The Blob

It's time for me of new challenges. I'm leaving Emakina to create my own company with some other guys: 1MD. We try to be online really soon!

Now, it's 1 month I work with flash CS4 demo at home. What's the verdict? I can tell you, I'm not going to buy this upgrade right now.

I liked:
- new organisation of interface (much space for the working "canvas")... but it's not enough (see further)
- search in library
- seems faster, more reactive for little projects
- Thank god, now it can browse font family (can find the Din Medium Italic for example and not just the "Din" as before).
- Of course the 3D rotations, moves, etc.
- Pixel Blender: a new world of distortion, incredible effects, transitions,...

I hated:
- the memory usage (with my macbook pro and 2gb it become quickly unusable), so slower for big projects
- the poor update of interface for development. Flex builder or flashDevelop is 10 times ahead.
- the motion tween interface. After 1 month, I still can't use it. I think there is a big potential in term of animations. You could be really precise and make eases as you want but actually you can't... the interface is just a crap. It take 90% of your screen if you want to animate everything you want and so you can't see the result:

So at the end you are just frustrated you are not able to exploit 100% of the possibilities just because of this stupid interface. And yeah, another great thing: you can't make the value of your "ease" more than 100% or less than 0%. So you can't make a bounce effect at the exact position you want (just try to do it, you'll see what I mean). Just take a look at the video on adobe TV http://tv.adobe.com/#vi+f1590v1014 it seems even the adobe guy is not comfortable with the motion interface.
- I still hate the sticky effect of the interface. When you move windows it accidentally stick to another window or to the border of your screen... For a mac user it's really a pain, especially if you use a tablet.
- Fonts still have different render if dynamic or static (line spacing). Still have problem when exporting on PC, some fonts move a little (I don't have this problem with photoshop, illustrator, indesign).
- Your projects can quickly become a mess. The interface was made for simple projects or simple animations. But now you have incredible powers (3D, new motion tools, pixel effects) so you can make huge projects, huge animations but then everything become confuse and you lose a lot of time finding everything, moving a keyframe, changing a tween, etc. I think flash should now turn to interface like Nuke or Shake. Because of all its 3D capabilities. It's time to grow up Flash!

My conclusion
If I use flash CS4, after 1 or 2 hours I'm just frustrated to have so much great tools in such inadequate interface. So I'll just use flash as I'm doing now; trying to make as much as possible in photoshop, illustrator or flex builder and use the less possible flash IDE. In fact I just use it to compile and quickly integrate graphic stuff.

Maybe one day Flash is going to get a good interface?

Labels: CS4, flash, test

Mr.doob | Omega Code Visualiser

Mr Doob just released a visual equalizer for Omega Code. I'm not a fan of music, but a fan of Mr Doob's work and again it's a piece of art.

Labels: equalizer, flash, Mr Doob, music

Finally, I found how to render a shadow with alpha in Cinema 4D (maxon) thanks to the shadowcatcher plugin.

It's especially useful when you need to import an object an its shadow into flash as a png 24bits.

Here is the step by step tutorial and the link to the plugin:
http://www.grafxflow.co.uk/

I don't know if you already discovered the windowshop website from Amazon. It's still in beta but it's already pretty good. In fact that's what I think it's missing in websites nowadays, a good way to "explore" things. And here, I think we have a start of answer.

link: http://www.windowshop.com/

Labels: flash, website

I found this presentation well done. Every designer should take a look.

Peter Flynn showed Flash Calalyst at Max 2008. It's promising. I think it can be really helpful for lot of projects. It enable us to test our idea. You can see things moving, interacting quickly and easily.

Just watch the video to learn more:

Labels: adobe, catalyst, flash, wireframe

Turn around 3D pixel to show the right image. Simple. Easy. Funny

link: http://www.bobblebrook.com/games/coign-of-vantage

Labels: 3D, flash, game

Check out this test of 3D animated character in away 3D. You can also play with lights setting. Sounds really good!

link: http://perso.numericable.fr/chamaslot/away_tom4.php

http://perso.numericable.fr/chamaslot/onkba.php

Labels: 3D, away3D, flash

link: http://www.dieselfueled.com/2008/12/2008-the-year-in-photographs/

Nice little website for a bank targeting teenagers. Smooth little animations everywhere but I talk about this website mainly because of the excellent idea of loader. Simple concept but efficient enough (but I think too "cliché").
link: http://www.essaeubanco.com.br

Labels: loader, website

I'm currently trying Blogo which is said by its developers as:

Easily publish text, images, videos, slideshows and more. With a simple, intuitive interface and support for Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad, Typo, Drupal, and Expression Engine, Blogo is the best way to maintain your blog and spread the word with Twitter, Ping.fm and other supported services.

Until now, everything work great and easily. I really LOVE the image publish tool. So easy. They just need to change the ugly icon of the software...

link: Blogo: The blog editor for your Mac

"If you could see and hear an athlete’s intensity, what would it look like? What would it sound like?"
Check this out now! An incredible promotional spot made by Bl:nd. The soundtrack is just great. The color calibration is so cool.... And there is also nice informations about the making of on their blog.

Just a line about PixelMator. A new versions is coming soon, with big changes. And the developers need you!
Drop them a line and you could test this next release.
All informations are there, on their blog.

Funny website of Diesel Sweden, where you can express your creativity with Diesel jeans. I think the interface to customize your piece of art, is really interesting. You directly get how to make what you want. But it's a little bit buggy and you have the feeling that's not totally achieved.

>> http://dieselgenes.se/

Inspirative typo blog :
>> http://www.typeneu.com/

Labels: blog, typo

that's their baseline, and indeed they have a really good compilation.
I'm waiting for the best photoshop tutorials around the universe !
http://www.photoshoplady.com

This is a new website for Renault Laguna Coupé made with (love i'm sure) and Silverglight.
http://www.laguna-coupe.com/

So I was curious and ready to be amazed by the power of the new rich media software from Microsoft...and finally I was quite disapointed.

