The Start Of Something…
I just felt the spark of inspiration.
I have been toiling away on a as3 generative art project that combines augmented reality, wiiflash control, papervision3d and beautiful organic tree structures for the last two weeks. It has consumed much of my attention, causing me to skip class and almost miss deadlines. It is the kind of project that is ripe with discovery and wonder. Since I appreciate math, but ended my studies with Math G: Math for Liberal Arts Students, I have no advanced knowledge of the trigonometry that was required to make this work. Yet, I continued to pursue a solution; pouring over math books and google searches, trying numerous formula’s until one seemed to fit and then refining that loose fit into a properly functioning algorithm. This would have been short work for a Trig student but it would have come with only a fraction of the satisfaction.
Through visual programming I see a way to learn about the world around me. I have never been able to truly learn by just listening, I have to go hands-on if I ever really want to get something. Although I have always enjoyed math class, I became bored around the grade where people started questioning “Are we really going to use this in REAL LIFE?”. The formulas and theory that must be memorized was a huge turn-off for me. With visual programming, and generative art in particular, I can explore the effect of any number of mathematical theories.
This is a very simple test of the CubeTree program.
Skittles.com Social Media Widget
The Skittles.com webpage is not so much a site, but a gateway widget that leads the visitor to many different third party sites. This is an interesting technique that is reminiscent of the dreaded frame era but without the ugly frames. The team behind Skittles.com utilized modern browser technology to create a persistent widget that hovers around the browser handing out extra information. It is in no way intrusive like frames once were. In fact, due to most viewers having a reasonable monitor resolution the widget almost never obscures content. To further help hide the widget, a minimization option is present.
The idea behind the widget is a novel one that goes against the grain of what most sites aim for. For a business, one would think that the most impact would be made with the visitor spending time exclusively on the site. While this may be true in most cases, the Skittles.com team opted to walk their visitors through a course of user generated content to show how much people love their product. Not only does the widget ensure a constant marketing presence, the wiki pages and social media pages provide a wealth of user generated content and opinions that further reinforce the brand.
Way to go Skittles.com, you have developed an innovative way to tap into user generated content from all platforms.
Cube Tree – Form And Space
On Thursday I returned from a three day business trip and had to bang out a project for my Friday morning form and space class. I wasn’t feeling especially creative yesterday night and I was beginning to become worried that inspiration would not strike in time. With the impending deadline echoing through my head I suddenly remembered what Dave says about having to photograph a project with no inspiration in sight. When Dave is presented with this situation, he starts with the basic principles of capturing an image. Sometimes during this process inspiration will strike and the remainder of the job will be a breeze. If inspiration does not strike, at least you will walk away with enough material to satisfy your client.
The Cube Tree evolved from my lack of inspiration. As I sat in front of my mountain of building materials and attempted to determine the best approach I realized that I had no idea what I wanted to build. I desperately needed inspiration but I know that is not how it works. Suddenly, visions of my childhood Lego’s flashed in my mind and I knew what I needed to do.
I decided to begin my project with building blocks. I knew that I wanted to build an organic looking structure and I figured that if I had enough building blocks then something would happen. I cut up the dozens of large scrap board into small equal sized pieces.
After gluing the pieces into cube’s I was left with my building blocks. I started with the “trunk” blocks that were two inch by two inch cubes. Each new segment had to have a joint that angled the new piece of the segment in a different direction than the segment under it. By only using a joint on one side and never placing the next joint on the same side, I was able to create a semi-organic shape that is composed out of non-organic shaped segments.
With the “trunk” of my tree in place, I was ready to build the branches. At this point of the project, I had the understanding that I was working towards building a tree like structure. I believe that this is the moment that inspiration took over and allowed me to create a project that I am truly proud of. The “branches” evolved quite easily and the “tree top” became the natural choice for an anchor element.
When the skeleton of the structure was assembled I decided to wrap it in handmade colored paper to give it a unique, finished look. I am pleased with myself that I was able to begin the project without inspiration and still accomplish something that I can be proud of.
Forget You Mr. Clear
I am always in awe of the talented and clever individuals who drive the web design/development movement. In 2006 I read an article about the coming web 3.0 and all of the greatness that it entails. Web 3.0 will not represent the dramatic change from the static pages of the webs origins to the database driven, dynamic monster sites that we frequent today but it will represent a fundamental change in the way we search. Web 3.0 is the semantic web. It is a network that understands the nuances of human language and enables us to search and identify valid, useful information in a sea of search results. Microsoft has an ad campaign for their Bing search engine that illustrates the frustration many people experience while attempting to search. Search engines now deliver “cloudy” results that are peppered with useless information, obscuring the valid results. It can be theorized that part of this problem is the idea that search engines index information, but really have no deep understanding of the content that is being indexed.
It was not long ago that HTML pages were a thick soup of content and presentation. In today’s modern times they are getting much more organized, but there are still unnecessary tags that must be used to “hack” the site into behaving or to properly accomplish a certain visual. Floats are one of the problems that introduce extra markup into the page, muddying up the beautiful content. Since the beginning of my web design days, I have been using an extra div to clear my floats. Just this morning I learned that a break (br) tag is an acceptable way to clear a float. This made me smile a little bit as the break tag would never contain content so it is an appropriate alternative to the div for this situation. Moments later my mind was blown when I was taught that we can skip the extra markup if we add a simple “overflow: auto” to the parent container of our floating elements.
Beautiful. Style where it belongs, in the style sheet.
Read more about this wonderful technique at http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2005/02/26/simple-clearing-of-floats/
My only regret is that this technique has been understood for over a year and I am only just now getting on board.