Dustin J Sparks : Portfolio

Blue Cross Blue Shield: Match-A-Heart

Dustin Sparks — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 00:00:00

This flash widget was created for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois. The widget currently resides on the BCBS: Illinois Facebook page. It was built as a holiday product to ship just before Valentines Day. The goal of the widget is to educate the user about unhealthy practices and how to get out of an unhealthy situation.

Blue Cross Blue Shield: eCards for Health

Dustin Sparks — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 00:00:00

This widget was done for Blue Cross Blue Sheild. They came to me with the proposition of doing two flash widgets that they could share on their Facebook fan pages. This widget is one of those two and takes content that they have had implemented on another website, then makes that content available to share on social networks.

Blue Cross Blue Shield: Food Shooter

Dustin Sparks — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 00:00:00

This is one of two widgets for Blue Cross Blue Shield. This particular widget tries to help educate users on healthy eating. The user eats the food by popping its container balloon. The amount of calories is based on actual amounts of fat calories in the corresponding food item.

CCL Organizational Leadership Website

Dustin Sparks — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 00:00:00

This website runs on a heavily modified Wordpress CMS. On the backend there were several Wordpress plugins created specifically for this website in order to allow the client to easily modify certain areas of the main website.

My Indy Race Car Widget

Dustin Sparks — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 00:00:00

This flash widget was created to serve as a decentralized, viral application to promote the main Indycar builder application. It was coded in Actionscript 3 and perfectly mimics the main design tool. It allows the user to create and share their designs with friends via the clearspring platform.

USO Patriotic Six Widget

Dustin Sparks — Mon, 25 May 2009 00:00:00

Located on the front page of the patriotic six website (http://www.patrioticsix.com/). This widget is built on top of the clearspring platform. The widget updates facts, about the USA, on a daily basis between May 25th (Memorial Day) and July 4th. The content is generated via RSS feed. It was created as a freelance project with a company located in Chicago.

TracFone Event Tracker Widget

Dustin Sparks — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 00:00:00

I built this widget on a freelance basis with a company out of Chicago. The widget leverages the power of the Clearspring system to provide individual user stats. It uses a database to send emails to users when their event date is approaching.

LevelSix PR Website and CMS

Dustin Sparks — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 00:00:00

This website was done for a company in Indianapolis. The design was created by another design company then transferred to me as an Adobe Photoshop file. I was able to chop the file into parts that I needed, then moved it into an HTML/CSS layout that perfectly matched the Photoshop file. The CMS behind the website is a custom CMS built by the original company along with heavy modifications done by me.

The Spill Canvas Widget

Dustin Sparks — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 00:00:00

This widget was done for the band The Spill Canvas. It was another project done as freelance through a Chicago company. The widget features the ability to display a music video, several of their songs, a tour list, as well as a built-in 'store' for their fan products.

Animal Internet Widget

Dustin Sparks — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 00:00:00

This was another freelance widget done for a company out of Chicago. The widget is for a website called Animal Internet that serves as a social network for animals. Some animals post their own opinion 'columns' and 'animatorials'.

ID Theft Days Microsite

Dustin Sparks — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 00:00:00

The ID Theft Days micro-site was built with Flash and Maya. All of the animation was rendered in Maya and exported as an image sequence. The animation is controlled by custom tweening scripts that I created to animate the image sequence from one point to another. This includes backward animation as well as forward.

PooYou! Legal Revenge Pranks Website

Dustin Sparks — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 00:00:00

The PooYou! website was built using a combination of html, javascript, php and mysql for the backend database and content management system. The CMS includes some extra features like AJAX controls and custom-built user account controls. The information gathered in the polls on this website includes votes from the facebook app on the same poll and the poll on facebook is synchronized with the poll on the website.

PooYou! Legal Revenge Pranks Facebook Application

Dustin Sparks — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 00:00:00

This is a Facebook application built specifically to play on the viral marketing aspect of the PooYou website. The application synchronizes pooyou.com account information with facebook account information and has very details statistics reports on various demographic information. It also has it's own in-depth CMS to manage features on the facebook application.

