This was a fantastically fun job and a chance to work on a very stylish comic. I had the opportunity to put together a flash trailer for The Faceless: A Terry Sharp Story, and really liked the work of Adrian Salmon and writing by Robert Tinnell. It is very much like a 60’s spy/detective story with fantastic color and biting wit. When Bob approached me about an online comic, I was excited. When he mentioned that he would like it to be flash-animated and initially hosted on Fangoria.com, I freaked. We set some guidelines as far as how animated it would be, and tried to be by-the-panel to maintain the comic feel. I also set about lettering the frames and bringing them in as semi-transparent .pngs. As the strips go on, I was progressively more ambitious about the animated sequences. This reached near critical mass when I pulled a truck out of a panel and animated it (Day 20, 21 & 22). (more…)
This is/was a site that I developed to showcase my work in 2005. I had a few real issues with this site which ultimately led me to discontinue development shortly after Feb. 2006. That coincides with being hired at COMAR, Inc. The 2 moves and about 3 other projects kept me from any real additions after that. My biggest issue with this type of development is the lack of easy update. If I wanted to change the size of an image, or change text, I would have to launch Flash and then find the file, hunt the text and then go through the export process. I have since decided that any further Flash development will be using XML porting from a dynamic back end like Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal or another CMS.
I was asked to show some of my web work this week by a prospective client. I realized that most of my work has been fixing other peoples sites and I wouldn’t want to be represented by those. However, there are a few from the late 90’s and ‘01 that I think show an understanding of the web as it was…
Signs by Brother Bill - One of my responsibilities as the manager of a sign shop in Fairmont, WV was to build and maintain at a very low file weight, a business web site with examples of our work.
Best Western of Summersville, WV - One of a few Hotel sites that I designed for a family of owner/operators. This hearkens back in the heady days of 800×600 and table based design. I love that bright yellow and blue.
Sixty Dollars | The Band Web Site - Ahead of the curve, Sixty dollars the band was ready to move their press kit online to not just HTML but flash it up. I was preparing to teach flash at college level and used this site as an example of multimedia, dynamic loading and embedding javascript popups(which consequently didn’t make it to the final site).
These are a small cross section of Pre Xhtml / CSS web sites that I have built. I am in process of 3 at the moment, with more coming soon.
The Living & the Dead is a Graphic Novel that was written by Bob Tinnell and Todd Livingston and was Illustrated By Micah Farritor. At the request of Bob, I developed the logo, the look and feel based on Victorian Horror paperback cover styles. The Cover art was fantastic to work with and all I had to do was get out of the way.
I was responsible for the interior design, including using pieces of art created by Micah for the book. There were several pieces that I liked very much, but I used this for the primary title page. I also added an “aged” look to the pages and used an unusual typeface for the text. For most of the project, we wanted to eschew the typical comic look for something a bit more classic, while maintaining a darkness. To view the Flash trailer I designed for it, go here… and click on the “view the exclusive trailer.”
Digg.com has a major limitation… lack of real tags. The most limiting things about this lack of feature is the inability to recognize connections between categories, track memes, get a deep understanding of current users/posters and ADD categories. There is almost daily a photo that makes it to the front page and the body will contain a universal gripe that there is no image section (at least not that the time of writing this). (more…)
