Wednesday 18 February 2015

GOOGLE Shows Interest In Nigeria 2015 Elections

Google, a renowned company popular for its first class search engine and other ever-reliable services, had shown a concern about the Nigeria 2015 general elections. The authority of the Google company had launched a public portal to help voters and citizens to get an easy access to the latest information about the election. The portal which can be located at http://www.google.ng/elections  was created by Google to provide easy access to media information such as news, videos, audiovisual files and pictures about the election and each political parties in the country. The portal is public, to the extent that it can be viewed from Smartphones, computers, or mobile phones.

Taiwo Kola-Ogunlade, Google's Communication and Public Affairs Manager for Nigeria, confirmed the launching in a press release by ThisDayLive. He stated: "The internet continues to play increasingly role in the way political parties and voters take part in elections in Africa. Today, it's easier for voters to actively take part in the electoral process".
He further added that "visitors to the portal will be able to access news, features and audiovisual content on the political parties and their candidates,  other major players and the various preparation by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC),in the run-up to the polls. There are also interactive platforms that will enable the candidates better articulate their manifestoes and agenda to the voting public who in turn can task the office seekers on issues of interest to them."

Attached to this gallery feature and multimedia concept created by Google is another feature located at http://pledgetovotenigeria.com where web surfers were permitted to make and create a public badge which can be shared on social media. "there are other features that are also designed to encourage eligible voters to vote on the Election Day. We have the 'pledge to vote' feature which allows visitors to publicly commit to vote via personalised #pledgetovote badges which can be downloaded and shared with their friends and the public via social media." To backup his points, the manager stated that "we think that by sharing pictures and images of their badges with friends or acquaintances on facebook and other social media, they too may be encouraged to make a pledge. The more people who commit, the greater the voter turnout and the better Nigeria's democracy would be for it."

He made it known that this kind of technology wasn't the first that Google had launched. "Its not the first time that Google has launched an Election hub for a country, the concept was first launched in 2007, and has since had other 40 editions including during the 2013 Ghana and Kenya polls" - he said on a final note.

So far, so good. I think the atmosphere of communication in Nigeria, is changing everyday with much favour to science and technology. Improvements included changing from analog to digital; graduating from antenna to satellite dish; moving forward from stationary to satellite campus; proceeding from manual to automatic; and with good communication media like these, it is my belief that Nigeria by 2050, will no longer vote with ballot papers. She will have graduated out of that to a more stable computer age.

Thanks for visiting.

Tuesday 3 February 2015

LOGOGRAPHY: DESIGN FIREFOX LOGO WITH CORELDRAW



One of the uniqueness of Mozilla Firefox is its logo which had made the browser awesome. The Mozilla Firefox is a very strong and reliable browser of today with over 130 million users. Today, in this post, I will share with you some hints I used to design a typical Mozilla Firefox logo with my CorelDraw X13. One of the 20 tips to become a good graphic designer is a perfect practice with a dream of greatness, and that’s exactly what this post is all about. I expect you to dream big.

If you follow the steps and instructions correctly, your final design will be as shown below.





Prerequisite
As a common rite, I expect you to have at least CorelDraw 11 or later version installed on your computer. Having done that, you are good to go!

Tools and techniques
The tools and techniques that will be use include:
(a) Pen tool  (b) shape tool  (c) fountain fill dialog  (d) Outline tool  (e) and some basic drawing skill (You can do it even if you are a beginner)
To draw the Mozilla Firefox is not as easy as drawing a simple rectangle! So, to help you along, I included screenshots to aid you get it. And with that, the tutorial begins!

Step 1
Draw a circle with dimension of 100mm by 100mm. Fill it with a nice fountain fill color From: ‘Sky Blue’, To: ‘C=100, M=80, Y=0, K=0. Remove the outline using the outline tool.



Step 2
If you had noticed the Mozilla Firefox logo, you’ll have noticed that it has a transparent world map at the back of the Firefox. In this tutorial, I made a sketch of the world map using the Pen tool. That’s the second step of the design. Remove the outline and fill it with a faint blue such as the ‘Ice Blue’. Use Uniform as the transparency type. Set the transparency size to 75. Group all the shapes created earlier together.

Step 3
It’s time to draw the Firefox, get your mouse occupied! From the toolbar, select the Pen tool and draw the fox outline as shown. Change the color to C=0 M=70 Y=100 K=0. This is a sketch of what I mean

Step 4
No matter how good one is, one is liable to make mistakes. With the Shape tool on the toolbar, we can shape/smooth/adjust the nodes of the Firefox so that it looks like the real Firefox we are expecting. While smoothing, be careful not to smooth corners because it will deform the logo! To smooth any node, click on it with Shape tool go to the property bar; select convert line to curve; then, click on delete node(s). Fill it with a color of C=0 M=75 Y=100 K=0. That will improve the quality like this
Step 5
We are now in the middle of the design; let’s improve our design by adding some concept to it. In this case, I will add some tails to the Firefox. To draw a tail wasn’t that difficult, all you need is to draw a triangular-like curvy shape with the Pen tool. Add up to 9 tails. For all the tails, fill it with a fountain fill color From: C=0 M=50 Y=90 K=0 To: C=4 M=4 Y=75 K=0. Change the Edge pad to 35. Make sure the edge is transparent so that it can blend into the Firefox.


Step 6
The uniqueness of the Firefox can be further increase by adding some vector drawing and shading effect such as hair and shadow illusions. To do that, draw the hair using the Pen tool. Fill the color with a deeper color such as that of C=2 M=55 Y=90 K=0. Change its transparency type to Uniform with a size of 50. Now, add the shading effect with a fountain fill From: C=1 M=95 Y=95 K=0 To: C=21 M=92 Y=95 K=0. Make the edge pad=32.
 



Step 7
The last step of the main logography of this Firefox design is to draw the face of the fox; fill it with a fountain color From: C=5 M=6 Y=90 K=0 To: C=4 M=4 Y=77 K=0; edge pad = 35. Also, you can improve its quality by including a shading-like vector drawing. Draw a small circle with a Black color to represent the nose.


Step 8 – The Final Step 
Hey! The Firefox is ready! Group all the Firefox drawings; Place it on the shapes created in Step 2 above. I added some text to the design to make it look nice. Behold! Our Firefox created using CorelDraw!

Don’t forget that sharing is good. Comment below if you have any question, you can also share this post to your friends.
Back to Top

Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner

Advertisement