Open up your favorite browser and type in a letter of the alphabet. Then record the top hit from the suggestion list. I’ve posted my list below:

• A – Approva (Client)
• B – Adobe Browserlab
• C – Creativity
• D – Designaside
• E – Ember
• F – Facebbok (Surprise!)
• G – Google
• H – Harvard Business Review
• I – IxDA
• J – Joshua Cole
• K – Kontain
• L – LogoPond
• M – Media Temple
• N – Netuitive (New client)
• O – Spotify
• P – Panera
• Q – QBN
• R – The Swedish Armed Forces Recruitment Portal (Don’t ask)
• S – Slicehost
• T – The FWA
• U – UNENDED (that’s me!)
• V – C’est vous le Boss ! Cisco Systems, Inc
• W – The Washington Post
• X – XING
• Y – YUI Blog
• Z – Tweetmeme Widget Graphic (I like to dissect things)

News, design, business, and social networks – it looks like I have a running theme here, and I’m seeing a lot of sites that I got to from the FWA.

Okay – now for that second cup of coffee.

When trying to edit an entry would get:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 311296 bytes) in...

A quick workaround for this is to add the following line of code at the top of your admin index.php page.

1

ini_set('memory_limit', '32M');

I’m only running a local version on my MacBook Pro MAMP PRO setup for my own testing purposes so this is going to be pretty isolated, but I thought I’d post this in case somebody else runs into the same snag.

Since we hadn’t made any changes to the site in a long while I was a little confused about what could be causing the issue. Turns out it ended up being a small change that was needed in the .htaccess file.

Here is a copy of line 3 in the .htaccess code before the change:

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [L]

Turns out that I just needed to add a ‘?’ right after the ‘php’ like this:

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php?/$1 [L]

Once I made this little change everything was back up and running.

Again, this change looks like it was specific to Dreamhost. I checked out a few other sites that use ExpressionEngine on other hosts where I know the .htaccess file hasn’t been changed, and they are still up and running.

If somebody else knows what might have caused the change in functionality please feel free to weigh in.

Now that I’m delving further into this, I’ve begun to create artwork that I would like to keep. My challenge was that I wanted to preserve the vector nature of the artwork instead of resorting to saving the work out at a bitmap. I researched the idea of using ActionScript to write out the EPS instructions to a text file so I could then change the extension to “.eps” and open it in Illustrator. After a few minutes I realized that I was overcomplicating the process. Moving from the dynamic artwork created in my SWF file to EPS is actually very easy to do.

Once the SWF file runs and generates the artwork that I was to export I can simply select “Print…” from my Flash Player menu, and select to print it out as a PDF file. This is something that you can do natively on my MacBook Pro. From here I just open the file up in Illustrator and I’m set. I have a complex rendering perfectly preserved with all its complexities in vector format. It’s a pretty low-brow process, but hey, it works perfectly for what I want to do.

I’m sure plenty of folks have already figured this out as a viable process, but I thought I’d share my approach here just in case there are others out there like me that can find themselves looking for an unnecessarily complex solution. Sometimes the answer is just sitting right there in front of you.

There was a lot of great insight, and points brought up during the meeting, but it was interesting to see how designers in all sections of the industry were agreeing a common point: there is a void when it comes to a designer’s role as business leaders. This is a concern that I also strongly share.

It’s been refreshing to see that American businesses and people are beginning to understand of the value that comes with thoughtful high-quality design. In reality we are still playing catch-up with the rest of the world, but the fact is we’re not so stagnant anymore. The problem, however, is that it’s very rare for designers to be the ones shedding light on the importance of design as it pertains to business success.

Much of our discussion revolved around the fact that designers tend to focus all of their attention around their artwork, and not the returns realized by their work and the decisions that they made. If our roundtable is any indication of the final decisions the AIGA board members make at their leadership retreat, it will be a much needed shift in the overall conversation.

What Constitutes a Storyboard?

The term “storyboard” can be used to define a variety of processes used to flesh out a final interactive piece. These can range from simple sketches on a napkin to flowcharts and functional prototypes. The purpose is to provide your project team members with a sense of how the final experience will work. The key to storyboarding is not in any single scene, but how each scene fits within the context of the overall deliverable.

