For my honours project at Abertay University, I will design a web-app for making city maps. The art part of this project will be the UI and UX, the creation of icons for various building types. I plan to use React or Angular for prototyping the editor. Alternatively, I might just prototype it in Figma, instead of fully implementing it in a web framework.

Today I designed some wireframes. They show different possible layouts for the building palette and toolbars. I think they all have very traditional “editor” look. Next, I will experiment with more funky layouts, to try to escape that look. I’m taking inspirations from games in the Sim City franchise, as well as various tile-based map editors. The app is intended to be a casual toy which allows you to design a city.

Here are some flowers photographs that I did with my Fujifilm X-E3. I was aiming for the bokeh effect and shallow focus, which is somewhat hard to achieve with my lens, but I think the results are nice.

I’ve been looking at some Orthodox iconography. The icon you see here represents gnostic wisdom Sophia and her daughters Faith, Love, and Hope. She’s having a discussion with St Christopher (navigator, strongman and psychopomp) who is depicted with dog head. This is common in Bulgaria and Greece, it’s probably the only Christian Saint who has animal head like Egyptian gods. In my opinion, St Christopher hearkens back to Hermanubis, the combined Greek Hermes and Egyptian Anubis of late antiquity. The official line of the Church is that “he is from a tribe of dog-headed people” which I find rather unlikely.

Dog-headed St Christopher was suppressed by the Church in some countries, but he is popular in Greece and Bulgaria. At the margins of the icon you see scholar St Katherine, and saint of hospitality and food St Martha. Jesus is perched on a cloud at the top edge.