Timo wanted me to design a template for his "Under Construction" webpages. He wasn't happy with my first effort, which was a photo of some scaffolding with some words across the top. Dwin gave me the idea of using a plane then some caption like "Launching soon", so I found this toy plane in my house, then took a picture of it as well as picture of the road I can see from my house.

It took a long time to select the plane out from the background then paste it onto the road picture, but it looked too fake as the plane gave the impression of hanging in mid-air, so I drew in the shadow using a technique I just learnt from a photoshop book. I got the shape of the shadow by shining a light onto the plane and trying to copy its shape.

After all this painstaking work, he told me the plane looked too dirty. haha, the plane is over 10 years old, of course there'll be a bit of dirt on it. But noooo, Timo wanted it to have a fresh coat of paint, so I used the Clone tool and tried to clean up the black spots without making it look too fake. I spent most of my afternoon doing this whole thing and finally got the following picture.



The plane now looks like it's on the ground and the half torn sticker can't be seen anymore.

After ALL this work, he tells me he doesn't look this design and sends me some sunrise pictures, so I spent the evening doing another one for him. He dictated all the text and positionings himself, then at the end of it, he said it didn't look nice, but that wasn't even the end of it. After wasting most of my day doing pictures for him, he did his own with PowerPoint, then complained that when he saved as jpg, it looked blur, so now he wants me to replicate his PowerPoint slide as a jpg using GIMP!!! Personally I liked the sunrise pictures better than his creation. And after all his talk about catchy slogans, his final one was a plain and simple "Work in Progress". grrr, I would have used that if he hadn't told me to find some subtle and profound phrase with double meanings.

So to all my platoon mates, if Timo asks you to do something, please think twice or you'll end up spending your whole day making endless changes to your work. haha. For another case study on working with Timo, refer to Dwin :)