Inspiration Time... Leo Burnett is an artsy web and graphic design firm whose web site is centered in a 3D interface based on the 'Leo Burnett' signature. Its hard to tell if the namesake is an actual person, but either way the personallity he represents is successfully used to express the business objective of the firm via interactive quotes and even the mouse. The user's pointer is optionally replaced with a large black pencil that shows "big ideas come out of big pencils." I was almost unable to stop wondering through the site checking out interesting Canadian Adwork/Artwork. Check out the Visa commercials for an indie style video portfolio. Also try to stop drawing with the huge pencil. Then take your new inspiration to start up you own portfolio.

Thanks David Chartier

As some of you may know, New Orleans was a major center for the creative arts with thousands of musicians and visual artists finding their muse in the center of the city. New Orleans was also home to thousands of artists who are now displaced for at least the next three months. The Chopping Block design studio has started a website with listings around the country offering space to live and work to all designers and artists who have lost their studio. Though most Flashers will only need an internet connection, some of us would really appreciate the space to sketch out ideas and get back into the swing of things. Though I am not in need of a work space presently (thanks to my family and my wife's family), there are many others who are desperately in need of help right now. If you have room in your studio or even just an extra space in your house, head over to the Displaced Designer site and submit your information.

via the Design Weblog and John Nack

Latest Katrina update: University of New Orleans is asking all students and staff to contact them

It's always nice with a new marketing campaign starts to get us to set to companies get it on... er the Sprint-Nextel merger, oh why didn't they change their name to the obvious S--tel... Well Sprint is getting the marketing into full swing with new commercials portraying how the merge will not effect you, but will give you new options and possibly better service. The videos are being distributed via your favorite format (mine too), Flash Video. Check out the fun for yourself.

via SprintPCSInfo.com

Latest Katrina update: My best friend is found alive and well with his boss in Donaldsonville.

Blog sibling AdJab found an interesting story over at the Washington Post that says those unbelievably annoying floating advertisements are actually working for the companies that use them. One bank even saw so much of an increase in new accounts during their floater they decided to run more. Who is clicking through on these ads? If its not you there are options, but Flashers maynot like them. One is FlashBlock the plugin for Firefox that blocks Flash content and replaces it with a filler denoting the Flashed area. On the other side of the coin is this little tutorial at designnewz that will tell you exactly how to make a floater of your very own.

via AdJab

Toyota presents first full Flash 8 only website for major corporation. They have created a special translation of their Japan specific Hybrid City website that requires Flash Player 8, but the tag at the bottom of splash page says: "It is translated to English only for the Macromedia demonstration." Entering the presentation shows you exactly why the site needs Flash 8. The full screen presentation (with hilarious English dubbing of course) includes use of the new Flash video codec plus video blurring and alpha techniques. Its possible this presentation is just a direct conversion from a Shockwave (Director made) file to Flash 8 like the playdoCAM project. Also this really isn't that strange considering the amount of Flash already used by Toyota across their other sites.

via H1DD3N.R35OURC3

Here I am telling a friend of mine to try out Toon Boom Studio if he wanted to get into Flash cartoons without cracking open Flash and what you know, Toon Boom software wins an Emmy. They won a Primetime Emmy Engineering Award to be exact from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for Opus, "Animation Software Solution for Traditional Studios." Opus is a 2d and 3d animation tool that gives major animation studios like Disney and Fox the ability to turn over custom and professional animation in formats for film, TV, HDTV and the web. Opus is also the big brother to Toon Boom Studio the third party animation solution for Flash based fun and the little brother for Harmony (a much more advanced animation solution that includes advanced digital drawing and lip sync features).

Yesterday John Dowdell blogged about the new Flash 8 video capabilities mixed with new bitmap caching and how Andreas Rehnberg has created a new piece of game software called the playdoCAM. Rehnberg uses Flash's Camera() object and new bitmap caching to detect pixel change and control games, light fires, and more. FlashMagazine looked at it and remembered a simple bubble pop game made by Protozoo that detects sound to blow bubbles and dark pixels to pop them. While Rehnberg immediately thought he should sell his take on this idea for game and ad development Protozoo is giving us the code.

The Protozoo zip yields the key with the line: new _global.flash.display.BitmapData( 320, 240 ). This gives Flash access to a cached bitmap screenshot of the Camera() object stream that can be checked for pixel shade (for the bubble pop) or compared frame to frame for change (motion detection). Let's take this a step further and create a site that is fully motion navigated. Limit your motion detection to a specific space. Photograph your user's face or hand or whatever and use the colors found as a joystick.

Want to learn more? Protozoo thinks BitmapData may come from Director's Lingo programming language and from what Rehnberg says about his inspiration, I'll bet a Director programming guide would be very useful.

Viewing the Flash will require Flash Player 8

Ryan Hornbeck has written a short Google search sourced article on why some people (not us of course) can't stand Flash and avoid it like the plague. I found it interesting that Flash is seen by some as the source of their headaches, when the real problem is bad design. Sure you can create a full Flash site that annoys all your users, but I can create a full AJAX or CSS or whatever site that also annoys all of my users, yet there aren't too many out there looking to stop using the web (for now, just wait for 2.0). Like Hornbeck, I agree with Keith Robinson that the issue here is with the designers and developers. We see Flash as a way to expand our horizons and some of us put thing on the web that can only be classified as art. Unfortunately there are others who jump face first into bad design and throw up on their sites (causing their users to do the same). In the end I also agree with John Dowdell's conclusion that best practices need to be developed and followed in order to create good sites in Flash. The release of Flash Basic may help push these standards on the new generation of designers, hopefully some of the rest of us can pick it up too. Whay do you think?

via John Dowdell; image from the Tombstone Generator

The keyword here is free. The Inquirer (not a rumor mongering tech blog like Engadget, but a rumor mongering news site) reported yesterday that MiniClip has signed a new agreement with Massive Incorporated to distribute advertising within their Flash based games. I figure this will be made possible by loading external images or small Flash files inside of the games or by requiring game developers to include an advertiser as part of the theme of the game. It most likely all MiniClip games with be wrapped in a presented by MiniClip.com and paid for by so and so. The good thing is the games stay free. The bad thing is you have to sit through some sort of ad just to play solitare. But the games are free, so you get what you pay for. I think this can only be a good thing for MiniClip and will help keep this Flash game site around to promote Flash game developers around the world.

Our blog-brother DownloadSquad has a link to a tutorial up that shows how to stop those annoying popup ads called from inside Flash (or other plugins) on sites you visit via Firefox. Careful how you use this though, because you could block some pop-ups you actually want to see, like that cool art gallery. This is all well and good, but it does nothing to stop the current hassle of my life: Float-Overs. These annoying floating Flash-ified layers of ad-vomit that seem to be infesting all sorts of news sites are not blocked via pop-up blocker because they use the joy of HTML to hide and show advertisements via div tags. The site owners that use these for ads just haven't seen the latest survey, I guess.

Hi-res.net created and released a banner ad art exhibition in June 2000 and the digital media art class I was taking then featured it as a way to think about the web as more than business cards, newspapers and advertising. Now let's return to the site and notice that most of the design concepts are still in use today. This anti advertisement web-based art exhibition encourages the creative mind and hope to take banner advertising to a higher level. While browsing the site again, after five years, I found some design style that are still in use today and some Flash banner design concepts that have become wide spread. For example Dirtbox's banners on the fourth floor of the exhibition use the now popular flash layering method that allows a design to jump out of its boundaries and take over a page.