New Identity for GreetingCall

I just got this design approved for GreetingCall. This is a new company that allows you to purchase a gift then attach a phone recording to the gift.

Rembrandt Exhibit Launched

The Museum of Church History and Art has posted a new online version of its Rembrandt Biblical Etchings exhibit. This is a rare collection of more than 60 of Rembrandt's original etchings. The exhibit is designed in such a way that you can zoom in on each piece.

This uses our new dynamic exhibitor engine. This Flash engine is a skinnable, completely dynamic system that runs on a CSS and XML file. All of the elements and colors are interchangable.

New Joseph Smith Site Launched

This is the first web site out the chute that uses the new lds.org interface. The new site has a lot of media and information about the founder of the Mormon church. It can be found at www.josephsmith.net.

Flash Platformer Game Engine Underway

Here is the latest version of my new Flash game. I don't have a story for it yet, but the physics are getting worked out and they are getting pretty believable. NOTE: this is not a game yet-just a physics engine. Don't try to make sense of it.

Check out some of my other games here and here.

AIGA Portfolio Site

I have belonged to the American Institute of Graphic Arts since 1996 and I just posted my portfolio on the portfolio area of their web site. I also discovered that their trade journal VOICE is now an online journal. It has great articles on graphic design.

New Church History Library Building Announced

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The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has just announced a new church history library building.

LDS.org Retrospective

With the recently previewed LDS.org redesign nearing release, I thought I would take a trip down memory lane and attempt to assemble a history of LDS.org home page designs that I have collected over the years. This is not 100% accurate but gives a flavor of the evolution of LDS.org.

1994-1995
Here are some of the first designs that were approved and posted on the Internet:



1998
The site pictured above grew to the point where a redesign with categories was needed. Four new main categories were identified: Basic Beliefs, Family History, Member Resources, and Media Information. The hope at the time was that these four categories would serve the needs of the LDS.org for a long time.


1999
This design was introduced to add spirituality and warmth to the site. Upon entering LDS.org the user was presented with a "splash" screen that punctuated the centrality of the Savior in the church. Families were also highlighted. This was the last site that was created by hardcoding HTML pages. At this point we were accumulating a large amount of content that was quickly becoming unwieldy. This drove us to begin investigating the concepts of a dynamically built site and the need for a new concept called information architecture.




2000
The need for a dynamic site eventually caught on and a new team was brought in to the Church to lead us into this exciting new technology. The infusion of new information architects also influenced the need for a new redesign which would accomodate even more content that was pouring into the site.


2001
An emphasis to the living prophets was added to the home page by adding a daily quote and a large link to the First Presidency Message. During this period, new sites were designed such as mormon.org and providentliving.org.


2002-2004
More sites were designed during this period such as Home and Family, Stake and Ward Web Sites, Church History, and Newsroom.

2005
...Which brings us up to the present. This new design is expected to be released this year. It was previewed and usability tested at Education Week at BYU last summer.

New Talent - Scott Stoddard

I discovered a new Flash game programmer/character designer and it turns out he lives in my neighborhood. His site is:

http://www.spiritonin.com/

Check it out!

Golden Gate Panorama

This panorama was created with Photoshop's stitching function so it is not the best, but it gives a good sense of our walk that turned into a hike (click on the picture to see it larger).

Tony Hawk for PSP

I got a new game today. Tony Hawk's Underground 2 for Playstation portable. It is AWESOME. Here is a product description:



You've been chosen by Tony Hawk to take on Bam Margera as your teams go globetrotting on an insane road trip: the World Destruction Tour. THUG2 grinds in with a hilarious story mode, an unprecendented level of customization, and more moves than the Skate Gods could dream of. Make the world your own skate park, as you spray your custom tag, slap stickers, and even create new skate lines as you wreak havoc. Now you can play as yourself, your teammates, or over 20 special guest skaters. When you're ready to go old school, check out Classic Mode with all-time favorite goals like S-K-A-T-E, Secret Tape, and High Score against a 2-minute timer. Grab your board, an arsenal of spray-paint... jump into the tour van and get ready to wreak havoc across the globe.

SF Flash Forward Conference - Saturday April 9

We spent this morning touring then rushed to the airport. I played Twisted Metal all the way home.

