leoburnett.ca

Commercial portfolio sites for design companies are a well-established category by now. The sites get slicker, better scripted, converted to proper CSS etc, but essentially it’s the same content in the same wrapping. Only rarely does a real surprise come along.

Advertising companies in particular tend not to take web design very seriously. You see, the awards available for new media advertising are much less prestigious than their film and print counterparts. A delightful exception, then, is the little wonder that is Leo Burnett Canada.

Under the title “Big Ideas come out of Big Pencils” it presents a playful interface, implemented completely in Flash. The user moves a big black pencil around the page, scribbling as it goes. Through interaction and exploration a multitude of details come to light, like the little apples strewn across the page. Clicking on an apple brings up “Leo quotes” with nicely animated typography. An excellent sense of space is created through the use of extreme zooms in and out, resulting in a feeling that is simple, typographic and minimalist, yet simultaneously fun and compelling. Users will most certainly staying longer on this page than they would on your average agency web site.

And that’s more praise than I’ve given any advertising agency in a long time.

Joshua Davis: Once-upon-a-forest

Joshua Davis has announced a new series of workshops somewhat cheerfully called Get Creative. The subtitle packs more of a punch: “Using dynamic abstraction within Macromedia Flash MX to build art making machines .” Only London remains on his tour, the dates are 4-5 November and the gig is organized by FITC.

Apparently, Davis will walk participants through the process he follows when creating works like those seen on Once-upon-a-forest. He will even provide them with code: “Attendee’s of this lecture will leave with a renewed creative outlook…and an enormous collection of reusable art making machines (Flash Components) written by Joshua Davis which he uses on most of his client projects.” Not bad for £400, cheap by design industry standards.

I’ve always found Davis’ generative illustrations (like those seen at Accident Happy) more fascinating than his design work. I think he has a much more unique “voice” as an artist than as a designer. His art works have a great deal of detail and texture to them that is often lost in his clean-line Modernist design projects. Granted, the recent Stardust.tv web site maxes out on kitschy charm and technical wizardry, but I still find much more personality in the print works. So a workshop exploring his techniques for generative composition doesn’t sound half bad…

Tile-based games tutorial

If you’re one of those people who pine for old arcade games and hoard MAME ROMs, you might want to check out Tony Pa’s excellent resource on creating your own tile-based games in Flash.

Pa’s tutorials are clear and concise, walking the reader through every basic step from creating maps to dealing with movement, pathfinding and isometric maps. He makes the FLA files freely available under a Creative Commons license, the only snag is that they use pre-Actionscript 2.0 code for Flash 5. Tony Pa’s tutorials are based on older work by Klas Kroon, who has created any number of Flash game engines.

Don’t think tile-based games make any sense in the age of Xbox and Playstation 2? Then consider the hundreds of companies that have put good money on mobile devices being the next big games platform. This despite the fact that your typical cheap mobile phone has a tiny CPU and next to no memory, pretty much like an old microcomputer. And guess what games were popular on microcomputers? That’s right, tile-based games.

Paul Prudence: Transphormetic

Paul Prudence wears many hats: Blogger at dataisnature, new media designer at slightspace and Flash guru writing for several books. He is also the creator of Transphormetic, a collection of generative sketches executed in Flash, marked by organic shapes and a delicate taste in color.

Flash coders might want to look at Paul’s articles for Actionscript.com on Artificial Life in Flash (part 1, part 2) and Fractal Botany and the Art of Recursion.

For a more in-depth looks at generative code in Flash, have a look at Flash Math Creativity, a book from Friends of Ed which includes work by Paul, Jared Tarbell, Manny Tan and others. Several of the same suspects are to be found contributing to Fresh Flash, another book exploring advanced design techniques using ActionScript. Source code for both books are downloadable online, but remember: If you like it, buy it.

