So I’ve finally designed a logo that I’m happy with. What do you think?
The creature sitting on top of the “o” is my “creativity”. He’s what brings me my inspiration. I love illustrating and creating characters so I wanted to create a branding icon for myself that represented my personality in a way. I wanted him to be colorful, eye catching and bit a goofy. I finally feel really good about my logo and I’m pretty sure this is the one.
I also got some excellent advice from fellow designers from Concept Feedback.
Recently at my job I’ve been working on a lot of online application interface designs. This one project in particular required tons of steps and navigation. JQuery has grown a special place in my heart recently and I stumbled upon this very cool jQuery breadcrumb plug-in from Compare Networks.
When I used it I didn’t need to worry about how long the name would be or how many items/steps there were. If you open up the jQuery file you can edit some of its features like how many are shown before collapsing, etc. You can find that at the bottom. Pretty self explanatory.
The only thing that gave me trouble was when I started using images with the breadcrumb links. They disappeared when I put them outside of the “a” tag. So you just have to remember to keep it inside. Overall very cool plug-in and I definitely have integrated it into a few of my projects already.
(This guy works with the newest version of jQuery)
Finally hosting my own blog. OHHHH YEEEAHHH! Next step – Redesign it 
My friend Tom needed a blog redesign. He just didn’t like any of the templates offered by Blogger. So he asked me if I could help. This actually was my first time seriouly messing around with Blogger. I guess this experience should help me move toward redesigning my own blog… ahem … one day.
So this is what I came up with:
A screen shot of the blog I worked on.
He wanted something simple, but going along with this dark zombie idea. I searched through all the images and finally stumbled upon this little guy on iStockPhoto.com. Then I based the mood and theme around him.
I’m not finished. Actually resizing the blog to take the screen capture made me realize a margin issue I hadn’t seen before. The hardest thing for me was trying to figure out what all the classes were, what everything did, etc.
I found this article on Work: “7 Tips to design professional blog layout using Blogger”. Pretty good starting point. So I’m hoping to revisit the page soon… clean it up a bit… probably spice up the body text a bit more.
I was skimming through my blogs and I stumbled upon this title Swf Searchability FAQ. Turns out Adobe is working with Google and Yahoo to make swfs searchable! The link explains it all… Actually Google already has the capabilities by now and every day the spiders are finding more and more flash sites. And I know what you’re thinking… “there has to be some software to buy or download or more coding…” Well that’s the best part my friend! The designer has to do NOTHING. And all the old flash files out there on the internet are seachable as well and will be found in due time. I almost feel like this is some prank Google and Adobe have decided to play on Flash designers everywhere!
Other good news… I passed my Flash 8 Certification test with an 87%. I am a Flash 8 Ace (ha). Now on to ActionScript 3.0. Not sure if I know what I’m getting into :/
I’ve been having a big problem with my movie. I had an FLV on main timeline with swfs loaded into a movieclip object behind it. I used the pause function that I shared with you on several of the swfs I was loading into the main stage. The pause button would then pause only the FLV and sometimes the swf behind it. So I went to actionscript.org (like I always do when I have a huge problem with nowhere to turn… highly recommend it). You can read my thread if you’re interested.
So anyway, the point I’m trying to make is to be careful with the pause code when it comes to loading swfs. I had a pause on a lot of symbols inside movieclips in the swfs. So when my pause button on the main timeline told the loaded swf to pause… it looked like it wasn’t working. It was driving me freaking nuts. But at least now everything works.
I’ve been working on a couple video projects at work and I stumbled upon some ActionScript online that has been a real life saver when it comes to keeping file sizes low. You use this to pause your timeline instead of just adding frames to time out your animation.
