The Power of Color, Sound, Peers and Light

 

Hey guys, time of my class blog. I wanted to show off a site I use a lot when it comes to designing the look of a project. That tool is kuler.adobe.com from Adobe.

Often time when we do work in class we focus more on the technical aspects, especially in this flash class where so much if the technical coding side of design. So to move away from that I decided to provide a tool for creating, sharing, and reviewing color pallets. The color scape of any project can greatly enhance or damage the experience of that project. Often time when I am stuck looking at colors and trying to come up with my own pallets, I turn to kuler to give me inspiration and to provide the tools for quick alteration of an already existing pallet. Sometimes I also use it to quickly sketch up a pallet that just hits me when I am out and about and don;t necessarily have access to Photoshop or other adobe products.

 I know a lot of people might already know this tool but I hope I was able to show some of you a new and useful website to help you in your designs.

The second tool I want to show off is Audacity. We don't often work with sound but Audacity is a great free program for sound editing. Here on campus we have the entire CS Suite to use but at home we might only have the web design suite and one of the things it lacks is Audition. Audacity can take the place of Audition or other programs like Sony Sound Forge form simple editing to even more in-depth audio production work. Personally I don't have too much experience with working with audio for Flash but I did use Audacity in conjunction with other programs extensively when going my BA in Linguistics to record and analyze speech. In that realm it does the job very well and from all that I have read about it, it can handle other audio tasks with equal quality.

The third site I want to highlight is stackoverflow.com. stackoverflow is a site where you can post questions about programing, from everything from C++ to Ruby to PHP to Actionscript, and have those questions be answered by other people. I do have to mention that sometimes the answers become very complicated and the questions people ask range from the very simple beginner questions to very complex ones. There are a few rules to follow as well. One, always search to see if someone else has asked the same question before. Two, always try and figure the problem out before asking a question. There is no use in asking "How do I do x?" unless you have first tried to do it and were not able to and have also first searched for an answer.

The last site I want to show off is flashlearner.com. This is a great site for video flash tutorials. If you are like me and find it easiest to learn by seeing instead of by being told how to do something without any visual aid, this is the site for you. Not only are the tutorials videos but they are also in full 1080p HD. So no more looking at poorly shot youtube videos that are blurry and where you can not even tell what is going on. Also, they explain things in great detail, especially the actionscript parts.

I hope that my blog post will show everybody in class something new. You might have seen one or two of these sites but hopefully not all.