The common challenge mentioned in the salon was how to comfortably fit storyboards into the design process, and most importantly how to identify what should be represented in your storyboards. At my company, storyboards play a vital role in the design and development process. Ignoring this step leaves a chance that the experience will feel incomplete and disconnected.

Elements of Interactive Storyboarding

I find that my storyboards tend to have two always have two common traits: (1) my boards incorporate techniques used in the film industry, and (2) they focus on the specific features of the final interactive project.

Interactive Design is so closely related to the film industry that for me it just makes sense to pull from a lot of their visual cues. Techniques that represent pan-and-scans, camera shots, scene changes and movement all lend themselves very well to this industry. For anyone interested, there is a great book that I would recommend titled From Word to Image: Storyboarding and the Filmmaking Processes hone your storyboarding skills.

If I tried to storyboard an entire interactive project at a high-level I wouldn’t know where to begin. The whole thing would seem overwhelming. So what I do is break down my project into a bunch of predetermined linear flows. From here I can focus on creating boards that illustrate details each of these features.

Even a smaller microsite is made up of many predetermined linear elements. For example, a viral site with only a few pages and an emailing functionality might include:

• Site preloader
• Section preloader
• Emailing entry, validation and confirmation funnel
• Navigation interactivity and transitions
• Scene transitions

Breaking these out allows you to put detail into those elements in a way that raises the experience to a more meaningful level.

I originally came from an illustration background so when I start my storyboards I like to go straight to paper to sketch out initial ideas. It’s fast for me because I know I can bounce the ideas off of other in a matter of minutes. From here we know whether or not to continue to explore an idea or scrap it all together and move in another direction.

The important this to note here though is that you don’t need to be a great artist or draftsman to create storyboards. The key to storyboards is to share ideas quickly. Not to create masterpieces. It might take some time at first if you aren’t used to creating them, but once storyboards becomes a natural part of your process, you’ll really begin to see the pay off.

This past September I attended the Interact 2008 conference here in Washington, DC. This conference was an interactive media marketing event that focused on the topics of creativity, strategy and technology. The conference included speakers from such companies as Google, Saatchi & Saatchi, Adobe and Trollback + Company.

Given our location, anytime there is a conference that even comes close to focusing on our industry it always ends up revolving around Government. This refreshing change is a good sign that others are recognizing the large number of businesses in the DC area that do not focus on Government. I think it was a good start, but unfortunately this is where my positive remarks will have to end. I thought I’d give my take on some of the bigger things that I felt didn’t work.

Only One Track

They should have set multiple tracks that attendees could choose from given the number of speakers that they tried to fit into the two day conference. On both days the conference hovered only momentarily on interesting, but spent much of the time covering mundane and commonplace topics. For the next event, I recommend splitting presentations into tracks based on the level of experience one has in the industry. Sitting through a 15-minute presentation on how to use META keyword and description tags (a presentation by Network Solutions, not Google) is not something that I consider a good use of my time and money.

Too Many Speakers

I don’t know if it was just a way to increase attendance or what, but they scheduled way too many speakers for a two-day event. I think I counted around 45 speakers over those two days. Many of the speakers also had sponsor booths so I’m guessing there was some kind of deal there. That’s fine, but at least review the presentation before giving them access to the mic. One speaker started spouting something out about “Web 4.0″ (I had to walk out for a few minutes at that point), and there was even one case where a speaker didn’t even show up.

Given this overload, speakers had only about 15 minutes each to present, and most of them were working off what was supposed to be one-hour presentation. This meant that the handful of speakers that actually were good ended up just hitting the next button at dizzying speeds so they could get to the end of the slide before the hook yanked them off the stage.

No Breaks

This is a carry over from the number of speakers, but given the lineup we basically had to sit through the following schedule each day:

• 1-hour keynote
• 3 15-minute presentations (topic 1)
• 3 15-minute presentations (topic 2)
• 1-hour panel
• Lunch
• 3 15-minute presentations (topic 3)
• 3 15-minute case studies
• 1-hour panel

There were no breaks between anything. There was supposed to be time for questions, but that didn’t play out right either. What you ended up with were truncated presentations with very little information, and no time to digest it or talk about it with any of it with other attendees.

