More cool work related stuff – there’s an amazing exhibition opening in the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin Castle called Telling Images of China opening on the 12th February. It’s an incredible collection of paintings from the 15th to 20th century from the Shanghai museum.

The exhibition includes scrolls and albums by artists active in the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties and the early Republican period after 1912. Each of these ‘story paintings’ retells or illustrates a tale from folk and religious lore, oral and official history, poetry or literature. The exhibition is presented through four sometimes overlapping, sometimes interweaving themes, namely ‘crossings’ – stories about exiles, loyalists and rustics; the supernatural world of popular religion; models and exemplars in history; and finally, emperor-concubine and scholar-beauty romances. There are artworks which illustrate texts inscribed on or beside the paintings themselves.

We’ve had the pleasure of working with these images in X Communications to create touch screen interactives and iPod tours (hours of hard work and heartache by Stephanie), so if you’re there please check them out!

Here’s me, handsome as ever (click to play with me!)

And who could this be?

X Communications Christmas Card, originally uploaded by irishstu.

Well this is what I spent most of this year doing (apart from getting married of course!). Just want to say a big thank you to everyone in X Communications for being such wonderful people to work with, and here’s to next year!

Superextrabonuslink – I made the card using some CSS3 but FBML doesn’t render it (sigh) – so here’s how it looks with fancy CSS properties!

In the video below the painting appears in the last frames for half a second – check it out.

We’re pretty interested in it here in X Communications (Steph wrote about it as well) as it’s cool to see something you’ve worked on become a small part of pop culture.

They’re talking about it on the Lost forums and other forums too – this Google Group is really interesting, with how much they actually read into things.

Banner ads we created in work (X Communications) are nominated for an award – if you’d vote for McDonald’s that would be great – you can preview all the nominees here to help make up your mind.

Edit: fixed a line about twitter that made no sense

More Sprout Widget creations! This is one we created at X Communications as part of a suite of online design and branding applications for their new production. We also developed:

• The Solemn Mass for a Full Moon in Summer blog where Rough Magic will document the production process and run of the show
• A twitter page for Rough Magic to document the production and run of the show in frequent small updates
• A skinned YouTube channel for holding videos
• A custom landing page for the Rough Magic website to direct people to the new production
• An embedded preview of the image gallery on Pix.ie so people caan easily share and view images from the production
• There is also a link to the Rough Magic Facebook page so people can learn about the production from there if they wish