James Paterson: Drawings

Bitforms Gallery in New York is currently showing work by James Paterson, the prolific mastermind behind Presstube. Pieces on display include drawings, prints and animation work. Paterson has pioneered a style combining traditional drawing with programmed composition. Sketches are done on paper, and favorites are selected to be digitized using a tablet as input device. Some are also animated frame-by-frame. These individual elements are then arranged and controlled using programming.

The resulting compositions are often a cacophony of shapes, demonstrating Paterson’s vivid visual humor. Unfortunately the Bitforms site features only rather small images of the actual exhibition, so it’s difficult to appreciate the complexity of the drawings. Images from a previous show in Tokyo illustrates it better: Skulls Show.

From the Bitforms press release:

Joshua Davis (the original Flash Guru) uses a similar technique for his work on once-upon-a-forest, combining pre-drawn elements with automatic composition to great effect. Both Davis and Paterson were recently in a show called Accident Happy, which describes the work as “computer randomized”.

While on the subject of Flash, it should be pointed out that there are now significant efforts in the Flash community to turn Flash into an Open Source platform. Noone knows how happy Macromedia really is about it, but it’s great news for developers. They can now bypass the Flash interface altogether, and code their ActionScripts in the Eclipse IDE and compile it in MTASC.

Not only does this development allow coders to create Flash apps without ever buying a Macromedia product. It also makes a lot of sense when you consider that it is often more practical to develop Flash applications in a proper programming IDE these days. Gone are the days when a typical Flash movie made extensive use of the timeline. Instead, Flash sites use event-driven programming with dynamically loaded resources. Flash is becoming more like a professional programming environment and less like a visual effects generator. And now we have the Open Source tools to make it even better.

OSFlash is an excellent resource for all your Open Source Flash needs.

The public beta of the Flash Player version 8 (known as 8 Ball) is now available. Download the uninstaller while you’re at it, things are bound to break. The Flash community is very excited about this release, to find out why you can take a look at Colin Moock’s video from the public demo, or read this more tech-oriented blog post from Franto. It looks as if Flash will finally have pixel manipulation, filter effects, blend modes and PNG format support with 24 bit alpha channel. And even if you don’t know what that means, you can still look forward to the millions of sites that will use all those effects in the next few months.

Mario Klingemann has created a SWF 8 Version Converter which allows you to fool Flash into thinking your old SWF’s are really version 8 by hacking the version number embedded in the file. He also gives the very sensible advice that the first thing you should do with the new player, is to test all your old sites to see if and how they break.

Mario Klingemann: Ornamism II

Mario Klingemann is well-known in the Flash developer community by the name of Quasimondo, under which he uses publishes a blog, releases Actionscript hacks and acts as general Flash Guru. He also has a very intriguing site of generative sketches called Incubator. The sketches are done in Processing or Flash and have source code included, so people can play with his work (for non-commercial use only).

Some of the pieces (like Ornamism, Ornamism II and Plankton) are animated organic forms, while others implement useful algorithms like fast blur and color quantization. Well worth looking at, whether you’re art- or tech-minded.

Mario’s Quasimondo blog is essential reading for Flash coders.

Michael Schmitz: GenoTyp

Michael Schmitz (an alumnus of Joachim Sauter’s Digital Media class at the Universität der Künste in Berlin) has created GenoTyp, an application demonstrating the genetic breeding of typefaces.

GenoTyp only works on 5 included typefaces, but a “gene laboratory” allows detailed control of genetic properties such as outlines, serif/sans serif, line thickness and contrast. Implemented in Flash, its use of genetic algorithms is very effectively applied to a clearly defined problem. Michael also has a portfolio of interesting computational design experiments online.

It is worth mentioning the grand-daddy of computational typography experiments, the Beowolf font by Just van Rossum and Erik van Blokland (aka LettError). BeoWolf subverted the fact that PostScript is in fact a programming language, and replaced the regular curveTo command with a randomized version, causing every letter to be randomly modified when printed. Anyone who wants to hack around with PostScript can read this tutorial.