All about me and my super crazy interweb antics

Hello, you have found the blog and online portfolio of Christian 'Cookie' Cook, a final year Digital Art & Technology student from the University of Plymouth. On this site you will find the various ramblings and progressions of his studies in the digital world. Heavily influenced by the gaming industry, he aims to incorporate game into every day life; because life should be fun.

If you wish to contact Christian, you can find him on such sites as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn or alternatively you can send him a traditional email if you fancy.

POSTED 16.01.2012 @ 20:25

Digital Architecture: Material/Immaterial

It has revolved around to taking part in embedding the digital immaterial into physical material. Architecture and physical space is somewhere which I haven’t ventured to much in my studies, but have been presented with the perfect opportunity to dabble around. Presented with an area of Plymouth called Devonport, we have been presented with a pretty open brief on aiding the reconstruction of a community which has been deprived of attention for so long. All of the research activities in this module are group-work, and our lecturer has taken the task of mixing together students from the 2nd/3rd year of [...] (read more…)

POSTED 08.01.2012 @ 17:37

Elevator Pitch… ’nuff said!

After a couple of days going mental in my room I cranked out this short video to represent my elevator pitch for NIGHTLY. I’ll let the video do the talking, as intended! The music is royalty-free from the interwebs, titled Daddio by David Austin. Voiceovers done by myself, which sadly aren’t the greatest but will do! Enjoy.

POSTED 06.01.2012 @ 15:04

Useful List of Resources

When starting a business it is always useful to have a resource database, with links for support, funding etc. I have gathered a small list (for now) which will hopefully help me start up my business. Office Locations Name: Formation Zone Contact: www.formationzone.co.uk Initial Cost: £60.00 Monthly Cost: £100-150 per month. £60-90 per workstation The Formation Zone offices are located on campus at the University of Plymouth. Name: Tamar Science Park Contact: www.tamarsciencepark.com Initial Cost: varies by unit Monthly Cost: £150 + VAT The Tamar Science Park is located by Derriford Hosptial in Plymouth, which is just outside the city. [...] (read more…)

POSTED 23.12.2011 @ 15:27

Critical Analysis of Nightly Pitch Presentation

For the Venture Culture module I aim to develop an application that allows students/business to find/advertise events. With this I have previously had to pitch my idea in front of the class, not once but twice. The initial pitch was intended to be a short 2-minute presentation explaining the basics of my idea. I then went away and refined my idea, coming back to do a 5-minute presentation which contained slideshow visuals to aid my thoughts. To start I would like to address the negative points of the 2-minute presentation. I have only watched this presentation twice, which straight away [...] (read more…)

POSTED 23.12.2011 @ 13:32

NIGHTLY Branding & Resources

So prior to my previous post I have video footage of me pitching my NIGHTLY idea. The second video posted contained a powerpoint, and to make it easier I have here images of my powerpoint slides. Within these slides I hope you can get an understanding for the brand, and the final slide contains a mockup of a beermat idea, using a QR code to direct the user to the nightly system. Alongside this I have a master vector of the logo so it can be used on any sized media in the future. I wont post this vector online, [...] (read more…)

POSTED 20.12.2011 @ 16:01

Gamification of Dull User Experiences

There has been one thing this year which I have really been putting off, and that is my Final Project. It’s an individually marked piece which is worth twice the amount of the other modules, yet I have spent the least amount of time on it. Illogical I know, which is what im aiming to fix. My original thoughts before starting the year was to work on some new age game controlling device which would use usually ignored input schemes to control games. I wanted to do a bit of hardware hacking, maybe a bit of soldering and Arduino to [...] (read more…)

POSTED 14.12.2011 @ 19:33

Get around.

Wow, another big gap in postings, I apologise! Along with breaks comes creativity, and I have lots to show. In the past couple weeks I have done lots of work on NIGHTLY. First off was the quick 2 minute pitch, which was a rough gest towards the idea of my product with initial reactions from my peers. This pitch was filmed, which is what I am throwing the blame on to my nervousness; I speak with my mind… not with my mouth! I have actually had this footage for a couple of weeks now but have been pretty much too [...] (read more…)

POSTED 23.11.2011 @ 18:41

Each evening, after dark

Good news! Very positive response from the group about my branding for Venture Culture. People loved the name, and loved the logo to accompany it. However, the tagline sucked and I am not happy with the colouring of it. Now that I look back at it, everything seemed a bit facebookish (did I just invent a word?). That is the kind of impact a social network can have upon your creativity, shocking. After throwing about a million different iterations of my tagline, developing synonyms for each word to create a unique and catchy phrase, I am kind of torn between [...] (read more…)

POSTED 17.11.2011 @ 23:39

Announcing: Nightly

Ok, so after deciding on a name, I literally have sat in Photoshop and not allowed myself to leave the computer until I came up with atleast one good logo design. After about 20 different logos and iterations, I have come up with the two logos seen below. I have a feeling that I am going for the logo on the right. Maybe because it took me 30 mins to create that cocktail glass. You may notice I have a very boring and obvious tag-line. I like to serve up products that do what they say on the tin, and [...] (read more…)

POSTED 17.11.2011 @ 15:56

Namination

One thing I have always sucked at: name creation. Whether it be on a game and I name my ingame avatar Bob, or if its an important university project; I always spend the most time stuck on this step. During the lecture I absorbed every single possible way to create names and branding advice. The best way I found was to do a brain-storm! See the image for my results. I quite liked toying with the idea of ‘night’, as you can possibly tell be the large expansion in that area alone. Associations with animals work pretty well for businesses, [...] (read more…)

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