My x-wing is broken. Everyone around me is zooming around in their x-wings and mine won’t leave the hangar bay. I ask myself, “Why am I sitting in the basement of FITC Toronto, bummed that I can’t get my x-wing to fly?!” One Reason:

Papervision3D - a.k.a. “PV3D”, a.k.a. “the Flash 3D Engine that Could”.

If you haven’t heard of it, you will. Papervision3D is “an open source 3D engine for the Flash platform,” developed by a small core of programmers, with a growing community of Flash developers, programmers, and 3D visual artists. It’s the next step in interactivity, entertainment, communication in the world of flash. Not “cheat 3D”, we’re talking taking 3D models, importing them into flash, rendering them, interacting with them, z-sorting, interaction, and more…all in a light-weight platform with a 90+% penetration rate in the computer-using world. Let me simplify:

It’s the hoverboard.

I first heard about it at my local FlashCoder’s New York Group I go to (every Wednesday at Think Cafe!), when Seb Lee-Delisle came to visit and give us the low-down on how to build 3D flash from scratch. We talked a bit after that, and he clued me in to the PV3D team. After that, plugged into the Papervision mailing list.

I lurked. I tried. I failed. I tried again. I failed better.

Then I heard John Grden was coming to FITC Toronto for a marathon weekend of Papervision Training! Square360 booked my ticket, and I took a nail-gripping 2-hour flight to Toronto, and crashed in a hostel right in the middle of Kensington at 2 a.m., and began a journey of vast amounts of caffeine, swimming graphics, and 72 hours of high-octane programming. There were 3D artists, programmers, designers, developers, young, old, and all eager. But I couldn’t get my wing to fly…

Ken (an x-wing co-pilot doing donuts) pointed to my x-wing, and said, “Try swapping MovieMaterial with MovieAssetMaterial”.

And BAM I’m flying with everyone else!

Next Up: a 3D Drink Display for Bar Friday

Here’s a taste:

Tags: Musings by Dominic
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Dear Verizon DSL‚

I got your message. I’m both nervous and excited; no one has ever offered me Price for Life before. I’ve thought long and hard about it and I feel ready to take the plunge. I am ready to commit to you for the rest of my internet life! Please forgive my initial hesitation. I was slightly taken aback when you proudly announced the requirement of a 2-year service commitment before we could be together. I just thought that since we are going to be faithful to each other for the next 40+ years, what’s the point in bickering over 2 years. Unless of course, you don’t really love me and only want me for my money.

Since I’m in it for the long haul anyway, I’ll sign the agreement. Have your 2 years. At least I’ll have internet for the rest of my life and we can be together. Besides, there is nothing wrong with 40-year old technology (No, please, you can leave your 8-tracks at home). But in 2047, when our grandchildren are flying their Hoverboards to school, our neighbor is bragging about the 240″ Plasma 3D she just had installed in her family room and the rest of the world is downloading at 768,000,000,000 Kbps on their brain implants, you are still going to be giving me 768 Kbps? You can’t really call it High-Speed Internet at that point, can you? So is that the plan? To gradually just stop trying and until we barely even need each other anymore?

And there was that one thing you said on your website:

We’ll keep your High Speed Internet rate the same for as long as we offer the service to your location

Oh I see: You can decide to see other people but I can’t? What is it? Am I not attractive enough for you? I could lose some weight, really I could. No, its the hair. You hate my hair. I can change, just gimme another chance. I thought we were going to go all the way. FOR LIFE. Why are you already looking for an out? I thought it might be that you have issues getting emotionally close to someone. That is until I read this:

termination or disconnection may result in an early termination fee.

So you are going to leave me AND take my money? Why don’t I just sign over my paychecks and custody of the kids to you right now and save us both the time? You know what? Fine. Go! Just go. Take your internet service back to your mamma! You were never that fast anyway!

And just so you know I HAVE BEEN DOWNLOADING WITH FIOS THIS WHOLE TIME!

Tags: Musings by Brian
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Just this once and in honor of Halloween, Bar Friday will be open on a Wednesday.

Join us for Spooky Spirits just for grown-up goblins:

We’ll be serving up a little black magic in the form of cocktails made with vodka that’s as dark as night.

[Read more →]

Tags: Bar Friday by Nancy
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Looking back, I’m surprised she didn’t hit me.

“What’s typography?” I asked the nice interviewer for the MFA program at the School of Visual Arts. This was the first thing I said after she rather breathlessly informed me that only a thorough knowledge of the subject, something she declared to be the most vital, potent element of graphic design, would admit me to their fine institution. I like to think I’m smarter these days.

Fast forward three years, and I’m finally studying this most awesome subject post-post graduate at the MFA program that did admit me, the Design and Technology department at the Parsons School of Design. Judith Landsman is the teacher, and she’s informative, tireless and demanding, all the sort of things one wants in an instructor. My design background was largely in illustration (due to my work background being primarily in 2D animation), and even that was mostly self-taught. I like to think my relative lack of formal training and sparse background in most aspects of graphics design, especially in Typography puts me in a unique position that allows me to see things with a fresh, untainted eye. I heard it’s this sort of magical thinking that gives kitteh fur that fluff.

Behold a few things I’ve learned so far as a typography/graphics design tadpole:

1) Tangents

Possibly the biggest thing I’ve had to unlearn as an illustrator and fully embrace as a graphics designer is the tangent.

Tangents have no place in Illustration. Illustrators hate tangents. What illustrators call “tangents” are illustrative lines that meet up but do not intersect. Imagine three human subjects standing next to each other in an illustration. As an illustrator, one would not:
Make them all the same height
Make them all the same width
Make them all equally spaced apart
Make elements in their dress/features/etc line up with anything else in the picture if at all possible. For example, if you could draw a straight line from, say, the bottom of a window in the window and have it line up perfectly to the cuff of someone’s shirt sleeve, that is a very bad thing.

If you were creating a graphic design, with type or anything else, you would want to do all the things I just listed. Three columns of text? Make em’ all the same height, or at least all the same width. And if you can’t do either of those, at least make sure all the elements within each column correspond in some way-type treatment, spacing, etc. While having multiple elements line up in an illustration would be a definite no-no, in graphics design and typography, it is a definite yes-yes.

Next post I will talk about negative space. Considering I’ve only taken been taking typography class for two weeks, I don’t currently know enough about negative space in type to comment about its differences from negative space in illustration. So in the meantime I will leave you with this awesome link my friend Ritwik Dey gave me on typography:
http://ilovetypography.com/

Tags: Musings by Rainne
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