Unqualified Panelists/Speakers

This was scattered throughout the two days, but there was definitely one panel that made my jaw drop. A question was posed about giving advice for those looking for jobs in the interactive industry. The CEO of one DC-area company basically responded with “learn everything.” She said that you should know Flash, ActionScript, PHP, Java, HTML, CSS, Database Administration, InDesign (yep she said that)… she said a few other things, too, that I can’t remember. What she did is give out a recipe for mediocrity, and then followed with “It’s very difficult to find people with all these skills.” I just ended up writing her name down in my notes with the word “inept” next to it. Most of the others on the panel were nodding in agreement, and eventually all said something along similar lines.

I’m going to end it with these three things since they were the major points that stood out. I’m voicing this with the hopes that the feedback gets considered for future Interact conferences.

Will I go to Interact 2009? I’d consider it since I see it as supporting the industry in our area, but first I’ll be taking a very close look at that agenda to make sure they don’t screw it up like they did this one. Or maybe we should just get a booth, and then I can have some time on the mic.

So Much Interactive. So Many Buzzwords.

There were some excellent proofs of concept from the interactive space, but there was still a bit of a disconnect in the message when it came to the thread that tied those successes together. The convention moved into the different topics and paradigms within web and interactive. This included the subjects of tribes, demographics, psychographics, market segments… the list went on. What surprised me was that the most important identifier of the bunch – the individual – was only brought up sporadically only to then be lumped into the traditional business categories of B2B, B2C, and B2G in the same breath.

My advice to anyone working in or wanting to break into this industry is to forget the above categories. They don’t exist when you’re talking about the interactive dialog.

Great! Now What Does It All Mean?

I’ll jump back to a question that the emcee asked in Monday’s panel: “How do you give a unique message to so many different tribes?” There was a bit of bouncing around as far as a definitive answer, but in the end it came down to everyone landing somewhere between “provide unique messages” to “know your audience.” The correct answer would have been “We don’t give the message to these tribes. They do.” Let me explain.

When it comes to interactive, you never give out the entire message. Doing so would be a direct contradiction to the way this medium works. Instead you are simply starting the conversation. From here the members of your audience will continue the dialog. That’s the whole point of interactive design and marketing.

“We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States.”

That’s a quote from Barack Obama’s 2004 DNC speech. My apologies for injecting a bit of politics here, but if you follow along you’ll see the point I’m trying to illustrate. Let’s look back at the question of “tribes.” If you’ve now broken down all these groups to individuals, then you begin to see how an individual usually belongs to more than one tribe; all these people in different tribes will share specific traits. By providing the start of the conversation and enabling them to continue the story they will deliver it to their own tribe in a way that is relevant to themselves and to their peers.

To sum up, interactive isn’t about telling the entire story. As interactive storytellers we are simply starting the story and enabling others to share, evolve, and contribute to that story in ways that can’t be achieved through traditional mediums.

I plan to delve more into this topic over the coming weeks, but I wanted to make this point upfront since to me it’s the foundation of anything that exists in this medium now and in the future.

I’ve grouped the following resources into what I think are logical levels and disciplines, but as you might know or come to realize, Flash has a lot of gray areas. Please browse through the topics that appeal on your interests versus simply focusing on a specific discipline.

Some websites and listservs are listed in multiple sections because they are appropriate for multiple disciplines within Flash – this goes back to the “gray areas” I was talking about.

General Flash

General Flash references are primarily for the entry-level people. These are basically primer resources that introduce you to the Flash IDE, and give you best practice approaches early on. It also never hurts for seasoned Flash users to thumb through or troll these resources. There are usually things you’ll see here that you may have forgotten, or come across something that gets you to look at an old tool in a new way to accomplish something different.

Foundation Flash CS3 for Designers, by Tom Green
This book is an excellent foundation book for anyone that wants to get started in Flash. Tom Green does an excellent job of walking you through using the application in such a natural way that it makes it enjoyable. You don’t find yourself spending too much time “reading the manual.” In my opinion just cracking open an app and playing around is the best way to really learn it, and this book does a good job of letting you do that. You will not become an expert after reading this book by any means, but you will have the right information to get you started in the right direction.

