What am I babbling about in design today?
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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.
Reading my friend Brad’s blog this evening, brings to mind my unnatural obsession with maps… and sets me off on a bit of a rambling blog… and not really related to design, other than the fact that my portfolio has perhaps a disproportionate amount of maps. As anyone around me knows, I tend to take my GPS receiver just about anywhere and save the tracks– that and bore everyone with some sort of stat about our location or speed. Google earth is my friend. Especially when i discovered I could convert my GPS tracks into files which Google earth can open (thanks GPS Visualizer). Knowing that, I do silly things like trace a track on Coronado Beach (see the striking red line):
…or check out the flight path over the Great Lakes (see turbulent green path):
How does this relate to design now? I don’t really know. Maybe there’s some environmental art project out there involving gps tracks across a large area. Sounds like a goofy trip idea. Mostly I enjoy maps for the daydream of what it may be like in so many different places and perspectives. Maps can also be beautiful at times in their abstract combinations of color and lines. I’ve sometimes wondered why the poles counter a circular continent with a circular ocean, balance in design, I suppose.
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