IMA MMFX Kiosk

Dustin Sparks — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 00:00:00

This project uses Actionscript 3.0, Flash CS3, and Photoshop CS3. The kiosk is installed at the Indianapolis Museum of Art in the Manufacturing Material Effects exhibit. I used Papervision 3D to create the 3D animation and objects in 3D space. Tweener was used for the animation. The navigation is touch-sensetive. Each group of Architects is added as easily as adding a single line into an array containing all of the projects.

Digital Corps Messenger Widget

Dustin Sparks — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 00:00:00

This widget was given to me as a quick project that is meant to help out the computer lab workers in taking messages for the Corps administrators. The problem in the lab had to do with student lab attendants taking sub-par or incomplete messages from people who call in, or in some other way attempt to get in contact with a manager or administrator of the Corps.

Ball State University Libraries Mac OSX Cardcat Widget

Dustin Sparks — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 00:00:00

I took on the project after the original team left and needed to re-write most of the existing code. I finished it and added some extra, unplanned, features in about 7 weeks. It was built entirely on OSX 10.5 Leopard while Leopard was still in its beta stages. The project uses PHP, Javascript, and XML to interface with Ball State's library servers. The widget is installed on all the university library's OSX capable computers.

Interactive Television Prototype

Dustin Sparks — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 00:00:00

This project was done as part of an intensive course on interactive television at Ball State. While another team of computer scientists were building a televised version, I was responsible for building the web version. We collaborated as much as possible, sharing RSS feeds and content managements systems that we built using PHP. A group of News designers provided most of the graphics.

Flasm (Generative Art)

Dustin Sparks — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 00:00:00

This project is currently setup in an installation in the Center for Media Design at Ball State University. It was also featured in a Muncie area art show. The program was heavily inspired by the original by Liquid Journey. It uses a complex algorithm and the flash drawing API to draw pixel by pixel each 'particle'. As time goes on the colors morph from one to another. No pixels are discarded during this process resulting in the overlapping effect.

Artificial Intelligence

Dustin Sparks — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 00:00:00

This project was built as a proof of concept for a flash-based Real Time Strategy game. It uses a very basic Finite State Machine to determine what action the character should be doing (collecting water to survive, walking to the water, or storing the water in his house).

Balloon Shooter (Political Satire)

Dustin Sparks — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 00:00:00

I took a commonly used game and recreated it with my own little political twist. It was created as extra credit for a digital media class. The 'balloons' scroll vertically while the player tries to shoot them. Certain balloons are worth more points. When they are shot, they slow down the rest of the balloons. Missing speeds the balloons up. I also included a control panel for manipulating the game at runtime.

Tile Scroller Engine

Dustin Sparks — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 00:00:00

I built this engine originally for a game that I was working on for a digital media class. The game has an editor for it that made it easy enough for the average student to design a level and make it live. Unfortunately my teacher decided that it was too complex for the class and I was told not to pursue it for the class. I continued to modify it outside of class to make it easily modifiable.

Ball State University Google Map

Dustin Sparks — Fri, 12 May 2006 00:00:00

This project was done for a summer job working with a Ball State undergraduate fellowship grant. My job was to take a given customized google map and make it interactive and searchable with the Google Maps API. I created a search engine entirely in javascript whose job is to search an XML file for any number of search terms. The XML file contains descriptions, links, phone numbers, and GPS data.

Center for Media Design Micro site Mock-up

Dustin Sparks — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 00:00:00

This is a mock-up for a micro site for the Center for Media Design at Ball State. The micro site was to be setup to showcase student produced video webisodes. The banners were meant to hold video segments representing each scene in the webisode. The banners are draggable and expand to show more video segments at any given time. As a little added effect I incorporated pendulum physics on the banners when the site loads.

Lawson Flooring Microsite

Dustin Sparks — Sun, 27 Nov 2005 00:00:00

This is a live micro-site built about 2 years ago using Flash 8 and Photoshop CS2. The website is very small and compact, designed this way to fit easily inside other websites. It can also be defined as a widget or gadget that also serves as a stand-alone website. I spent about a week building the front-end design and animation as well as the backend PHP contact form and content management system.