EXPLORATION OF DESIGN AND NEW MEDIA TECHNOLOGY

CLUB PENGUIN

http://www.clubpenguin.com/

This blog is a combination of design and new media exploration not to mention SEO and marketing brilliance to drive hits to the site. Leave it to the Imagineers of Disney to come up with the ultimate social networking site. If you have been to any of the Disney theme parks you will notice a common thread in the design of Club Penguin. After you join, you choose a penguin, and of course there are plenty of hair, color, clothes and accessory combinations to choose from so you can personalize your character to represent yourself or alter ego. Next you choose a user name, and you are off to adventureland. Your penquin goes to the theme park so you feel like you are there with all the other penguins waddling around that are also currently online in the virtual theme park. So at any given time there is usually a few hundred penguins visiting the park in different clothes, hair, personalities, etc. There are several different areas of themes to choose from. In each area are various games you can play and activities to participate in. Penguins traverse from place to place using a site map. Once they are in their desired area members use their mouse to move their penguin around. Each penguin has their name on the screen, and if you click on it a picture and description is displayed. Almost every theme area includes a lounge for the penguins just to hang out and chat in. The cool part is any penguin can go up to any other penguin and start a conversation using instant messaging. By representing all the users in the style of Club Penguin this new media technology gives you the feeling that you are there. There in one of the Happiest Places On Earth, with all the other happy penguins.

The way the site is designed, you forget you are not in a real theme park. There is The Dock, Ski Hill, Ski Village, The Beach, Cove, Dojo Village, The Town, Ice Rink and more. Each area has different games and themes like a real Disney Theme Park. Your Penguin and pet Puffle can go to Town and dance at the disco, or hang out at the Coffee Shop and read the Penguin News or go upstairs and read a book in the lounge. I went surfing in The Cove, and saved a Puffle in Peril in The Mines. In the Dojo Village it is in a Samuri theme with totally awesome games. There are other penguin members that carry Tour Guide signs who sign up to be tour guides for the newbies at Ski Village. Although the games are a lot of fun to play, it is an incentive to win because if you are a paying member you can earn points to go towards the accessory items you want to obtain for your penguin. First of all, your penguin has an igloo, that you can have other penguin friends over to visit. So of course you need points in order to outfit a really cool pad with a stereo, couch, rugs, pictures, and of course landscape for your yard. The best idea in marketing is the idea of your penguin having a pet Puffle. These cute little furry pets need a place to live, Puffle beds, scratch post, food, water and you name it they have got it stuff. You can bring your Puffle with you throughout the theme park and take it on the rides and to the games. They send you e-mails to remind you to feed your Puffles if you have not cashed in your points to redeem food. They send e-mails to let you know when the new Puffle becomes available so everyone has to have the latest one in their Puffle collection. Of course there is a What’s New newsletter so you can keep up with the latest happenings being offered in the theme park. For instance there was a golden feather hidden in the park and if you found it you got a golden key to cross the river to a secret location. Now there is a big promotion and lots of hype for a new game called Herberts Revenge. There is also a posting area so you can share your club experiences or other things such as what you did for Earth Day. Your penguin can become a secret agent and go on Secret Agent Missions by reporting any penguins that are not behaving as they should.

The fun part of this site is the discovery of it all. You have to discover the hot spots for yourself to find out what clicks and where the games are, but that is part of the wonder of being a kid at a Disney Theme Park. Even though it is virtual you feel like you are in the now and in the experience.

-jv

Got Music for Sale? Try Jinglepunks

This is my site exploration blog:

Got Music? Want exposure?

Try jinglepunks at

www.jinglepunks.com

This is a website that serves artists and people who need music. It has attracted big companies like Walmart and Nissan for music and it provides a marketplace for those with music to sell.

The site is easy to navigate with clear instructions for sending them your works and for buying from the site.

There are galleries showing the products and the musicians. There are forms to send back once filled in.