SF Flash Forward Conference - Friday April 8

Advanced Character Animation
Chris Georgenes of www.mudbubble.com showed some animation techniques.

Unleash Your Debugging Arsenal
Paul Ortchanian of www.reflektions.com demoed debugging techniques in Flash. He spoke about "unit testing" which is basically tracing every line of code as you program to test assumptions. He posted some valuable unit testing components and his notes at:

http://www.reflektions.com/lectures/

The O'Reilly Radar
Tim O'Reilly of http://www.oreilly.com/ gave a lecture. This is the famous technical book publisher. They have a new magazine called MAKE.

Lunchtime
Chevy's Fresh Mex. Great fajitas, Batman!

Cut, Paste, Animate: Collage Animation
Evan Spirellas from www.jibjab.com gave some very informative demos on his collage animation techniques. He designs large for TV then scales down for the web. Kim and I attended a Q&A afterwards where we got to ask him questions face to face. He was very generous with his techniques and advice.

Less Ordinary
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Erik Natzke of http://www.natzke.com/2002.html showed some amazing Flash effects and ads he created for HP. His site speaks for itself.

Closing and Raffle
None of us won anything.

Evening
We took a bus to Fisherman's Wharf and had dinner at Cioppinos. We found a beach then took a cable car back to the hotel.

SF Flash Forward Conference - Thursday April 7

Macromedia Keynote
Kevin Lynch from Macromedia promoted Flash for mobile devices. He also showed the new Flash player. Here is some info about the player:
Click here

Drag Slide Fade 2.0
Brendan Dawes from magneticNorth demoed some Actionscript classes that seemed somewhat useful. It inspired me to start building a class library of commonly used functions.

Evolving Computational Creatures
This was AMAZING. Jared Tarbell from www.levitated.net demoed some examples of Flash organisms.

Lunch
We walked for a few blocks to Carl's Junior. I had a guacamole 6-dollar burger. Mmmmm. I'm sleepy.

A Close-up View of Type
Matthew Carter, a famous type designer who designed Verdana and other popular fonts, gave a lecture about the nuances of designing type. He showed a cool font that has interchangable serifs. It is not available, but I WANT it. Here is a specimen:

http://www.feelgoodanyway.com/identity/walker1.html

Here is a Matthew Carter bio:

Click here

3D and Games
Patrick Gardner of http://www.perfectfools.com/ showed how he did some of his award winning games for Coca-cola and other companies. This was insiring to see how 3D and "2 1/2-D" are being used in Flash to simulate depth.

A Warped Look at Flash
Ze Frank of www.zefrank.com showed some extremely funny work on his site. He uses Flash in very innovative ways. To me he was hilarious and is an exceptional improvisational actor. Be warned that his web site is a little too harsh to be viewed at work. Wade carefully.

Flash Film Festival
Flash pieces were shown and designers recieved awards:

Click here

Our music Flash application (http://www.lds.org/cm/display/0,17631,4996-1,00.html) was one of the finalists but didn't win.

Dinner
My brother Mike was in town and he picked me up and we went to an Italian restaurant and then he blazed down Lombard Street.

SF Flash Forward Conference - Wednesday April 6

KEYNOTE:
Made You Look Again - Stefan Sagmeister
-http://www.sagmeister.com
-Very creative (and sometimes crude) approaches to design
-This guy liked himself a lot

Lunch
While standing in line at California Pizza Kitchen we met two guys from Punchcut, a SF design studio. Both guys were BYU graduates and LDS. I had a long conversation with Joseph Pemberton who is the creative director.

pemberton@punchcut.com
TEL. 415 445-8855

Flash Video In and Out (two sessions)
-Very good introduction to get started using Flash video
-www.pixelfury.com

Best Practices Experts Panel
-Robert Reinhardt www.themakers.com/
-Brendan Dawes www.magneticn.co.uk/
-Chris Georgenes http://www.mudbubble.com/mad2005/main/mad_2005.htm
-Joey Lott http://www.person13.com/
-This panel was very good. Each designer gave their list of rules to live by

Evening
We went to Fisherman's wharf and ate at Neptune's palace and watched the sea lions bicker with each other. Afterwards we took a cable car ride back to our hotel. Kim made the mistake of talking to a homeless man carrying a large, live chicken. He made some colorful remarks. I guess we were walking through a bad part of town. It was a rush.

