Easy Reader

Hi all.

Being my first post here on my own blog I should take a couple of lines to introduce myself. Name is Dave Stewart and I work with Aaron at Cronin and here at Easy! Designs. Flash and ActionScript are my things and I hope to have plenty experiments to show you in the coming weeks. Anyway, to get the ball rolling I thought I might put up a link to my latest project.

To make a long story short, the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, CT is due to launch a Surrealist Paintings exhibit October 7th to welcome home some of there paintings that have been on tour. They came to us with a tight deadline and limited funds (is there any other kind of client?) to produce an online advertising campaign and a viral piece. So we did. After one brain storming session we had some web banner ideas and a wacky idea for a “Create Your Own” Surreal painting program.

The challenges for me were

1. creating original assets; and
2. how to save a painting, since Flash has no way of producing a bitmap on the fly from a users actions.

My initial thoughts were to create an actual paint program with traditional pens, brushes, etc. but it seemed obvious that we would just get a bunch of crap scribbles in our gallery from lazy or artistically challenged peeps. I needed to take control and supply easy to use pre-made assets. So I did 20-30 minuets research on Surrealist Paintings to see what that lark was all about and proceeded to build a couple dozen 3D models and renders for assets. Then I coded her up for drag’n drop functionality with some basic manipulation tools. Then I wrote some crazy ActionScript and Flash Remoting PHP to store a painting (with all it’s hundreds of object attributes and arrays) in MySQL . Off it went yesterday to the live site and so far the response has been awesome. Lots of great feedback and such.

I hope to re-build it now that I have Flash 8 and get creative with some of the new bitmap filters and what-not. Have fun.

Cheers.

With all of the travelling I was doing last week, I forgot to mention that some of the sites Dave & I have worked at Cronin and Company on took home WebAwards from the Web Marketing Association. We took home two “Outstanding Website” awards (think silver) for our sites for Middlesex Hospital and the Drink-Drive-Lose Ad Challenge. I was perticularly stoked as I was the designer of both sites and single-handedly built the Ad Challenge site which had a lot of complex application-level code behind it. We also took home a “Standard of Excellence” award (think bronze) for the site we built for Garelick Farms’ Over the Moon Milk product launch. I’m not a big fan of that site’s design (not because it wasn’t mine), but I love the game Dave built.

I was also a judge of the WebAwards (as I have been for the last few years and, no, I did not judge any sites I was involved with) and I have to say I was very pleased to see more sites moving to web standards. Out of the 15 or so I judged in the initial round, there were at least two or three that were well on their way to being exemplary in the standards world (compared to 0 only two years ago). Like most marketing-related awards, Flash always seems to trump standards, but it seems like developers are starting to cue into the standards trend more and more every year.

This year I also had the privilege of judging the Best of Show. I was pulling for Project Rebirth but National Geographic ended up taking home the top prize for Inside the Mafia which was also in my top 3 picks.

All in all, this years WebAwards were pretty good to us (and a step up from the two “Standard of Excellence” awards we pulled last year for Ride4Ever and Bertucci’s Restaurants). I look forward to next year’s competition as well as the one at SXSW, where we hope to go from finalist to winner this year.

Yeah, I’m weighing into the debate on the ALA redesign. I have to say I agree with Jon and Jeremy regarding the fixed 1024px width. My little 2¢ to add to this discussion is that I think more designers should consider the wonderous world of CSS switching based on browser width (see Rammstein or the slightly better implementation on Drink-drive-lose.com’s Ad Challenge). Using this technique, users can view your site at their most comfortable screen resolution and you can still have a nicely designed page for them (fixed or liquid… or both). Can you say zoom layouts? I knew you could.

Just when I had gotten over the loss of Design In-Flight, the magazine relaunches as a web-only publication. From the history/about page:

With the reduction in production efforts with this format, and a slightly less rigid publishing schedule, DiF is sure not to disappear again.

I certainly hope so. Welcome back!

Sad news, friends… Design In-Flight is closing shop. This very young, yet stellar PDF-based magazine was off to a fantastic start, but, as Andy put it, changes in his personal and professional life have conspired to make DiF’s continued publication an impossibility.

Though I am disappointed at losing such a great publication, I understand where Andy’s coming from. Having spent six years of my life devoted to a magazine I started in college, I know how tough it can be. I put the fritz on hiatus in the summer of 2000 when I moved to Connecticut, hoping to restart it again as a solely web-based publication, but time has conspired to keep it only a homepage. Will I ever find the time to get it going again or is it only wishful thinking? I’m not sure. I guess time will tell.

Andy, best of luck to you in your future endeavors.