I discovered it because Daniel Nahmod, www.danielnahmod.com, a composer, musician and vocalist who sells cd’s and appears at many of the “new thought” churches uses the site to sell his music. Some of his material provides background to the “American Pickers” show and others.

Daniel says it is hard for a musician to make a living selling things on his own; but he has managed to do so with a good product, persistence and the help of Jinglepunks.

They offer the benefit of being non-exclusive. You can continue to market & sell your music elsewhere. They have a 50 / 50 split. Half of any licensing fee they get for you music, is yours.

You remain in control of all rights to your music. The initial contract is for one year. And there is NO FEE: No cost to give it a go.

Jingle Punks was launched in the summer of 2008. It was created to fill the void created by stock libraries that refused to deliver relevant and hip content.

Named one of "America's Most Promising Startups" by Business Week in 2009, their client list has grown to include ABC, NBC, Comedy Central, Vh1, MTV, Bravo, TLC, Starz, History Channel and A&E. They also service many of the industry’s top advertising and branding agencies.

At any given moment one of Jingle Punks catchy and unique tunes are being transmitted across the 1000 channel universe and getting lodged into people's brains.

RESOURCES Exploration/ Camaran Khiev

For my last blog i would like to explore different sites in giving people more help as a designer. I found a few good sites that i thought were helpful, if your new to flash and or have questions about it.

Forum:
The first site i found was a forum site. If you have any problems you have the ability to post your questions and get help as soon as possible. They had quite a load of categories to choose from if your not to sure what your looking for. So here is the link to the forum.

Stock Resources:

I found these really cool free stock sites. One of them is categorize by people, plant, animals.. You can search whatever kind of images you need. They have a good amount of pictures for each category and you can check it out here.
The other cool site i found is like photoshop essential, it teaches you how to make different textures and tutorials showing you different elements. Its pretty cool if you want to create your own pictures. This is pretty much the site id go to. You can check it out here.

Flash Tutorial:
If you ever wanted to look for some tutorial sites on flash, i found a pretty neat one to look at. It shows you how to make motion tweens and shape tweens etc..
I checked out one page and they go into depth on how to do stuff and they have pictures showing you what it looks like. It is a very useful site and i recommend it for beginner flash users. Heres the link.

Resources

CGTextures:
http://www.cgtextures.com/

This is one of the web sites that has resources from different types of textures. That can be useful for your projects. You can scroll through the different types of textures to find the one that you want. It has a good categories that help you to create your projects. The quality of the images are really good and look nice.

http://www.partnersinrhyme.com/

You can find many types of sounds from this web site. The sounds they have are pretty good. You can choose different sounds that you need because the variety they have its big.


http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_colors.asp

This web site shows you different ways to use flash and how to make a web site. They have many information about things that will help you to create a better projects. They have information about color, fonts and you can learn the techniques they teach you there.

gif animations:
http://www.gifanimations.com/animation/Index

In this website you can find different types of animation that you need. They are pretty normal ones nothing to fancy but you can find some good ones in here. I like it because it has a good variety to choose from, you can always find something that will work with any project. you can find useful things in here to create something that you might like.

Interactive Multimedia Design

This is my third and most likely last blog. Multimedia today is quite advanced and I can imagine what is coming in the near future. Depending upon your business goals and of course budget multimedia is a very effective and beneficial marketing tool for online games, products presentations, demonstrations, etc. I have decided to share an interactive game created for the California Milk Processor Board to encourage milk consumption. www.gettheglass.com

This website invites visitors to engage and participate in a comically entertaining based Flash game. The game takes you through a series of interactivity where the objective is to "Get the Glass". I had fun here, rolling the dice was cool and deciding the fate of the characters by choosing certain outcomes was interesting. Check it out with a tall glass of milk.