Websites

• FlaskKit – flashkit.com
• Adobe Developer Network – adobe.com/devnet

Design and Manual Animation

The resources that I list here focus on design, character animation, and motion graphic techniques that are useful both inside and outside of Flash. I’ll mark them accordingly, but the reason for this variety is because Flash animation is merely a focused area of this discipline. It’s imperative that you consider yourself an animator before you consider yourself a Flash animator.

The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation, by Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas
Written by a two of the original Disney animators, this book is an essential resource that every animator should read thoroughly. I cannot recommend this book enough, and would consider it required reading for any designer/animator entering the field.

The Animator’s Survival Kit, by Richard Williams
This is another book that doesn’t not focus on Flash, but instead on the discipline of animation. The book focuses on techniques and approaches for honing your craft. Like any valuable animation book, these lessons hold true through any technology.

How to Cheat in Flash CS3: The art of design and animation in Adobe Flash CS3, by Chris Georgenes
I have not read many of the “How to Cheat” titles, but this book by Chris cannot be passed up. Chris began his career in the field of more traditional forms of animation before moving into Flash in it’s earlier days. His techniques are valuable, and can save you a lot of trial and error since he has paved the way for much of what is done today. Most importantly, the tools you learn here are a great foundation upon which you can build. Chris has contributed many articles to the Adobe Developer Center, and has two websites (keyframer.com and mudbubble.com) with plenty of resource material.

Websites

• KeyFramer – keyframer.com
• MudBubble – mudbubble.com
• Adobe Developer Connection – adobe.com/devnet

ListServs

• FlashNewbie – Mailing list for new users of Flash

ActionScript, Programmed Animation and Interactivity

Essential ActionScript 3.0 by Colin Moock
This book is the latest in a long line of key ActionScript books that have always sat at the core of any Flash developer’s bookshelf. The original books, called Definitive Guides focused on fundamentals, touched on some best practices, and finished off with the second half of the books being a thorough reference tool. As the language has evolved the books became “essentials” that covered the fundamentals, best practices, and inner workings while leaving the Flash documentation and live docs as the main reference material. As ActionScript has become a more complete and sophisticated programming language, this approach has been the better option. With third party libraries, and new packages continually being added to the language writing the book using the old approach would have simply left users with an incomplete manual. This approach allows readers to get a deeper understanding of the inner workings of the language, and still remains the first book choice for anyone entering the discipline of Flash development.

Foundation Actionscript 3.0 Animation: Making Things Move!, by Keith Peters
These books have, in my opinion, always been some of the best ActionScript for animation books that I’ve read. They cover everything from the basics, all the way to such complex topics as inverse kinematics. All examples in this book use best practice approaches in the programming examples. Another key thing to point out about this book is the approach taken when looking at how to create animation through scripting – calculating position by evaluating time instead of using frame-based animation (if this doesn’t make sense now it will after you’re more familar with the topic). This book has done a very good job of picking up where Robert Penner’s book (below) left off in ActionScript 1.0. Anyone interested in getting heavily into ActionScript animation should consider reading this book. It’s a great way of giving you starting points from which you can continue to experiment and explore.

Programming Macromedia Flash MX, by Robert Penner
This book is a classic, and helped many people look at Flash animation through the eyes of a physicist and mathematician. What eventually became the Flash Tween and easing classes was originally Robert Penner’s animation classes. Based on key math principals many Flash designers and developers were able to quickly make realistic and reusable animation. The design community simultaneously started flexing their brain muscle by pulling out old algebra, trig, and calc techniques while hearing their grade school teachers in their minds telling them “I told you that you’d need this stuff.” The code examples are dated, but the practice and process are still very relevant today.

Websites

• ActionScript Org – actionscript.org
• KeyFramer – keyframer.com
• Community MX – communitymx.com

ListServs

• FlashNewbie – Mailing list for new users of Flash
• FlashCoders – High traffic mailing list for programmers using Macromedia Flash. The topics discussed here are advanced.
• FLASHmacromedia – This moderated discussion group is for Macromedia Flash users who want to use Flash more effectively for building websites, games, apps, etc.