Just put this in your first frame on your actions layer:
this.createEmptyMovieClip(”timer”,50);
timer.onEnterFrame = function()
{
if (this.startTime>0)
{
var diff = getTimer()-this.startTime;
if (diff>this.timerLength)
{
this.target.play();
this.startTime = 0;
}
}
};
function pauseFor(theTime)
{
stop();
timer.timerLength = theTime;
timer.startTime = getTimer();
timer.target = this;
}
Then when you want to pause your animation, put this in your keyframe in the actions layer:
pauseFor(”set amount of time”);
If you wanted to pause, for example, for 5 seconds you would write:
pauseFor(5000);
Thats it! Ever since I fell upon it I use it in everything. I hope it helps someone else.
I checked my Digg Feed this morning and there was a cool video I thought I’d share with you. An artist took a screen shot of his project in Illustrator every 5 minutes while working on it. Here’s the video:
Science Machine from Chad Pugh on Vimeo.
Visit The Page
Cool no? I always love seeing how artists get their work done. Also, finally someone thats using Vista 
.
Hi again. This post is a little late but better late than never. My work rolled out a new look for their website a couple weeks ago and I had the privilege of designing the Flash for the home page and the Online Preparation. Unfortunately, you have to be signed up for the show or the software or something to see the Online Prep Flash but everyone can take a look at the home page. ( I like that one better anyways).
You can visit the site here.
This was my first real Flash project for a client. I learned a lot of things actually.
I made a preloader. I animated it based off an example I found online but just tailored it to reflect the look of the site.
The movies were all dynamic except for the “when” part of the Flash. This is because I ran into a problem with the XML. (This was also my first major experiment with loading XML content out of a school setting). The shows are populated by an XML page. For some reason it worked perfect when I played the actual swf, but when I loaded it into the main container the XML didn’t load. It was weird. I think it has something to do with Root Levels. I searched for tutorials and posted my question on an ActionScript forum. But no luck. So my solution was to just put it on the main timeline.
I also ran into some problems with file size. At first I had a lot of frames… just for timing purposes. But then I found some AS that would pause the timeline for a set amount of time and then continue playing. This took a HUGE chunk out of my final size. I also went in and individually set the quality of the JPEGs and tried to replace as many PNGs as I could.
I think my favorite part of the whole thing was creating the “what”. I just enjoyed animating the star from the MarketGate logo.
I think it was a success for me and big step towards Flash Super Star. I’m extremely proud because I designed and coded it myself. And usually when there was a problem, I fixed it (with some help from others and online resources of course) or just found a different solution that worked.
Since the site is 100% width, it does look a bit silly when you have higher resolution monitors. But I’m working on a solution to this. I think I’ll either have the Flash resize itself as the resolution goes up or have either AS or JavaScript detect the screen resolution and then load the correctly sized Flash movie. We’ll see what turns out to be the best option.
Hope you enjoy it!
Hi.
I decided to make a blog about my interests in web design.
Currently, I hold a position as a web designer in Solon, Ohio. Despite the title, I still work with a lot of print as well. My favorite part of the job is when I get to do any Flash projects. My goal is to become somewhat of a Flash guru. I’m studying for the Flash ACE exam, which I hope to attempt sometime in June (and pass with flying colors). I recently passed my HTML certification exam. Yay.
In my spare time I love to animate. In college I took both 2D and 3D classes. I used mainly After Effects and Maya. Both softwares came very easily to me. I fell upon this website; The 11 Second Club. It was based on the the competition entitled “The 10 Second Club” where people would animate a 10 second clip. It became really popular so the website was started after the competition stopped. I think this would be so fun and I plan on submitting my own clip in the future.
Right now, my main goal is to update my site. When I graduated college, my website wasn’t exactly functioning correctly. So just for the sake of finding a job, I threw together a website that displayed my work. You can check out my portfolio site here.
Also, I’ve been doing work for free just to get my name out there. My cousin in Brooklyn owns a masseuse shop. She needed a logo so I quickly came up with this one.
It’s just a first draft. She didn’t really seem too impressed with it so we’ll see how it evolves.
Also as a web designer… I feel a bit ashamed for using a CSS template but I plan to redesign it to reflect my new portfolio site.
- Nyekola
