Visual Advance | Blogthe personal and professional evolution of danny davis

When I see a commercial this well executed it makes me think of how poor our state of advertising is, and how many missed opportunities have gone by. Each commercial gives us a 15-60 second window to create a piece of art that will last in someones mind.

I would like to think this concept was one person who had the vision, and was able to dig through the distractions to make sure it got made correctly.

When I see a product like this, and its named Perky Jerky, I have to ask myself; which came first, the name or the concept? I have to admit many times I will come up with a phrase, be insanely tempted to buy the domain name, and then build a site around that.

Then I realize sites take time to build, and I watch TV instead.

I see hundreds, if not thousands of articles each week now that I am an avid Google Reader user. After a while it becomes easy to identify each bloggers style. Lets take for example Scott Hansen of ISO50. A lot of his posts and images tend to have the same tone, even when he is blogging about other peoples work.

So when I came across this post from NotCot, I instantly wondered why Hansen was styling his post like a typical NotCot post. Then I realized it wasn’t a post of his at all. It isn’t even his work. Just a Scotch tape promotion that is extremely similar to his work. Is it just me?

As my document class files get larger and larger I tend to have a hard time keeping my place. Especially when I need to jump back and forth between a couple spots. So one trick I just naturally started to evolve was to add my own “bookmarks” into my code.

For example if I am working on a function called “showMessage” and I want to jump between the function and where it is being called I might do this:

//#
showMessage();

// blah blah blah other code
// 1000 lines later

//#
private function newMessage():void { }

This way I can just search for the # and keep jumping back and forth. If you were really ambitious you could derive a whole system from symbols

# = links

! = currently working on

% = work on later

Not perfect since a lot of symbols will be used by operators, but it felt like a good LifeHacker type of tip. I supposed you could always search for //! to avoid the operators.

It isn’t often that I repost other people’s posts, but i have to give credit to the ‘Ten Things I Have Learned’ by Milton Glaser. Please go to the original article to read the full thing, but I wanted to pull a few of my favorite quotes that I believe in.

Point 3 talks about avoiding poisonous people. The test is to spend some time with that person.

“If you are more tired then you have been poisoned. If you have more energy you have been nourished. The test is almost infallible and I suggest that you use it for the rest of your life.”

Point 4:

“What professionalism means in most cases is diminishing risks…After all, what is required in our field, more than anything else, is the continuous transgression. Professionalism does not allow for that because transgression has to encompass the possibility of failure and if you are professional your instinct is not to fail, it is to repeat success.“

In point 5 he talks about how absurd the quote “less is more” is. He suggests a new saying “Just enough is more.” I think this statement struck me because of how obvious this statement should be, yet I have never heard it. I guess it has hints of laziness. I am sure a client would never want to hear ‘I did just enough to finish the site’. But to me ‘just enough’ implies perfection. Maybe I am looking at it with optimistic eyes.

On point 8:

“Deeply held beliefs of any kind prevent you from being open to experience, which is why I find all firmly held ideological positions questionable… Of course we must know the difference between scepticism and cynicism because cynicism is as much a restriction of one’s openness to the world as passionate belief is.”

This may seem to be a direct jab at religion, but he goes on to apply it to the design field, and it should be applied to everything you do. To me scepticism is almost its own religion. Or perhaps it is the road some take to find thier own religion. Ironically, the best quote I could find to emphasize my point is a proverb:

“For the waywardness of the naive will kill them, And the complacency of fools will destroy them.” Proverbs 1:32

And lastly, on point 10:

“We can accept certain kinds of misrepresentation, such as fudging about the amount of fat in his hamburger but once a butcher knowingly sells us spoiled meat we go elsewhere. As a designer, do we have less responsibility to our public than a butcher?”

There are plenty of other good tidbits (and even a joke toward the end of 9 that I will be guilty of repeating) throughout the article.

