2008 New Year Countdown
Made a 2008 New Year Countdown today.
The color theme and cutout portrait was taken from the design of my MSN avatar and Facebook profile picture, which was inspired by the Casino Royale opening. The colors are the ones found on USPC playing cards, except for the green which is the color of poker table surfaces.
For the countdown digits, I wanted to use the font on USPC playing cards. Identifying the font is the hardest part. I started by browsing through the fonts in Font Book, but came up with no matches. After searching on Google for 10 minutes, I downloaded the font Card Characters by Harold Lohner. It was based on Bicycle playing cards.
I used the speech bubble and exclamation mark to give the feel of the person actually shouting the number of seconds left, just as you would at Times Square or IFC. The effect did not work until I added the fading out of the bubble. Without the fading, the countdown is just like a digital clock, with the rightmost digit changing only. Having all the images ready, all left is the simple coding. A few lines of Javascript was used.
It looks silly for someone to countdown alone. If I were to do it better, I would create cutout portraits of a few friends. Then by varying the size of portrait and bubble duplicates, there will be a crowd of people counting down together.
Tags: Countdown