Fire Island Blog

A clip of Jimi Hendrix playing the US national anthem at Woodstock in 1969. At about 4 minutes 45 seconds in he kicks into Purple Haze.

We’re nearly ready to reveal the early-stage private beta of Fantasy Festivals that we’ve been building over the last few months. There’s still a fair way to go before we reach our shared vision of what Fantasy Festivals will become, but we’re getting there. We’ll keep you posted.

One of the most interesting (and fun) early tasks as a designer for Fantasy Festivals is working on the ‘festival posters’.

For version 1 of the site (just going into beta now) all of the posters had to be created to work at relatively low resolution (900×600 at 72dpi) without too much noise or detail adding to the file size for download.

We wanted to create a few choices within each genre, so we were almost looking for design clichés to represent different musical tastes and there are some obviously punk, hip-hop, reggae etc examples that do just that in the beta version of the site.

However for version 2 of the site (in development now) the design shackles came off and our brief was to have fun, make beautiful images with quirky, interesting layouts and not worry about the resolution because they would be rendered in a funky new Adobe Flash format.

We were also after some more generic backgrounds, not specifically tied to any one musical taste.

So I had some fun with some of my old ‘texture’ photos, favourite colour palletes and some funky new Photoshop brushes I found on the web. You can check out some example designs on Flickr.

Through posting these images in my Flickr photostream, I got some feedback inviting comparison with both Gustav Klimt (who I was familiar with) and the Japanese Rimpa school of artists (who I’d never heard of), both of which are very flattering.

The Rimpa work was fascinating and I particulary like “Autumn Flowers and Moon” by Sakai Hoitsu which I will try to use as inspiration for the next set of designs, be interesting to see if my work is enhanced or intimidated by the comparisons.

Following on from my last post where I learnt about the ‘Rimpa’ school of Japanese painting, I thought it might be interesting to compare my artwork before and after I had seen the original paintings. Is it any better? You decide… 

Before:

After:

Amazingly, only a few months after its cinema release Glastonbury (’the movie’) is being shown on the BBC on Saturday at 22.30. Even stranger, it isn’t released on DVD until Monday. How on earth do they plan on actually selling any copies of the DVD?

Directed by Julien Temple (known mostly for pop promos and Sex Pistols documentaries) the film combines performances, interviews and festival-goer’s own camcorder footage to tell the 35 year story of one of the world’s best festivals.

My band Sunshine State (soon to be re-named, all suggestions welcome) are playing in Wootton on Saturday if anyone fancies a knees up in the sun. 7pm on Saturday at Wootton Recreation Ground.

We should be putting some tracks on our MySpace page as soon we’ve decided on a new name, but for now, let me tell you that we sound a bit like the bastard offspring of Motown, The Jam and Muddy Waters, if they all got in a big love heap and flexed their musical muscle pumps for a day or two.

You’ve gotta hand it to the people at flickr, they do make some cool stuff, check out this neat little flash gizmo, my new flickr badge!!!

<!-- Start of Flickr Badge --><style type="text/css">.zg_div {margin:0px 5px 5px 0px; width:117px;}.zg_div_inner {border: solid 1px #000000; background-color:#ffffff;  color:#666666; text-align:center; font-family:arial, helvetica; font-size:11px;}.zg_div a, .zg_div a:hover, .zg_div a:visited {color:#3993ff; background:inherit !important; text-decoration:none !important;}</style><script type="text/javascript">zg_insert_badge = function() {var zg_bg_color = "ffffff";var zgi_url = "http://www.flickr.com/apps/badge/badge_iframe.gne?zg_bg_color="+zg_bg_color+"&zg_person_id=24424426%40N00&zg_set_id=72057594120970168&zg_context=in%2Fset-72057594120970168%2F";document.write("<iframe style="background-color:#"+zg_bg_color+"; border-color:#"+zg_bg_color+"; border:none;" width="113" height="151" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" src=""+zgi_url+"" title="Flickr Badge"></iframe>");if (document.getElementById) document.write("<div id="zg_whatlink"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/badge_new.gne"  style="color:#3993ff;" onclick="zg_toggleWhat(); return false;">what is this?</a></div>");}zg_toggleWhat = function() {document.getElementById("zg_whatdiv").style.display = (document.getElementById("zg_whatdiv").style.display != "none") ? "none" : "block";document.getElementById("zg_whatlink").style.display = (document.getElementById("zg_whatdiv").style.display != "none") ? "none" : "block";return false;}</script><div class="zg_div"><div class="zg_div_inner"><a href="http://www.flickr.com">www.<strong style="color:#3993ff">flick<span style="color:#ff1c92">r</span></strong>.com</a><br><script type="text/javascript">zg_insert_badge();</script><div id="zg_whatdiv">This is a Flickr badge showing photos in a set called <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/21644036@N00/sets/72057594120970168">Grafix</a>. Make your own badge <a href="http://www.flickr.com/badge_new.gne">here</a>.</div><script type="text/javascript">if (document.getElementById) document.getElementById("zg_whatdiv").style.display = "none";</script></div></div><!-- End of Flickr Badge -->

Really simple, quick and easy to put together, and as soon as i saw it, i wanted one too, i have a feeling this will really catch on, bet this isnt the last one you’ll see…

P.S. I chose to feature my ‘graphix’ set in this badge, mostly work created with fantasy festival posters in mind.