SF Flash Forward Conference - Tuesday April 5

Before I left I bought a Playstation Portable (PSP) and played Twisted Metal on the plane. We took BART from the airport to our Holiday Inn Civic Center hotel.

Around 5pm we picked up our packets and got our badges and went to dinner. Bummer. My wireless card doesnt work in the hotel.

Seattle Design Conference - DAY 3, Afternoon

IMAGE OPTIMIZATION [frontent, vd] ****
-good review of save for web in Photoshop and Imageready
-learn how to use alpha mask compression

PHOTOSHOP AND FLASH [vd] **
-a guy from Adobe showed a lot of workarounds in Photoshop that are ten times easier in Fireworks
-airtightinteractive.com has a cool flash based slideshow called simpleviewer


FLASH VIDEO [vd, frontend] ***
-good info here
-65% of users have flash 7
-3 ways to do flash video: 1. inside Flash, 2. Flash Video exporter plugin for video apps, 3. Sorensen Squeeze (SQUEEZE IS BEST)
-make flash frame rate match the video frame rate!! or the sound won't sync.
-2 pass compression recommended
-import the FLV into a movie clip - not on the main timeline
-look into behaviors palette in flash to see what it can do
-look at the video component
-showed his isight live video inside of a SWF. GOTCHA this doesnt work if the SWF is narrower than the size of the contextual menu inside flash
-communitymx.com

Seattle Design Conference - DAY 3, morning

ECOMMERCE [nobody] ***
-good introduction to low budget ecommerce

APPLESCRIPT [nobody] **
-guy showed how he uses applescript to create Quark layouts for those fancy weather reports that you see in the newspaper

FLASH MX TIPS [vd] *-nothing new here. disappointing beginner level

MACROMEDIA CENTRAL [vd] ****
-good introduction to Macromedia Central
-not catching on yet - but a pretty good idea - keep an eye on it

FLASH ACCESSIBILITY [vi, ia, frontend] **
-bottom line is that Flash doesn't live up to its accessibility claims
-lots of bad gotchas getting accessibility to work in Flash
-use Flash only for media demonstrations
-OR have two versions of the site (Flash & html) that both use one source of data

Seattle Design Conference - DAY 2, Afternoon

DREAMWEAVER INTERACTIVITY [frontend, vd] ***
-demonstrated a bunch more behaviors
-Flash Media Objects - learn how to make these (Flash slide show Media Object built into Dreamweaver was intriguing)

BROWSER COMPATIBILITY [frontend] ***
-Dreamweaver has great built-in validation aids
-you can edit the Dreamwaever config files to tailor it to your needs
-DW toolbar shiws "/ ! \" icon when there are errors
-errors are underlined in DW with a red line - roll over them to see the error

-Resources:
-communitymx.com
-webstandards.com-eric myer(s) CSS guru
-csszengarden
-BOOK: Standards Based Web Design, Jeff Zeldman (BUY THIS)
-browsercam.com -renders your site in any old browser and sends you screen grabs
-browsers.evolt.org - a site that has installers of all the old browsers

Wisdom nuggets:
-the longer you are complacent, the longer it will take to get caught up
-if you master the new standards (CSS, XHTML), your site will work in all media- the standards are media independent

Seattle Design Conference - DAY 2, morning

BLOGGING/RSS [everyone] *****!
-This session was electrifying - like when I saw the web for the first time
-speaker made the claim that Blogging/RSS is as big as when the web was first introduced
-Blogging is content management that works (and its free). He made the claim that it is just as good as a $100,000 Content Management System
-Search engines favor blogs over traditional sites because they have tons of cross-linking (this boosts rankings. They are also favored because the nature of a blog is frequently updated content (also boosts rankings)
-A blog gives twice the visibility than a web site gives
-adding an entry to a blog automatically:
1. makes you add meta information,
2. adds to your RSS feed,
3. archives your data-soon, browsers are going to be less used than RSS readers. Web sites will not be the first place people will go
-The speaker will hold a Bloging/RSS conference in January
-netnewswire is the best news aggregator for Mac
-feedster.com is like yahoo for RSS-Talk to Lyman Kirkland about blogs (newsroom.lds.org mgr.)
-Pushing google ads on your blog will earn you money
-Movable Type is the best blogging platform to date (VERY hard to configure if you are dumb like me.

