Wind4D Wins Design Competition!

Two months ago I submitted Wind4D to Communication Art's Annual Interactive Design Competition. Last week I found out that my submission was selected as one of the winners of the Information Design category (I think there are 5 categories and about 8 winners per category). This means that the application will get linked to from the competition winners' page on the Communcation Arts website. And more importantly, it will be published in the September/October '08 issue of the magazine. Yay!

Here's a link to the archived version of Wind4D, as it will appear in the magazine.

Urban Zen Foundation Website

I just finished a freelance stint at Cool Gray Seven, a small design agency in New York. I was working there, alongside some great folks, on a website for Urban Zen Foundation -- a non-profit organization founded by Donna Karen of DKNY. Not only is this a great cause, it's also a beautiful site, filled with gorgeous photography.

Tetris.TXT

Five weeks into the semester, I thought it would be cool to show my Flash ActionScript students how much can be done using only what we had learn up to then (variables, Arrays, if...else and for loops) and a Text Field. So I built this bare bone tetris game, where all the graphics are drawn by populating a text field with String characters. This may just be the most efficient way to to overwhelm a group of design students, but I still figured there are some geeks out there who appreciate a Flash tetris game that doesn't use any MovieClips.

- Left, right and down arrow keys move the shape
- Z and X rotate the shape

Download source file

Vines

Last year I assigned the students in my Flash class a project, to create a parametric animation. They had to base it on parameters such as mouse movement, random numbers or the current time. In the process of coming up with this assignment, I slipped into the rabbit hole of time waisting through experimentation and made this little gadget. Just click and drag the mouse anywhere within the window and let your mind drifts to a vine-covered garden of a charming house somewhere in the Italian countryside.




But wait.... The story continues. Fast forward 3 weeks. January 7th -- exactly one year ago actually. An extremely foolish episode takes place, whereby I leave my bag - with my laptop inside - in a car.
Night time. Brooklyn. Barely a soul in the streets. A car is broken into. A laptop is stolen, and with it, a considerable amount of unbacked-up work. Including (you guessed it) this small fruit of my labors. All that survived of it is this SWF file, having been put on a server. The sources are all gone, and with them the ability to make changes to this animation. Like for example, making the "canvas" area bigger. Well actually... there are ways, but who has the time?

So our story ends with a moral: watch where you leave your stuff, and backup your work often. Actually, never mind. Morals suck. They just make you feel worse when your stuff gets stolen. Unfortunately sometimes that's the only way to learn a lesson.

Trading Floor Ticker

The New York Stock Exchange is looking to give their trading floor a "face lift" by replacing the 80s-looking LED tickers with an array of slick, huge (36"x24") plasma monitors. A few months ago I was hired to make this quick mock-up to illustrate the potential amount of information that could be animated across 30 feet worth of pixels.

Wind4D

I recently finished creating a visualization application that displays time-based and location-based data in one integrated view. It's called Wind4D.

For now, it reports forecast data of weather, wind and waves in the New York region. Still, I think the same methodology can be applied to other kinds of data, such as financial maps. Is there such thing as financial maps (other than SmartMoney's)?

Hello World

Welcome to my blog. This is where I shall post anything I wish to share.
To see some of my professional work, check out my portfolio site.