Artist Exploration

This exploration is about Chris Georgenes. He is a Flash animator, teacher, and author. He has worked for several different companies including Acclaim Games, Fablevision, and currently at Game Show Network. He has written three books-How to cheat in Flash cs3, cs4, and cs5. He teaches Flash animation for sessions.edu. He has written articles for the Adobe Developer Connection and appeared as a speaker for Flash conferences. Chris currently runs two websites,mudbubble.com, which is his online portfolio. And keyframer.com, which has his personal blogs, and tutorials covering Flash. Chris primarily designs animation in Flash, especially character animation. Something he does well in his work, and what i noticed in his books, he presents techniques that may seem hard or impossible to do and he makes them possible. I like the connection between his portfolio site and his tutorial site. You find work that he has done on one site, then you can go to the other to see how he created it. Here a few sites/projects he has done, The Schmancy scmashup Game, it is a interactive video where you choose a theme, make a drawing, choose a sound, and real actors appear in a scene incorporating your drawing and sound. A more adult work is samuraikittens.com, animated kittens fighting to the death. All of his work can found on the website listed above.

New School Mr. Potato Head and more

First off I found a site that is called monface (http://www.mono-1.com/monoface/main.html) and pretty much it is like a mister potato head site. There is a picture of a face but you can change the eyes, nose, mouth, and hair by clicking on them or you can hit randomize and make a new face at random. You can also save the face you make if you want. A very simple and seemingly useless site but it is fun to mess around with and make some corny and silly faces.
Another site I found was 2Advance Studios. This is a design company that has a really nice website. The backgrounds and overall feel is very futuristic and pretty. It has very smooth animated transmissions between pages and great site architecture. I'm not a very descriptive person so I would suggest you just check it out.

Your Majesty

Your Majesty  is a creative agency is based out of New York with offices in Stockholm and soon, in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Their goal is to work with forward thinking advertisement agencies and clients who want to engage their audience, strengthen their brand name and create great relationships. According to their web site, they are "Driven to inspire by design, technology, style, music and immersion - our aim is to form a constellation of creative components that infuse each other and ultimately serve our customers and our lives."  Their studio offers Creative Services, Branding and Identity, Technology and Video Production/Shoots.

They compare each individual working for the agency to a knight. It suggests they all started as sons or daughters of vassals, started training at a young age to soon become a page who in turn became a squire (the assistant to a knight). Eventually, that squire, with all of his/her knowledge in which the knight taught,would be knighted themselves and free to take part in lobster feasts, champagne baths, and to pray to interactive advertising all night in the office.

Your Majesty has a fair amount of clients. A few campaigns/sites stood out to me a little more than the others.

The first site I enjoyed was for Level Vodka, "a vodka for adventurous tongues and minds". This site is an interactive wonderland to more than 50 cocktail recipes using their liquor. What stood out to me was the 'Delicious Pairings' section of the site. Here you are able to view ten cocktail recipes and it suggests a delicious pairing like it's Yellow Spice Cocktail with a Yellow Tail Ceviche. You have the opportunity to either download or email the recipes, and it has a link to Absolut Vodka.

The Holiday Inn site was the first thing I was able to launch and I thought it was really interesting how they used the interactive approach to actually SHOW you the rooms and amenities rather than just letting you read about it with a tiny thumbnail image to decipher. You are able to view multiple rooms including the bathrooms and within each room lies a plus symbol that gives you little blurbs about Holiday Inn - what the stand for, what they have to offer, what's new and much more.

The Nikon site was fairly plain, but I really enjoyed the 3-D image of the camera that enabled you to really get a glimpse of it as if you were holding it in your hands. Someone would scope out that camera and maneuver it in their hands the same way it is done on the site. It also offers a wide variety of imagery to show off it's quality functions. You can view the aperture, ISO, lens, shutter speed and the color temp in which each image was taken for inspiration.

Your Majesty seems to be a really talented agency that is willing to push the limits for their clients in an energetic, appealing and effective way.

Design Exploration

www.silenzio.fr
I like the idea for design of this website. Choosing black background for this design makes it more attractive and more effective for viewers. So I like all the design and navigation . I was looking into flash animation best websites on the web and I found several interesting sites. One of them was www.silenzio.fr which is actually a designer’s website. This site provides reference of flash to many useful ways and websites. It is an interesting resource for a lot of things to do with flash and web design and I noticed its button menu which was interesting.
This website does a good job of combining typical Flash elements, such as animation and details graphics, with the development portion of the website. One of my favorites is under Flash Animation and set element of graphic in each page. Color combination and use of alphabet buttons have been designed very nicely and professionally. I like organization of list of the movies with good information of each movie.

When I started my exploration of a studio design that creates web designs or other types of designs that are created by flash, it was difficult for me to figure out which one to choose. There was many companies and studio artist that showed their work which was pretty amazing for me to see and relate to some of their work. Most of the web sites that I research where pretty detail to show off what they can do however they didn’t show many designs only a few. One of the studios that I really like is Essasson Studios not because they had an amazing web site but because the type of work they do. It looks like they are an amazing Studio designers; they deal with different variety of customers that are looking for a certain logo or designs that can be achieved by using flash.

These are some of the people that they have help to achieve their designs by using flash. Some of the clients are CSSB Corporation, Express Auto lease, E motoring, Britney Spears, Ricky William and many other high profile company’s. They are using cutting edge designs and techniques to achieve their goals of their clients. There is many things that set this Studio designers apart from other ones because they deal with all types of clients, they give their clients a choice to select their specific design and they create it by using the latest software. They are from Hollywood California so they deal with a lot of people in the movie industry as well as regular people that they want to advertise something they also deal with people that want to create multimedia and internet designs as well.

They work is very well design I looked at some different designs they made and their work is pretty good, I saw many designs they made and they all have a little something different. Their work is very effective because they try to use very organize themes for the clients which that’s a good thing when creating flash in my opinion. I think if you are organize when creating flash it won’t look so messy and that way you can enjoy the creation of the design. Here is a link to their web site, I hope you will enjoy it.

http://esasson.com/flash.html

Studio Exploration - Devin Cox

ICREON STUDIOS

I have decided to explore through the website belonging to a design studio called ICREON. I found them a few pages deep from a Google search. I enjoyed the first reaction to the website. It mixes HTML elements with Flash Elements. The main text navigation is in HTML while there is more fun/playful elements to navigate with in Flash. The impression I first receive is that the design studio is more graphic design first, usability second. The reason I feel that way is because you see flash elements that serve as links, but from a usability view, they are pointless links or unnecessary. For instance their is a paint tube that says portfolio on it by you cant tell it is a link at first.

Another nice feature of the website is the footer. They have all of their Services offered in a very space effective manner. Another great feature I realized as I browsed through the website more was that each time you reload the page the background color changes. That's a really neat feature that I don't know requires Flash or HTML, but is something I definitely want to learn. There is also a Flash version of the website by flipping the light switch.

The idea of a flash version is neat but the flash site is completely irritating. I can't find a sound option anywhere and the sound effects are so loud and annoying. The navigation is controlled by clicking leaves. Again there is no real usability but very nice graphical features. The animations that roll in and roll out in between buttons are very nice and it has a clean look. The theme of the flash version doesn't really fit. They have cartoon drawn images but then there are incorporated photographs, which don't really flow well.

There are some really nice things about the website but then butting up against it are some unfitting elements. They do have nice graphical work, but the functionality of their site could use some assistance.