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March 14, 2005
The Evolution of Mario
NFG Games presents The Evolution of Mario: a visual history of 2D Mario sprites from 1981 to 2004.
Posted by Devon at 10:27 PM | Comments (0)
March 13, 2005
"Western State" Rocks
From Coudal Parters, the geniuses that brought you Photoshop Tennis, and L.A. producers Slowtron comes a series of mini-documentaries profiling designers and how they think. Combine great camera work, motion graphics, composition, and a brilliant soundtrack and you get Western State. You know it's gonna be good when you hear Boards of Canada in the intro and Kings of Convenience later on. My fave profile is Jason Gnewikow.
Some quotes:
"L.A. is amazing not because of how it looks or how the streets are linked together or how the city is laid out whatsoever, it's more sort of an invisible creative community."
"The elements of design are available for anyone who'll pay attention to them."
WS 1: Andy Mueller
WS 2: Cory McAbee
WS 3: Geoff McFetridge
WS 4: Jason Gnewikow
Posted by Devon at 08:55 PM | Comments (0)
Collective Type, Wikis, and Eigenmedia
Check out Jeff Weir's Collective Type Project, an attempt at font design by committee. This is cool for several reasons:
(1) It's collaborative--the author just put up a framework and let people do whatever they wanted with the site
(2) It's further proof of the viability of the laissez faire Wiki concept
(3) It's robust against vandalism - the training examples for 9 contain graffiti, Kanji, roman numerals, and various styles, yet still comes out looking like the numeral "9"
(4) The content is instantly re-purposable:
This reminds me of Brian Whitman's Eigenradio project, which extracts the most statistically distinct components of entire songs as new compositions. It's interesting to compare the two approaches and note that Collective Type yields recognizable results, whereas Eigenradio's songs sound like meaningless noise. These projects take two opposing approaches--one takes the mean of its inputs whereas the other favors the most unique inputs.
Posted by Devon at 07:50 PM | Comments (0)
I've Changed my Mind About Proce55ing
I discovered Proce55ing a little over a year ago, but wasn't impressed at first. My background in interactive 3D and web apps had spoiled me so much that I wouldn't settle for anything less than texture-mapped 3D with shaders and a highly-evolved object model. I was thinking that Proce55ing was just a toy, too underpowered, and not practical for the kind of work I was doing.
This perception changed when I found Toxi's base26, a stunning infoviz app that illustrates the frequencies of common 4-letter english words with real-time 3D wireframe visualization of marching-cubes-style isosurface clusters.
That this was built with Proce55ing shows that the platform is capable of great things. The API supplies very minimal 2D/3D support, so it's up to individual developers to write their own functionality. However, Java is used for scripting so it's possible to leverage OOP and come up with something useful and scalable. Unlike Flash, the frame buffer is open for all to modify. And unlike Director/Shockwave, the 3D engine is pure software. This has all kinds of implications, for example, being able to apply filter & blur effects to a 3D object and layer this with 2D content. But most important of all, it enables old-skool late-90's demo effects that are impossible in Flash w/o massive hacks. For example, an animated 3D water heightfield.
Toxi has lots of amazing interactive art on their site, like this screensaver, and this 3D isometric color picker. These guys are extremely versatile--they even wrote a 3D modelling and animation tool: ReAnimator3D. And their client work is amazing: for example, lateral.net (which is worth a post in and of itself).
Toxi's blog is here.
Posted by Devon at 01:33 AM | Comments (2)