DESIGNING FORMS [ia, vd, frontend] *****
-EXCELLENT examples of what to do, and what not to do.
-this would be good for the usability guidelines for the LDS.org redesign
-(this session was actually yesterday - I forgot to blog it)

KEYNOTE [vd] ***
-Just an hour long plug to get us to use Photoshop CS-Now that I am hardly using Photoshop I need to make sure I keep on it so if I ever switch back to Adobe I am not lost. Their software is changing a lot. I should probably use it more where possible (Fireworks is just SO much more useful for web design)

STUDIO MX [vd, frontend] **
-Just an hour-long plug to get us to use MX Studio. There were a few "AH-HA"s but I mostly knew all of this stuff

EXTENDING DREAMWEAVER [vd, frontend] ***
-Went into detail on how to extend and customize Dreamweaver.
-excellent introduction to customizing Dreamweaver
-excellent intro to behaviors-I fell asleep and almost spilled my Sprite (maybe I will get Coke next time)
(I will need to rewatch the above sessions - I stayed up until 3am trying to get Movable Type (my Blogging software) to work. I kept going crosseyed. Thanks, Pete for saving me and helping to finally getting it to work!)
-LUNCH- (and nap time)

Seattle Conference - Day 1

There is so much good information here that I am going to try and send 1/2 day updates (or as often as brain-fulls require). I will never remember it all if I wait to do this until I get home. Please forward this to whomever you think might benefit.

This entire conference will be available in streaming format in a few weeks. Because of this, I have named individuals/teams who might benefit from each lecture in [ ] 's. I also gave " * " ratings to each session.

KEYNOTE: [everyone] ***
-Don't get complacent in skills - the web will leave you behind if you don't pay attention
-Users should complete their errands efficiently and feel special doing it (correspond to IA and VD)
-a click is a commitment - don't let the user down
-"solutions" and "resources" are words that really mean "miscellaneous"
-(there was a camera site where thumbnails of the cameras were all shown and as the user chose price, megapixels, etc. the thumbnails disappeared accordingly). This was done in Flash and was very cool.
-(this speaker showed his process for using sticky notes to determine the design)

CSS: [vd, frontend, ia] ***
-This was mostly a sales pitch for using CSS instead of tables
-This presentation made me want to design our sites around CSS's capabilities rather than let the design dictate the implementation
-If our shop doesn't get good at CSS now we will become obsolete
-some very useful tips were presented

USABILITY [everyone] *****!
-This presentation was INCREDIBLE with lots of new tips. I thought I had heard everything about usability until I went to this session.
-There is no usual path the eye takes through a page. The path is entirely based on visual heirarchy - WE ENGINEER THE PATH THE EYE TAKES BY OUR USE OF VISUAL HEIRARCHY. This desired path should be included explicitly in wireframes and vd's.
-Things that look like ads get ignored (the large feature area on the LDS.ORG redesign, for example)
-(there is an excellent study on the web where people show where certain elements on the page should be located)
-Do users scroll? YES. As long as it is apparent that content continues off the screen.
-For long passages, scrolling is better than segmenting to multiple pages.
-Take out the garden path. The less time it takes to get to the destination, the more time they will have to spend with the content. Lots of features and graphics slows them down
-search and navigating should be considered as a dynamic duo - not as separate navigation tools. The web is moving toward search/navigation hybrid interfaces.
- As a guide to labeling, look at past search logs to see what terms people are using.
-3-click rule is a myth. People will follow the the first link they see that looks "good enough"
-users dont read anything they dig then use their back button over and over again until the find their goal
-this session is worth watching when it comes out on the web

L U N C H -

CSS (continued) [vd, frontend] ***
-Same lecturer as earlier - more great tips on CSS page layout
-We should bring this guy in as a consultant
-discussed float vs. absolute positioning (float wins)
-rebuilt Microsoft.com home page using pure CSS.
-Valuable tips to help us overcome adoption gotcha's

Blogging and RSS [EVERYONE] *****
-Very exciting
-came back to my hotel and stayed up late and could never get Movable Type to work. I couldn't even get Type Pad to work.