Advanced Programming Topics

ActionScript 3.0 Design Patterns: Object Oriented Programming Techniques, by William Sanders and Chandima Cumaranatunge
This book is for the Flash programmer. At this point you should be very comfortably with the topics of classes, packages, polymorphism, and other fundamentals of Object-Oriented programming. This book takes these topics and begins putting them in to the context of design patterns. Written for the advanced programmer these patterns are essential in building frameworks, and packages designed for flexibility and longevity. I really enjoyed this book as it introduced methods not discussed in other ActionScript books.

Object-Oriented ActionScript 3.0 by Todd Yard, Peter Elst, and Sas Jacobs
Another great OOP book. This book, like Design Patterns, discuss some of the more advanced topics. This one, however, has a lower entry-point so it may be easier for users to transition into these topics by first reading this book. This one also provides more practical examples that you can begin using in your existing projects.

Advanced Flash Project Topics

Flash to the Core, by Joshua Davis
This book is now out of print, but if you can get your hands on it then do so. Like Penner’s book the code in this book is dated because it uses older versions of the language; this doesn’t matter though. It’s more a book of inspiration, and a way of getting you to stop thinking in traditional ways typically dictated by the majority of the Flash development community. Typical thought and approach in Flash leads only to mediocrity. Joshua Davis does a great job reminding readers of this in the book.

MTIV: Process, Inspiration and Practice for the New Media Designer, by Hillman Curtis
Not so much a Flash book as it is a book from a well know Flash expert, and video artist. In this book Hillman shares his process and methods as a designer. Written more as a narrative, this book also does a great job of getting you to focus on how to approach your projects. Like Joshua’s book and all great books that discuss artistic creativity, it reminds you that you always need to get out of your comfort zone and really explore to create remarkable work.

There are of course plenty of other books and resources out there, but I tried to keep this focused on a few key materials that I am confident in recommending. I will continue to add/remove/modify this list so that it’s up-to-date.

What are resources and references are you using learn Flash or even to stay up-to-date? Please feel free to share it here, and I’ll certainly include it on this list if it turns out to be a great resource or reference.

I’m going to give a slight nod to the designers on this one because less and less of them seem to be practicing the latter, albeit, because of the influence of the former group. The position I take on the matter is this: The timeline is great aspect of Flash that should never be discounted as an archaic tool left over from the application’s early days.

The claim that everything should be placed on the stage using ActionScript sounds great in theory, but in practice falls short on several points. There are certain artistic attributes that simply cannot be reproduced efficiently and effectively with ActionScript. I’m not going to go into all of the specifics here, but by using the timeline for artwork, positioning, and certain animation techniques designers and developers can free themselves of trying to accomplish the same things (unsuccessfully on many occasion) through code.

It seems like some people have forgotten or maybe never realized that Flash (or FutureSplash for those of us who have been around long enough) began as a vector animation tool. The timeline has always been essential to the application. If there is anything that Macromedia and now Adobe have fallen short on regarding the IDE, it’s that they haven’t continued to enhance the timeline capabilities enough with subsequent releases.

This doesn’t mean that people should always forgo ActionScript for use of the timeline either. As a matter of fact the more complex, dynamic and intriguing interactive pieces can only be achieved by using ActionScript. Flash expands the interactive capabilities exponentially with each version of the language, and ActionScript 3.0 with Flash Player 9 has been a huge leap forward in further expanding those capabilities.

In the end most work that relies solely on ActionScript will have dynamics and smart interaction, but can usually feel cold and hard. Work that relies completely on the timeline can be incredibly artistic and the motion inspiring, but the shelf life isn’t very long. Repeat visits don’t have the same impact because the results are already known and even expected – the initial luster fizzles.

Browsing around the web today shows countless examples of inspiring interactive Flash work. More often than not the great pieces that leave an impact on their audience are combining the two aspects of Flash harmoniously.

Both designers and developers should be using a thoughtful, creative combination of both the timeline and ActionScript to accomplish things that even Adobe themselves couldn’t have imagined.