This weekend I finished designing a logo for an ONG. This was my contribution to this organization, briefly described below. I am talking about the Forum for Youth Advocacy. Unfortunately I couldn’t dedicate too much time due to my job, but it was a good nostalgic exercise since I am abandoning more of the design field and dedicating more to the software development side (heavily on Flex now). My friend Erica is the founder and co-director of FOYA. The head office is in the UK, in London. We worked/volunteered together in the International Peace Bureau (Geneva) when I arrived to Switzerland and I wanted to contribute with something as soon I knew she was going ahead with this initiative. I wish I had more time to dedicate.

P.S. > Please do not make any confusion with Radio FOIA or with some popular Castro Verde’s junkie :)

Click the logo to enlarge

Small intro about FOYA:

The Forum for Youth Advocacy (FOYA) is a non-governmental organization (NGO) aimed to engage youth in peace and development. We work to empower marginalized youth to realize their full potential, and build peace within themselves and their communities. Our work focuses on protecting children in armed conflict, engaging youth in peace building, raising HIV/AIDS awareness, and working with civil society for the inclusion of youth.

The history of FOYA is a story of commitment and dedication to peace and development. Created in November 2007, FOYA focused on bringing together committed individuals to create positive change in the lives of youth and marginalized people in Uganda. Today, we are working in Uganda, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone and Cyprus.

If you want or know someone interested in contributing the website (I should be contributing on that too) will be available soon at http://forumforyouth.com

One of these days I decided to recycle one of the pre-historic laptops waiting to be trashed in my company. I saw those digital frames that are appearing everywhere and thought how nice they would be as a gift for my parents in Portugal (I am in Switzerland). I always have a lot of new photos that I would like to share with them. But shortly the idea of the digital frame was dead since they all lack some features that would make them a perfect gift and even the smallest ones have outrageous price tags. So a few things had to be taken into consideration.

My parents are not tech geeks or even computer users and they are older than 72, so I had to avoid something like:
“Here’s a digital frame and a computer so you can connect to the internet and receive emails with new pictures and transfer them to this thing called SDcard and put it in the frame, after you read that book that tells how to use a computer and the internet…” and I can go on forever.

I decided to do something completely or near zero-maintenance. Basically it had to be simple to use, or rather not to use at all: instead you just plug it and connect it to a phone line. And that should be all. Here’s what I ended doing on the frame software side: The computer runs Windows ME. First step was to setup the Bios so it resumes to Power-ON if the power fails, and to turn on by itself at 7:00am. The software (and I should say version 1) is Flash based and just cycles trough photos in a folder in the hard drive, with a soft fade effect between each one. So far no big difference on how it works (visually) comparing with a normal digital frame. (click for bigger image)

Now the twists from a normal digital frame: At 7:00am, when it turns on windows (I changed the boot screens to complete black with a “please wait” message), it runs an application that dials up a free internet connection and connects to my FTP server to check if there are new pictures. If that’s the case, it downloads them and adds them to the local folder. There’s no card reader. Before closing, the program also checks for a new version of both the slideshow application and itself (transfer apllication).

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Step 1: While my parents were staying at my place I decided to do some tests with smoke photography.
For a little bit more than half-an-hour I’m convinced they thought I was going crazy, since I came from work with a giant black matte cardboard piece and started burning a lot of incense and taking non-stop pictures of the smoke column. One incense stick, two at the same time, several at the same time, quiet and straight smoke column, disturbing the column with my breath or blowing at it and all the weird things to have a lot of distinct shots. I tried to explain my parents that it should look interesting in the end but they didn’t seem very convinced.

Step 2 was to get rid of the bad pictures (not interesting, out of focus, bad framing), and they were a lot. From around 250, I ended up with 15 to continue. Not surprising since I was not really sure if it would work and the digital camera was just an average 5 megapixel one.

Step 3 was the most interesting one. And it is quite simple. Basically the only thing you need to do is to crop and rotate until you get the perfect framing and after that change the grey tones to any color tone (Photoshop: image > adjustments > hue/saturation and play with the sliders). You might need to fix the levels a little bit before colouring the smoke, if the background is not pure black (Photoshop: image > adjustments > autolevels should be enough). You can also invert (Photoshop: image > adjustments > invert) to end up with a white background smoke picture.

And that’s it. There are some results below. Click the thumbnails to open a bigger version. This was just my first test and I will play with the technique a little bit more when I have some time. I want to try also with video to see if it works or ends up as something interesting at least.

Yes, that’s what I used for the blog header image.

Here it is: the very first post in this blog. And by the way, what is this all about? Well, this will be the place where I’ll post a lot of nonsense pictures, weird videos, useless articles I might come up with and whatever I decide to post, whenever I decide to post, after all, this is my blog.