Ok there are good videos...but what about interactivity ? A big mosaic which is supposed to give you an immersion feeling... but all you feel is a lot of work spent on learning the technology and not on a real immersive world.
For me this website designed as a common sad grid won't shake the web.

I never found the time to talk about the famous awards of D&AD. Awards not for profit as they said. I think it's the only award that is really significant.

So let's talk a little about the awards of 2008:

UNIQLOCK.
You all remember this campaign with girls dancing for the clothing brand Uniqlo. It was a widget for blogs, with a video permanently different. Depending the time and even the seasons (at midnight they go sleep, in summer they wear Unliqlo t-shirts, etc). Every hours there was special video sequence. It can even be used as alarm, screen savers etc.
The result 27 000 widgets from 76 countries, 68 million views, parodies on youtube,... Great job guys. you deserve your black pencil. They have make an original and creative concept buzzing around the world.
>> Video of the project on D&DA

Ebay France
A smart advertising with incredible results. It can be resumed as this "For the 1st time in the world a brand puts its adverstising space up for auction". People bought the ad space to ebay and ebay helped these people to sell their own items. The result was phenomenal, a lot of buzz on french tv channels. Everyone talked about that... And the result for the brand? 38% specific recognition, 55% promptd recognition, 8 times the tv norm. And a yellow pencil!
>> Video of the project on D&DA

Get the glass?
It's really rare a website receive a black pencil. But it deserve it. This incredible online game with impressive graphics, funny mini-games, beautiful animations, ... A piece of art!
>> website


Gorilla
I think it was the most famous AD the last year. Everyone heard about it. And the impact for the brand was more than significant, I saw a presentation from Fallon (the agency behind this AD), and I think the brand awareness has grow up of 33% after the release of this AD. There were a lot of parodies on the web, 2 500 000 views on youtube... Impressive, creative and efficient. Black pencil for them of course!
>>Video of the project on D&DA

Take the time to look at the presentation of all nominations. You can find great inspiration, motivation and can raise up faith in your work ;-)

Labels: ads, awards, video

Today, I've watched the video of Adobe Financial meeting, seems ultra-boring, but they make a sneak preview (at 0:18 of the video) of their next major update: Adobe creative suite 4.

In general: interface reworked. Now even on mac you have unified panels and a grey background instead of viewing your desktop. You also get "tabs" to browse between opened documents. After testing Fireworks beta CS4, I don't feel lost with the new kind of interface. That seems really good improvements to me.



Photoshop CS4
John Nack says it, the major feature is performances. That promises a lot! In the video, he plays with an enormous picture as it was a jpg of 100Kb.

Thermo.

A new software in the suite. Its goal is to fill the gap between designer and developers. To resume it's like add interactivity in your psd files. I'm not really sure of the utility of this tool. Seems too basic for me, it only integrate standard interactivities, like srollbar, basics rollover, etc... But designers don't want to use BASIC stuff. They always want impossible stuff, they can't do alone. In fact Thermo is like flash for designers only. But wait and see...

After effects CS4.

They don't show lot of new stuff, but I can already see they added a search field in the timeline panel. Great! They integrated tools to preview your video on mobile phones. They also showed a new cartoon effect... I don't know why because it totally useless... Who cares of this kind of filters? The good point is they make the demo on macos X. So we can hope they worked on performances on our macs.

Flash CS4.
Ok you all already know a lot about flash CS4, thanks to the release in beta of Astro (flash player 10). So ok now we have Z axis, pixel bending capabilities, bones, etc.

In the demo, we can see how easy it is to play with rotation Z. To create tween, and to modify tween. Every tween is like a vector line you can transform, rotate etc. I love that! They showed how easy it is to integrate a video into a text rotation in 3D.

There is also an incredible new tool to extract moving stuff from video. You just draw some guides and the filter do the rest. The quality of course is not like a real blue key but it can really help sometimes.
Flash and after effects tends to share a lot of their functions. It remembers me when photoshop started to integrate illustrator functions and vice versa. I dream of the day we could copy paste elements between flash and AE like smart object with PS and illustrator.

Adobe media player.
I think they hope a lot about this AIR application. But personally I don't see why and how. It's juste like thousand of media view applications but running painfully slow and memory consumptive thanks to the flash technology behind (comparing to native mac or windows applications I mean). But I'm not a big fan of AIR right now. I just need to be convinced with good examples...


It's not in the video but you can try Fireworks CS4 and Dreamweaver CS4 from adobe labs. I just give a shot at fireworks. Seems good and more reactive. Clean interface. But as I'm not a regular user of this software, I'm not the best beta-tester.
Soundbooth CS4 is also available to download and test. This is a sound editor application made for video editors and designers. For now I prefer to stick with Apple Soundtrack, it's already full of functions I don't know how to use so I don't want to spare time in learning another sound software

Labels: adobe, after effects, beta, CS4, dreamweaver, fireworks, photoshop

Win 100 000$ by participating to the Doritos Quest.
The concept is not new (it remember me Volvo The Hunt a few years ago. Actually I think it was just one year ago.

This new one is quiet entertaining but not as impressive as the volvo. But I like these kind of ad because it's not just passive ads. So if you want to take your chance :
>> Doritos Quest

Labels: 3D, flash, games, quest

A start of an answser here

I think this can be more interactive. I think there is a good potential behind this idea.

>> http://www.seymourpowell.com/

Watch this.. That roxx.

Iron Man's end titles sequence goes retro wireframe.
http://creativity-online.com/work/view?seed=d4d7c058