As some of you may have noticed, things have been pretty quiet on this blog lately. Well, they’re about to get even quieter, but for a good reason.
I recently started a new blog called School of Flash, and I intend to put a lot of effort into making this new blog into a valuable resource for anyone interested in Flash. So head on over and let me know what you think.
Also, let me know if there are any questions you have or any tutorials you would like to see.
While watching the Red River Shootout this weekend, I decided to exercise my creative muscles a little bit and play around with Photoshop. This is what I came up with:
The design is just a compilation of images I downloaded, sliced apart, threw together, and added some color changes to. It was actually inspired by a similar piece that I had seen on the internet, but for the life of me, I can’t seem to find the image again.
Anyways, the moral of the story here is that it’s good for the creative mind to take a break from “work” every now and then in order to create something just for the sake of creating something! It reminds us that we love our jobs, that even though we may get bogged down in the business side of things every now and then, we’re still designers, and we love what we do!!
Well, the Flash Forward conference is in full force, and Boston is beautiful! The weather here is absolutely perfect right now! The sun is out in full force but without the oppressive heat of late-summer Texas. In this weather, I’d be just as comfortable in a light sweater as in a short sleeve polo . . . which is fortuitous, because all I brought was short sleeve polos and t-shirts!
The sessions so far have been great! Thus far I’ve been to sessions on Flash games, the SWX data format for Flash, and website branding on social media sites (digg, twitter, MySpace, etc.)
One quick note on MySpace . . . Even though it’s ugly, bulky, and downright icky, MySpace can still be a very powerful tool for driving traffic to your website. There, I said it. Enough about MySpace!
I’m really excited about the next session I’ll be going to. It’s called “One Man Bands - Flash Animators Going it Alone.” Aaron Simpson will be the speaker, and I can’t wait to hear what he has to say.
More later!
I’m catching a plane to Boston this afternoon for the Flashforward Conference, which starts tomorrow. Telling my wife goodbye this morning was harder than I thought it would be, but it’s only for a couple of days, and I’m sure it will go by in a flash (pun intended)!
The speakers at this week’s conference include Aral Balkan, founder of OSFlash; Chris Georgenes, an amazing Flash animator and the owner of Mudbubble design and animation studio (can’t wait for this one); Seb Lee-Delisle, a well known Flash game programmer and animator; Erik Natzke, an amazing designer; and many more!
With such a great lineup, I can’t help but get excited about this! Plus, it’ll be a lot of fun meeting up with other Flashers out there and finding out what other people are doing with Flash and other Adobe products.
I’ll keep you updated!
CraigSoup.com has undergone another mild redesign. I’ve brought it together to make it a little more visually cohesive, and I really like the results. As you can see, I haven’t redesigned the blog just yet, but that shouldn’t be long in coming.
I got the fancy, dark blue background above the header from the ‘Patterns’ section of Brusheezy.com. Thanks to Shawn Rubel for the awesome design!
The new design was created with XHTML and CSS, and the graphics were created in Photoshop.
Anyways, please leave a comment, and let me know what you think of the new web design.
Update: The design, as you can clearly see, has now been applied to the blog. Ah, the beauty of uniformity!
As you can tell from my portfolio, WriterInside.com has undergone several face lifts over the past couple of years. But I think I’ve finally hit the jackpot with the current header design.
The previous design, although it was vibrant and had a little of that Web 2.0 flare to it, didn’t exactly fit the mood of what I was trying to go for with the site. So I decided to do an overhaul, something that would ring true to the intended audience of the website, and I feel like I captured that with this header.
I created the paper background of the header by scanning a sheet of paper that I tore out of a very organic-looking journal that I had. The paper’s practically impossible to write on with a pen, but the texture is really cool. Anyways, once I scanned the paper in, I touched it up using Photoshop’s Burn tool. This gave the edges of the paper background the darkened, almost scorched look to it.
The rest was pretty easy. I just pulled in a couple of images that fit the mood I was going for, overlaid some spiral shapes to give the header a sense of depth and then masked out a partial sun shape from the upper-left corner.
All in all, I really think this new header was a success! What do you think?
From time to time, I thought it would be cool to show off a particular piece of work from my portfolio and talk about how it was done.
My first show-off piece was actually just an experiment — a little bit of tomfoolery, if you will. A few years ago, I decided, against my better judgment, to see if I could create a photorealistic graphic of a guitar in Photoshop. I say “against my better judgment” because I knew that it wouldn’t be a quick project that I could just throw together.
Sure enough, after many hours of hardcore Photoshopping, I created the image to the right.
Once I finished, I showed it off to several of my friends, and I knew it was a success when they just shrugged it off with a half-hearted “that’s nice.” This meant that they thought it was just an unimpressive photograph of a guitar. Once I explained to them that it wasn’t a photograph, but rather a work of sheer genius and unadulterated talent, they were genuinely impressed . . . as well they should have been.
And now, here it is for your viewing pleasure. Let me know what you think.
Yesterday, I finally downloaded and installed Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium onto my computer. This includes new versions of Flash, Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, and more! And so far, I’m thrilled with the products.
The integration between products is now flawless. It’s remarkably simple now to import Photoshop and Illustrator files into Flash, which is going to save me tons of time in the long run.
Like many others, I was a little nervous when I heard that Adobe was going to acquire Macromedia. All kinds of nasty, unsubstantiated rumors were whirling about: Adobe was going to drop Flash, kill Dreamweaver, and set up their own colony on the moon. Naturally, none of these rumors were true. In fact, at the Flash Forward convention last year, we were told that the main reason Adobe wanted to acquire Macromedia was because of Flash. We also discovered that they were keeping the team that developed Flash in the first place.
No need to mess with a good thing, right?
Anyways, I just wanted to give a big shout out to Adobe and all the hard work they’ve done in the release of Creative Suite 3. The result is a masterpiece. Keep it up, guys!