Actionscript

Again I stray from strict design and illustration development to spend more time trying out actionscript, and again I return to one of my favorite subjects– astronomy. Similar to the simple interactive distance map I made several months ago, these are virtual 3d maps of the bright stars within 1000 and 25 light years. I’m hoping to add more to the design later, but I’ve posted the early drafts of the 1000ly and 25ly maps for perusal.

Once again I display what a geek I am as I set out to create a world map in actionscript . Mostly it was the challenge of a designer trying to figure out some programming, and with some late nights, I managed to create this little thing. What it will do is display any location you enter or city you click on in the center of the world, with a measure of thousand-mile rings radiating from it. I originally tried it with the text, as in a previous design but the overlapping text made the cities difficult or impossible to click on. For now it loads centered on my home in Utah, but I think it’d be great sometime to set it up such that the default loading location is that of the visitor, determined via their ip address, but I think I’d be investing more time figuring out that programming than I ought to right now. Every now and then I’m have to do some design, of course.

I can’t leave my site alone. I get in a discussion with my buddy Brad about how to randomly rotate his background on his Therty Brand site. I go and figure it out (probably nothing new to most people), then try to figure out how to make my flash movie transparent so I could do backgrounds… just for GP, of course. Instead, I end up adding a random image generator in the flash movie to show some random glimpses of my sketchbook. Some are honestly pretty old. The example here is from my internship days at Shannon Associates Ah well, it’s just to add… I was going to say texture, but maybe clutter is a better word, I don’t know yet. Maybe just a warning about what you might be getting into if you’re looking further into my site.

Within a week of launching my own site and i’ve finished a second one. Once again, nothing flashy or probably very good, but hopefully it’s not a fluke that I accomplished one site. While my friend Brad was compiling and refining lists of Utah design firms, he added the one that I work for normally, Indigo Creative . But of course, the guys hadn’t had time to fix up the site yet. So what do I do? I stop in to see how things are going and suggest that I could give them a quick fix. After a day and several hours into the night, I wonder why I volunteered. But now (or as soon as they get it uploaded), I can refer people to a working site, and hope nobody finds it too comical when they see it. I realize, as I’m sorting through old portfolio, what a task it is to try and keep things updated and wonders where the balance is between maintaining a good website for your business, and spending time doing actual work for clients.