LycetteBros: revisting Not My Type
"The Not My Type animation series was primarily produced for distribution on the internet. Set in an office, the Not My Type series explores the various relationships within. While avoiding the use of language and dialogue, Not My Type, takes various typographic faces, symbols and characters and then duplicates, distorts and moves them to create a simple, stylistic production.
The initial version was created using Macromedia Director in 1995 (while John was at University) and was then recreated in 2000 for internet distribution using Flash - which was a perfect fit for a font based, primarily black & white animation. Not My Type I was so well received that another episode soon followed, culminating in four episodes by the end of 2002."
(John and Mark Lycette)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Idle Together: rich internet applications blog
"IdleTogether is a technology blog oriented towards good design and impressive web applications. We explore Flash and Flex as well as Web2.0 Ajax based application. We promote the useful, the usable and the pretty rich internet applications."
(Nicolas Noben)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Video for Wikipedia: Guide to Best Practices
"This new effort takes advantage of a movement toward open video - a movement that has its roots in the free software movement that is largely powering the web today and which, through companies such as Apache, IBM, Mozilla, Oracle and Red Hat, has resulted in trillions of dollars of value creation for the stakeholders involved. The open or open-source video movement recognizes the contributions from, but also the limitations inherent in, the video work of industry leaders such as Adobe, Apple, and Microsoft. Flash, Quicktime, Windows Media and Silverlight are handsome technologies. But they have been developed and controlled by commercial companies that often protect themselves against innovations by outside coders, designers, developers, programmers - technologists, lawyers, producers, and educators keen to move away from proprietary solutions that are delivered for the benefit of shareholders first and the billions of everyday people who connect via the web a pale second.
The open video movement recognizes the importance of rights and licensing strategies designed to create profit or serve national interests, but it is critical of systems that prohibit access to film and sound assets becoming part of our collective audiovisual canon. Many film and sound resources digitized for preservation, for example, do not appear online because of dated copyright rules; and some of the great investments (millions of dollars in fact) by, for example, the U.K. government in film and sound resource digitization result in materials being put online only behind educational and national paywalls that keep students in Nairobi and Nashville from using London-based resources in their work.
Enabling video to catch up to the open-source movement on the web goes to the heart of our efforts to improve our understanding of the world. The central technologies of the web - HTML, HTTP, and TCP/IP - are open for all to build upon and improve, and video’s future should be similarly unobstructed."
(Peter B. Kaufman, 2010)
Fig.1 Kid Kameleon, CC BY SA NC
2). Video for Wikipedia and the Open Web October 2010 An Intelligent Television White Paper PETER B. KAUFMAN INTELLIGENT TELEVISION WWW.INTELLIGENTTELEVISION.COM THE OPEN VIDEO ALLIANCE Version 1.0
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Monkey Magazine: a new publishing vernacular?
"In the future, as depicted in the 2002 film Minority Report, our periodicals will create interactive, hybrid reading/viewing experiences-with built-in sound and motion-based commercials rather than static advertisements, incorporating news footage with pages that dissolve and re-form to reflect breaking stories. Despite minute gestures in that direction, such as the Amazon Kindle and G24, The Guardian’s PDF newspaper that’s updated throughout the day, that vision of media-if there’s really a market for it-is a long way off. ...
Nevertheless, something ... is now available weekly from Dennis Publishing, the company that gave the world The Week, Maxim and several other British 'lad magazines' as well as launched their American spin-offs. Monkey is proportioned like a glossy, has an interface that mimics the turning of pages and even has a magazine-like layout: margins, a basic two-column grid, images combined with text and print-like pacing. The difference is that Monkey’s text sparkles (literally, if not figuratively), dances and slides onto the page. Many of the photos will turn into movies or slideshows (some rather naughty) when clicked, and on some spreads users can shuffle page elements, substituting one image for another. The format also changes to serve its content. A small mini-magazine with short reviews is digitally 'stitched' into the 'middle' of each issue. Additionally, most advertisements come alive, thanks either to Flash, streaming video or some combination, showing previews of movies or commercials for products framed by the equivalent of a full-page ad.
To be sure, Monkey does nothing that isn’t done on other websites, and it has formal predecessors for its page interface-the arty This Is a Magazine, for one, and the webified versions of print glossies from Zinio for another. But unlike the wider web-which has evolved its own vocabulary and conventions for storytelling-and other web magazine predecessors-for which the turn-the-page interface seems a formal conceit-Monkey truly blends old and new media design conventions in a way that is both appalling and appealing."
(Jandos Rothstein, 29 January 2008)
Fig.1 Monkey Magazine, 2011. Dennis Publishing, Issue 183, pp.8,9.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Flash web application prototypes
I created a series of Flash web application prototypes between 2002 and 2003. I did so as part of my design experimentation and growing interest in software design. As a result the prototypes were very limited in their scope as they tended to focus on particular concepts or techniques. For example I created my Kiwifruit prototype to explore an approach to updating database records which removed the need for users to make explicit update/submit decisions; I created my Rhizome prototype to explore approaches to contextual grouping and association; and I created my in-flight meal booking prototype to test some ideas I had about interactive information design. I developed the applications using a combination of Macromedia (Adobe) Flash, PHP, XML and MySQL. The prototypes now stand as a useful reminder of the promise that Flash offered in the early part of this century - before HTML5, the iPad and responsive layout etc.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
