Model and Render created in 3dsMax with V-ray.

Click to enlarge

Feel free to contact me if you need some isometric 3d models.

Model and Render created in 3dsMax with V-ray.

Click to enlarge

Feel free to contact me if you need some 3d models.

Luxury Abroad is a luxury travel club website I am currently developing.

I will be doing a follow-up post in a few weeks to discuss the design of the store itself.

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

Here is another respect in which we are lucky. The universe is older than 100 million centuries. Within a comparable time the sun will swell to a red giant and engulf the earth. Every century of hundreds of millions has been in its time, or will be when its time comes, ‘the present century.’ The present moves from the past to the future, like a tiny spotlight, inching its way along a gigantic ruler of time. Everything behind the spotlight is in darkness, the darkness of the dead past. Everything ahead of the spotlight is in the darkness of the unknown future. The odds of your century’s being the one in the spotlight are the same as the odds that a penny, tossed down at random, will land on a particular ant crawling somewhere along the road from New York to San Francisco. You are lucky to be alive and so am I.

We live on a planet that is all but perfect for our kind of life: not too warm and not too cold, basking in kindly sunshine, softly watered; a gently spinning, green and gold harvest-festival of a planet. Yes, and alas, there are deserts and slums; there is starvation and racking misery to be found. But take a look at the competition. Compared with most planets this is paradise, and parts of Earth are still paradise by any standards. What are the odds that a planet picked at random will have these complaisant properties? Even the most optimistic calculation will put it at less than one in a million.

Imagine a spaceship full of sleeping explorers, deep-frozen would-be colonists of some distant world. Perhaps the ship is on a forlorn mission to save the species before an unstoppable comet, like the one that killed the dinosaurs, hits the home planet. The voyagers go into the deep-freeze soberly reckoning the odds against their spaceship’s ever chancing upon a planet friendly to life. If one in a million planets is suitable at best, and it takes centuries to travel from each star to the next, the spaceship is pathetically unlikely to find a tolerable, let alone safe, haven for its sleeping cargo.

But imagine that the ship’s robot pilot turns out to be unthinkably lucky. After millions of years the ship does find a planet capable of sustaining life: a planet of equable temperature, bathed in warm starshine, refreshed by oxygen and water. The passengers, Rip van Winkles, wake stumbling into the light. After a million years of sleep, here is a whole new fertile globe, a lush planet of warm pastures, sparkling streams and waterfalls, a world bountiful with creatures, darting through alien green felicity. Our travellers walk entranced, stupefied, unable to believe their unaccustomed senses or their luck.

As I said, the story asks for too much luck; it would never happen. And yet, isn’t it what has happened to each one of us? We have woken after hundreds of millions of years asleep, defying astronomical odds. Admittedly we didn’t arrive by spaceship, we arrived by being born, and we didn’t burst conscious into the world but accumulated awareness gradually through babyhood. The fact that we gradually apprehend our world, rather than suddenly discovering it, should not subtract from its wonder.”

This quote alone put me into a strange euphoric state for about 24 hours, which is apparently somewhat uncommon. That’s pretty much what got me interested in looking at life, the universe and everything.

Model and Render created in 3dsMax with V-ray.

Click to enlarge

Feel free to contact me if you need some 3d models.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

This is one of my most loved videos of Steve Jobs. Looking at his more recent keynote pitches and how confident, calmly and presently he delivered them is very peace inspiring.

Change, and the human mind is an incredible thing.

Inspired by a post on my friend Anthony Bridger‘s blog today, I had a rethink about what my favourite colour could well be. The last time I considered this, I was about 16 years old and decided that it was red, and that was how it stood, entirely unconsidered, until now.

It was this particular shade:

These days, I have to say it really changes on a day-by-day basis, mostly influenced by whatever design I’m working on at the time. As a general right this moment I’d have to say:

I think exploring favourite colours as design research when it comes to researching a target market for business would be interesting, perhaps you could offer varying themes based on the most popular choices or design squeeze pages with favourite colours in mind. It’d be interesting to see if this in fact had an impact on conversion rates and click-through’s, but I reckon you’d need a Google-level of traffic to do justice to that kind of research.

Tranquilo is a UK-based website development agency which I am part of.

I recently assembled the branding for the website and I am in the process of working on some accompanying print media.

The Tranquilo logo is represented as an angular randrop transitioning into a  boldly serif’d ‘T’. This portrays the incubation and growth that this organization is involved with. House colours are a bold teal which contrasts with the white background of the site, without being too jarring.

The website itself consists of numerous jQuery transitions which display the intended body of the site within around 3 seconds. Earlier versions had much less speedy transitions, which was an issue that we reviewed and iterated.