a revelation
I seem to have spent the past couple of months spending more time worrying about implementation, learning programming patterns and understanding basic programming principles and less time actually playing in Flash and doing the things are really want to.
I’m a designer, I enjoy design and good design is always the first thing I look for in a website however, the geeky side in me loves to program, learn new details about programming language and to find simpler ways of using code to achieve the effects I desire. But then I get too hooked up in the technical aspects of a project and the design takes a back seat, it’s clear that I need to try and find a happy medium.
I have decided to start using my programming knowledge to create little experiments and features that I can then explore even further if they are ever suitable for a project. I can combine these little experiments with other skills that I want to learn like After Effects and Maya to then create really interested experiments. I want to start creating more ‘flashlets’ to test my skills and try to re-create the small details I love to play with on other websites. Leaving the heavy coding and pure OOP to the developers.
I’m an interactive designer, I should be building my skills to suit this. An excellent article was written by Balind on his blog Interactive Hug. This blog is a fantastic read and is refreshing to see a blog which concentrates more on the design, animation and the user experience in a website than the frameworks and architecture used to build the site. I’m not knocking those site and almost every other RSS feed I’m subscribed to is some sort of technical Flash based blog.
So my plan…
To start with I will not be learning Flex, at least not for the time being. Instead I can use my time to learn some After Effects tricks or download the Personal Learning Edition of Maya and start tackling that beast. I will set up some sort of Lynda.com account and use the tutorials to introduce me to this new software. I will leave the Flex development, OOP design techniques, MVC theories and frameworks to the developers and I will concentrate on the things I really love to do. Create cool looking stuff that makes other people go “oooOOOooo” and “ahhhh” and “cooooooool”.
I’ve recently stumbled across the soulwire blog and that has also help me making the decision. There are several small flash experiment posted that are simply Justin Windles attempts at re-creating the effects he sees on other sites that make him say “cooooooool”. This small things can often spawn countless other avenues of experimentation and “visual hiccups” as he describes them. I have done this in the past, and post my small experiments within this lab. It’s just that I have recently spent more time concerned with the correct architecture for projects and less time getting my hands dirty and playing. Also a trip to Brighton for Flash on the Beach also helped me make this decision to put and end to the hardcore programming theory and to start playing in Flash again. To discover new things and experiment.
So there it is. My decision to start playing more. To build little menus, filters, effects, scrollers, buttons, and other fun things. To finally read through my New Masters of Flash books and Flash Math Creativity. To code only in order to build something interesting and fun to interact with instead of something that is sensible but boring.