hudeywho.com

Renaissance Tech Guy

hudey123 — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 20:20:13 +0000

There comes a time when you need to make a choice. For me, 2012 is that time.

For the last 11 years I’ve been swimming in a bunch of shallow pools. Web development, graphic design, banner ad design and development (Flash, Actionscript, Photoshop), customer service, phone system installation and administration, CRM administration, web server administration, among others. I was the Renaissance Man in my company. Whenever something came up that no one had experience with, I agreed to take on the project. I loved being that guy because I love to learn new things and I have this huge propensity for learning technical concepts and procedures very quickly. I enjoyed learning to write a press release one day and then configuring Microsoft Dynamics CRM the next.

But what happens when you’re the Renaissance tech guy is that you float forever on the fringes of the company org chart. You’re not really a part of the marketing department or the IT department even though you’re doing important projects for them both. You’re not really a system administrator even though you’re managing the phone system and you’re not a developer even though you’re helping customer service update their member database. You’re forever learning bits and pieces of all aspects of the company but you’re not involved in making decisions for any of them.

I spent the last five or six years without a job title. I was Creative Director when I built all of the banner ad assets and designed all of the graphics. I was Web Developer when I was designing or developing a new site. I was API Integration Specialist when I wrote documentation for our API and helped customers implement it on their own web sites. But a proper business card would have to say something like “Wearer of Many Hats” or “Renaissance Tech Guy.”

2012 is when I will plunge into the deep end. No more water wings or inflatable life preservers. The pool might be filled with HTML/CSS. It might be overflowing with WordPress. It might be full of Windows/Linux web servers and phone systems. Regardless what it contains I will work hard to find the right one and jump in ready to swim the 1200 meter freestyle.

CSS3D Image Rollovers

hudey123 — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 17:50:04 +0000

I’ve started doing some research for easy methods to move banner ads into the HTML realm and away from Flash. Barely started the process and I’ve already come across this great demo by Chris Heilmann. The demo is here. There are several CSS3 tricks here that would make for a pretty cool banner ad.

Crisis Averted… back to normal

hudey123 — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 05:41:47 +0000

A Favicon Blunder

hudey123 — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 22:22:21 +0000

I just noticed this today. I guess I’ll have to rebuild my favicon to use the H instead of the arrow.

TweenNano: A Banner Ad Designer’s Best Friend

hudey123 — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 07:34:18 +0000

I want to introduce you to Greensock.com. Greensock is the site for a family of Flash Actionscript tweening engines that are super lightweight and extremely easy to use. As a banner ad developer you need this tool because it gives you the ability to script beautiful animations in your ads while adding only 1.6k to your compiled SWF file if you’re using Actionscript 3.0. If you’re not using AS 3.0, it’s time to start! If you don’t have a lot of art in your SWF file you can even step up to TweenLite (4.7k in the compiled SWF file) but I have found that using TweenNano to script animation chains is super easy, super lightweight, and very professional looking.

Once you download TweenNano and add it to your Actionscript 3.0 classpath this is how you import it into your FLA:

import com.greensock.TweenNano;
import com.greensock.easing.Strong;

The first line imports the tweening classes into your file, the second one imports the Strong family of easing equations. I like this one, but there are others to choose from.

After that moving a movie clip on-screen is as easy as typing:

TweenNano.to(myClip, 1, {x:300, alpha:.5, ease:Strong.easeOut});

This breaks down to meaning you want to use TweenNano to move movie clip ‘myClip’ over a duration of 1 second to an X coordinate of 300 and an alpha value of .5 and use a Strong.easeOut easing equation on the movement. The result is beautiful and fluid.

Let’s say you want to move the clip across the screen from x:0 to x:300, then have it stop and fade out. Just chain two tweens together like this:

TweenNano.to(myClip, 1, (x:300, ease:Strong.easeOut)};
TweenNano.to(myClip, 1, {delay:1, alpha:0, ease:Strong.easeOut, overwrite:false)};

This means that the first tween will send the clip to an X value of 300 over a duration of 1 second. The second line says to fade the same clip to alpha 0 over 1 second but delay the animation for 1 second (giving time for the first animation to complete), and NOT to overwrite any other animations already assigned to the movie clip ‘myClip.’ I don’t think it can get any easier than that, and that includes using basic timeline animation.

TweenNano will help your animations look more professional, it will save having to animate on the timeline, and it will decrease the size of your compiled SWF files over using Flash’s built-in tweening classes. What is there NOT to love about that?

Check it out at Greensock.com.

Buffer

Welcome!

hudey123 — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 06:20:41 +0000

Thanks for visiting. This is my first post of what I hope to be many posts on the topics of online advertising, banner ads, ad design, and ad development technologies.