Ten Things I Have Learned by Milton Glaser

I thought this article by Omar over at Oateck pretty accurately described how some of the ways I was able to get into coding and should help others as well. The short story is:

Tip 1. Methodize… don’t memorize
Tip 2. Create your own Resource library
Tip 3. Learn WHAT not HOW
Tip 4. Comment to match your style
Tip 5. Master one…Learn another… but keep your eye on the next thing

I think for beginners I would suggest tip 2 and 3 the most. Having a library of sample files, or even text documents with code in them that I keep forgetting, was the most helpful to me when I was starting (and still to this day), and it relieves the pressure of having to memorize the syntax of everything.

Tip 3 is important mainly because I am always telling people to read the code like a sentence. “If the box is 200% in size then make it disappear”. That is must more friendly than looking at:

if(box._xscale >=200) { box._visible = false };

The post is definitely a good read so check it out.

I have (shamefully) just begun teaching myself ActionScript 3.0 in my downtime. It won’t be as hard as the first time through (learning Flash on my own) since now I understand the basics around code, but there are a lot of new concepts to AS3 that I need to wrap my head around before I start the nitty gritty part of memorizing the syntax for writing AS3.

Not that I am an expert on all AS3 books out there, but I happened to get myself into Learning ActionScript 3.0: A Beginner’s Guide. I think I like it because the first few chapters are basically a refresher on what variables, function, etc. are, and what they actually mean to the flash compiler. They get into detail about the way the compiler actually reads the code, but then it also explains things by comparing it to the real world (i.e. a child has the same attributes that their parents do). That tends to be the best way I learn.

Update:
I just found this link to all the source files that go along with the book. Extremely useful.

The idea of creating an ecosystem through code has started to interest me. I have only just begun my exploration into it, but it is interesting how it changes your perspecting on the world around you. Once you train your brain to think the way that code wants you too (very rigid, highly organized, no room for error), you start to categories things in the real world the same way.

For instance; when I was creating this small test which I called EEP (Evolving Ecosytem Project), I had to think about what properties each character needed in order to have a realistic ecosystem. Off the top of my head they each would at least have:

1. A life span.
2. A need for food.
3. A means of attaining the food source (locomotion, photosynthesis, etc).
4. Social interaction (mating, community, reactions based on proximity to others).

As I was doing some tests based on this I would start to look at objects in the real world and think about what they need and how you would code that. Let’s take a tree for example. It has a life span, needs energy, growth rate, and seeds for reproduction. In theory you can break down just about every living creature into these small fundamentals that would just be the change of a couple numbers in the code. I live 75 years + or – random*10. A cat might be 12 + Math.random()*5.

Of course other variables can effect these numbers, but it comes down to simple calculations.

For some reason even doing this small exploration really made an impact on how I see things. Sometimes it becomes a little philosophical for me. Like, if we can program this in a computer, then were we really programmed. Or on the other side of that coin, if every living thing is so similar in the properties that make it up, doesn’t that lend more toward supporting evolution from a single source.

Anyway, I guess that is all I had on that subject for now. I hope to have more on this once I get back into the project.

In my desire to use code to create artwork, I decided I need to learn how to use code to control actual real-world devices. Lets say for instance I have some code that outputs the number 10. How would I go about making that number make an led flash 10 times

This is just an example of course and could be turned into anything, but it is a start and would be a huge start. When I write code I know it will output a .swf, or a .html, etc.. I know my output. But what if I want my output to be light, or an action by a machine. I don’t even know where to begin.

This isn’t rhetorical. I am asking everyone. How can I get a program such as flash, or processing to output to a real-world devices?

I am not sure if this cartoon is meant to be a stab at advertising or not, but when most of your day is spent working to advertise for a large company, you start to see this cartoon in a very jaded way.

It is interesting because I think that the effectiveness of advertising is the direct opposite of the directness. To me, the ‘Branding’ frame is the least direct approach to reaching customers, but the most effective approach. Especially at finding customers who want to be a part of your product. On the other hand the ‘Advertising’ approach is the most direct, but I would like to think, the least effective. Even if it may drive more sales up front, I feel like they would be short term customers and only bought once because of the screaming approach illustrated in frame 4.

Obviously I must be wrong since most large companies put most of their budget into the ‘Advertising’ approach over ‘Branding’. Even when I work on a “Branding” campaign, ‘they’ always manage to slide in an offer at the last minute.

- discovered at: swissmiss