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Daily Dish of Dominey Design
{  Thursday, May 27  }

PGA Pin Placement

I promised to stop pimping my work around here, but before I do, here’s a little ditty I made in a mad rush to this morning’s opening round of the Senior PGA Championship — course pin placements rendered in Flash.

To preface this, pins are moved every morning before a tournament round begins. Since every round is played on the same course, changing the pin placement helps mix things up a bit.

From a development perspective, you’d hope to get each round’s pin placements in advance, but that’s not how it works — the cups’ coordinates aren’t determined until the night before — so by the time you receive a fax detailing where the pins are, you don’t have a lot of time to get them out on the website.

So the data for each hole and round are stored in multidimensional arrays, which are edited in an external text file. Taking the flat 2D illustration of the hole received from the course, the pins’ coordinates are (visually) translated to the illustration, but as an isometric coordinate. The pin is then placed to that spot, and the other elements draw out from the cup.

Design wise, everything but the tournament logo are vectors, with the hole art traced from the Senior PGA tour book in Illustrator. The flat art was converted to isometric angles, and exported to Flash as a series of swfs. Each hole’s ‘slice’ was loaded into Flash, tweened with ActionScript, and voila — each hole builds itself like a big old sandwich.

This was built very quickly over the past couple of days, so it’ll see a number of improvements and enhancements in future PGA events.

Link to this entry | Comments (off) | Posted in Site News
{  Wednesday, May 26  }

The Anti-Bush Game

You’ve never seen a Flash game quite like this. Check out the anti-Bush online adventure, which can only be experienced and not described. Click “Play”, then click through a bunch of intro screens to get to the actual game. You can alternately choose “Screenshots” to see the goods, or “Download” to play it offline.

Note: Parts of this are definitely not workplace safe, so be warned.

{  Friday, May 21  }

Extra ‘Scribe’ Images

This weekend I’ll be creating some extra side-bar header images for the ‘Scribe’ Blogger template. These images will be uploaded to Blogger, where users of the template can link to them for their blogs. If anyone using Scribe has a title they’d like typeset in the graphical script face, drop me a line (mail at whatdoiknow.org).

(And yes, I do plan on actually posting something of merit besides all this Bloggerness soon. Not a lot of free time these days).

Link to this entry | Comments (off) | Posted in Site News
{  Monday, May 10  }

Introducing “Scribe” from Blogger

After numerous weeks of sitting, waiting, and wondering if this would ever see the light of day, Google has relaunched Blogger.

The news is a big deal on numerous fronts — one, for anyone who currently uses Blogger to publish their web site; two, for anyone who’s considered starting a web site but didn’t where to look; and three, for the “blog” community as a whole, for with the marketing, technological, and financial muscle of Google pulling the strings, Blogger (and blogging in general) is about to go to a whole new level.

Now, that’s all fine and good, but for me the best part is purely personal for I was involved (albeit in a small, gazing from the hillside kind of way) in the relaunch by creating one of the new default templates Blogger users can choose from. I call it Scribe.

My involvement in the project came through Douglas Bowman of Stop Design, who was contracted by Google to work on various parts of the relaunch (which he talks more about here). Myself, along with Jeffrey Zeldman, Dave Shea, Dan Cederholm, and Dan Rubin, were each asked to design and code one CSS / XHTML template, including a home page and a story page, using Blogger’s API as our skeleton to skin.

For me the most exciting part wasn’t just the aforementioned company I would be working with, but the opportunity to create a template design thousands of people would potentially use. After all, the old Blogger templates were a very successful foundation for untold numbers of web sites; and while they may not have been the most visually arresting, or contain the most streamlined code, they succeeded at one important goal — they visually got out of the way and allowed users’ content to drive the personality of their site.

So the creative challenge, for me anyhow, was to develop a template design that had personality and a general creative concept, but (like the old Blogger templates) wasn’t so visually overbearing that it distracted readers from the real content of the page.

The design had to be interesting, yet restrained. Have style, yet be appreciable by varying users’ tastes. Be functional, but not boring. And…oh yeah, the template had to styled almost entirely with CSS, with graphics used only when absolutely necessary.

So I tried to think of objects or products with near universal appeal, since the design would be used by people with wildly varying taste. Books and journals came to mind (everybody reads, right?), so I aimed for a color palette, layout, and typography that had the tactile feel of a printed work, hoping to create a space that felt warm and slightly nostalgic. After a number of iterations, the end result was Scribe.

The concept could have been pushed much farther, with more book-ish graphical effects like page corner curls, frayed edges, and other applicable stuff (and chances are, if I was creating this template for my own site, or for a client, I would have done just that), but it would have drawn greater attention to the visual design, and the author would have been in competition with the template for users’ attention.

So I went with the basics — a light parchment paper texture (aged edges and all), a deep brown border to give the page “lift” (like a book’s hardcover as seen from inside the book), and warm brown / black tones in the typography. I also created an ever-popular bitmap tiled wallpaper, to emulate the patterns often seen on the inside of old hardcover books.

In the end, I’m pretty pleased with the result. But to critique myself, I believe Scribe’s appeal can change depending on monitor gamma and color correctness. On most screens it looks balanced with a pleasant level of contrast, while on others it can appear a little muddy. But that’s the nature of using a non web-safe, limited color palette with a delicate visual balance. I don’t expect the template to be the most popular (most users will likely choose one of the more neutral options), but for those who appreciate this style, I hope Scribe fits the bill.

Link to this entry | Comments (off) | Posted in Site News

To the old stuff →

and you are

Todd Dominey, new media designer & writer waking up each day in Atlanta, GA. To make contact: direct email / web form

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currently enjoying

The oh so luscious Komeda is back with a new video (via Coudal)

Archinect has redesigned with plenty of porn.

Ninjatune Desktop Competition

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Lord of the Rings Icons (from Iconfactory)

Screen on the Green 2004 (Cloris Leachman, Robert Redford & Jane Fonda to introduce respective films in this year's Piedmont Park movie festival)

Headless Hollow (great mod of my Blogger 'Scribe' template)

Jon Stewart's Commencement Address [1]

HyperEdit (fantastic HTML / CSS / Javascript / PHP editor that renders live previews as you type) [3]

Connect Flash MX 2004 to MySQL with PHP (handy new tutorial)

Adtunes (nice resource for TV commercial ad music)

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currently listening

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind by Various Artists

3 + 3 by The Isley Brothers

When It Falls by Zero 7

Parts in the Post by Plaid

DJ-Kicks by Erlend Oye

Get Away From Me by Nellie McKay

Ghosts of the Great Highway by Sun Kil Moon

1992-2002 by Underworld

Apropa't by Savath & Savalas

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miscellaneous

Zeldman - Designing with Standards

When I win the lottery, I'm buying everything on my Amazon wish list.

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