a catastrophe.

By adding depth through embossing and lighting we turned this logo into a medallion. The computer graphics software programs used were Macromedia Freehand, Adobe Illustrator CS2, Photoshop CS2 and Irfanview.

Fire, Rescue and EMS iconography is quite interesting. For centuries, the fireman’s hook and axe have helped him enter buildings, rescue occupants and gain control over fire by depriving it of fuel while trying to hold the fire at a distance. The fireman’s horn was used in early days to sound an alarm, but today is used for ceremonial displays. Some horns had wide mouthpieces and may have served as megaphones. 

The fire helmet is a complex and expensive piece of equipment, with ridges for strength and a brim that is usually enlongated and tapered at the back.  Perhaps this keeps debris away from the fireman’s head and allows water to flow backwards and away, keeping the fireman’s back dry and better protected from heat.  Many of today’s fire helmets have large heat-resistant visors and a variety of fittings with built-in illumination and communications systems. 

The EMS Star of Life is the symbol of Emergency Medical Technicians and Care Units. It has six prongs that symbolize the six steps of a rescue mission: Detection, Reporting, Response, On Scene Care, Care in Transit, and Transfer to Definitive Care. While the fire service protects property and people, the EMS mission is directed towards first aid, health and life care. Follow the link above to learn the story of the star. 

One last thing before we go . . .

The number 343 on the fireman’s helmet stands for the 343 brave firefighters and EMS personnel who lost their lives at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. 

Back during the Easter Season this year we were approached about creating a rental product/service catalog and e-commerce web site for a new unique service company, EventDrapery.com, guided by Marina Miller here in Atlanta. This project required the creation of a searchable database of products, an electronic forms system, a shopping cart, the usual "about us" and "FAQs" modules and many "behind the scenes" pages, documents and web tricks. A sales-oriented website can involve hundreds and even thousands of considerations. This article is a detailed case study designed to let you peer inside one of our more complex projects.

If you haven’t already tried it or want to see it again, click once or twice on the play button in the drapery video above to see the drapery set itself up from scratch. Those clip-joint drapes are actually 12 feet tall. The Macromedia Flash video you see is made up of four kinds of photographic efforts: The flame retardant drapes were shot on location with an 8 mega-pixel Minolta DimageA2 camera. I used four Dynalite 1000x professional photographic strobe units with white umbrellas to evenly light the large area of at least 144 square feet.

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This is a daydream mood panel that could be used as a background for a PowerPoint title slide.Microsoft’s trainers and other presenters tend to call stacks of PowerPoint slides "decks" these days,as if the speaker support portion of a presentation were a deck of cards. My guess is that unless an image is projected on the wall, it doesn’t qualify to be a slide any more.

The image above is a cloud photo that I ran through a couple of Photoshop Actions to flatten and re-color various parts and selectively emboss other areas. It is peppered with stars turned slightly counterclockwise (-12.5 degrees) with bubbles that vary in transparency.

Do you ever wonder what’s up with naming things such as software as if it is spelled SoftWare? When did it become correct to name products like PowerPoint, QuickBooks, FrontPage, SharePoint or WillMaker?

That peculiar distortion of the English language is called "camel case." I chose the name "AtmoSpheres" because it illustrates the CamelCaseConcept. According to the Wikipedia,

CamelCase is the practice of writing compound words or phrases where the words are joined without spaces, and each word is capitalized within the compound.

For an interesting history of CamelCase, visit the link. It appears that MisterRogers is one of the EarlyAdopters from ModernTimes, dating back to 1962.