Programming and music are generally not two things that you place into the same field of thought, but just to show the capabilities of Flash (which Clover uses for the Greenhouse as well) we thought we would highlight a few tuneful pieces of software.
Firstly we have Audiotool which is an entirely Flash based interface designed to emulate music hardware and produce some wicked-awesome beats. You gotta appreciate the degree of detail that these guys put into this thing… it takes a while to load but it is worth the wait.
On a more interactive end there is a super simple program called BallDroppings which is pretty addicting, but can be pretty annoying for those listening around you. This one isn’t made with Flash, but is still really fun.
Apparently car companies have gotten in on typography stuff and they are using their cars to help in the production process (with a little help from two typographers and one interactive artist). Pierre & Damien from pleaseletmedesign.com and Zachary Lieberman are the three dudes who collaborated with Toyota to make this impressive font. The video will tell you the rest of the story. Enjoy.
Typography and font production have been a huge interest of mine for the past few years and when I get the chance to talk about design I really enjoy highlighting the often overlooked world of typography. You can enjoy more of my thoughts on what I regard as great design by tuning here on a regular basis. – Wes
Through the last few decades we have seen type design evolve from a simple, representational system into a “craft” with various means and tools being used to create new, unique typography. History is a font that breaks the conventions of traditional font production, by utilizing an integral element of design software known as layers. Through the use of 21 different typefaces placed on top of one another the user can create a unique assortment by simply combining each layer. Curious as to how it works?… Try it out yourself with the History Remixer
Some of you might be labeling this as “old news”, however I am still amazed by the innovation, thought and production that went into this font. For a more in-depth look at History visit Typotheque.com (and you can a free pamphlet) Enjoy.
We have a friend, Shelene, who recently started a cool organization we thought you might like to know about. It’s called Skip1 and the idea is that you skip something (lunch, dinner, golf game, whatever) and give the money to a child in need.
The big day for their first event is September 1st. Check it out and see if you’d like to be a part of it. 100% of all public donations go to food and water projects around the world.
Every once in a while we like to highlight a beautiful website created by one of the Clover family. Most of the ones we really like are highlighted by our Green Thumbs page, but every so often we like to bring a bunch of attention to a spectacular website.
Jarret and Jeanne Stevens are planting a church in downtown Chicago in the spring of 2010. They went with Clover for their website, and absolutely rocked the Epaga site design. Thanks for making us proud, guys.
Mail Chimp version 4 is coming out this weekend… and I realized I should mention how awesome this service is, in case you haven’t heard of it.
MailChimp.com let’s you send emails out to big ol’ lists of people kind of like Constant Contact or one of their other competitors. The funny thing is, they’re nothing like their competitors.
I’d like to go out on a limb and say that Mail Chimp is the Clover of the email world. They’re over-the-top casual, easy to use, and they still manage to pack in a ton of features. I was about to list some of their key features, but I realized it would make this post a lot longer. So instead, I’ll just tell you to check them out for yourself:
I have a confession to make. In all the years that I’ve been learning from other people on the internet, I don’t think I’ve once given anything back. Ok, I do answer a lot of programming questions from strangers over email, but as far as contributing code to the online community, I’ve been pretty silent.
I think maybe it’s because I’ve never wanted to publicly admit that I’m a nerd. Or maybe it’s that I’ve never felt like I had time to talk about programming when I had so much of it to do.
Either way, it’s about to change. Nerd glory, here I come.
(Disclaimer: If you’re not an ActionScript3 programmer, you probably won’t care to read past this sentence).
Last night at about 11pm I decided to tackle a problem that had been bugging me for years: How did the amazing programmer Robert Hodgin create the beautiful glowing curves on version 7 of flight404.com? (Yeah, I know it’s been keeping you up at night, too).
I started working on it and then got a little side-tracked… but I did manage to create some nice code that I couldn’t find anywhere else on the internet. So in rare form, I decided to share it.
It’s a class for AS3 that draws bezier curves. Or more precisely, curves with any number of control points. It’s based on the simplified curved lines from Grant Skinner, but I changed it so it doesn’t start and end with a straight line segment, and more importantly, I made it a really simple class for anyone to use.
The example code does a lot of stuff… and hopefully it’s valuable for any budding coders who are starting to ask the complicated questions that come up after that first Hello World plateau.
Here are some things you might get from it:
- Bezier Curves
- How to structure classes and objects
- A bit of TweenLite animation
- Full-browser flash (with minimum height and width)
- Drawing a background gradient that fills the screen
- Handling browser resizes
- Creating and using a custom event class
- Keyboard events
- Simple physics with gravity/magnetism/friction
Sometimes it’s easy to get in a designing funk. For some, a simple brilliant color palette can kick-start a design block. Here’s a great resource for a little inspiration: check out Adobe’s resource, Kuler.
This can especially be a great resource if you’re looking for some inspiration on you Clover site’s color palette. Spend some time and mess around on the site… It’s a bunch of fun.