Another effective multimedia example is the website for M&M's, (which go very well with milk). Currently, the television commercials are running a well thought out campaign about voting for your favorite M&M. This ties in directly with there website which allows you to vote and engage in some activity with the M&M characters. Go ahead and vote for your favorite! www.mms.com

Explaration 3

For my last exploration i decided to make it on this website called http://www.embraceyourelement.com/ and its about a energy drink. this energy drink is based on the four elements that are earth, fire, wind, and earth. they animated a bottle for each element and when you click on one it takes you to a brief video describing how they made this energy drink. and when you are in the video you can click on another button to show the ingredients that were used to make that particular energy drink. this website also has a menu where you can turn off/on the sound and to see the website in full screen mode.

Exploration 2

While looking in the internet for cool flash websites i came across a about a new phone from Nokia.
The link for the website is http://www.nokia.co.uk/find-products/all-phones/evolve-microsite-nokia-3110-evolve. I liked this website because it is simple but looks sophisticated, the first thing you see when you enter the website is the new cellphone that Nokia launched. In the main page there are a couple of buttons that link you to different parts of the website. also when you enter this website a cool sound starts and keeps on playing whether you leave the main page and go to the other links. in this website you can also find video, the videos explain what materials nokia used to make the phone and the impact on this phone has on the environment. overall i think this website used flash effectually and also delivers the message.

New Media Exploration - Artist Jonathan Harris

The goal of classic art, poetry and literature has always been to connect with people and to convey an idea, an emotion or a philosophy. The growth of the internet and its ability to interactively engage the viewer with multi-media content, presents new opportunities for connecting with people and digesting the huge amount of information being posted on the web in ways not imagined twenty years ago. There are some creative people are now fashioning new and very innovative ways of sorting through the web's content. Jonathan Harris is one of those people Jonathan's web site can be found at: http://www.number27.org/


The introduction on Jonathan's web page tells what his work is all about - he creates projects that "reimagine how we relate to our machines and to each other."


Karl briefly introduced us to Jonathan Harris' work a few months ago with quick looks at "The Whale Hunt" and "We Feel Fine". I would like to briefly re-visit a small portion of Jonathan Harris' work.

"We Feel Fine" really captured my imagination when I first saw it in class. I thought the concept of trolling the web for blog posts expressing feelings and then creating an interface to interact with, measure, or view those feelings was a very creative concept. The program looks at recent blog posts for the words "I feel" or "I am feeling" and then captures the sentence and categorizes it based upon about 5,000 pre-identified feelings.

You can then sort through the different methods of compiling the data and see the pulse of how the group "feels" at any one time. In the "murmurs" movement one can chase down a feeling based upon its color and see the remainder of the sentence. If the user is interested in the context of the sentence, then a link will take the user to the blog post. The "mobs" page will sort the feelings according to their frequency. The "metrics" page will give you a relative snapshot of the sampled feelings.

Jonathan's work "10 X 10" sorts through the RSS feeds of the BBC, New York Times and CNN to harvest the 100 most frequently used words and images during a day. Those words and images are posted on the 10 X 10 site in hourly snapshots. You can then browse back in time to see the words and images that were most used by the sources during that hour.

Lastly, the "I Want You to Want Me" project [ http://iwantyoutowantme.org/index.html ], which captures personal profiles of people participating in on-line dating services was also a very creative and interesting concept. The project was commissioned by the New York Museum of Modern Art.

The program searches through the profiles and breaks the sentences down into categories such as "who I am", "what I want", opening lines, and closing lines. The user can then sort through and view the profiles. The program also attempts to pair the profiles based upon their description of who they are and what they are looking for.

Here is a link to a short bio of Jonathan Harris: http://iwantyoutowantme.org/credits.html

I have been very impressed with the creativity [and programming skills] expressed in Jonathan's work. Some of his other works are too abstract for my old brain to grasp and I don't understand the point he is trying to make. Perhaps further contemplation of those works will result in a deeper understanding.

For me Jonathan's work is an excellent example of what is possible with the "new media" and the tools that are available to explore our collective humanity.

Please visit Jonathan's site, look at his projects and enjoy: http://www.number27.org/index.html

NEW MEDIA THEORY EXPLORATION

http://disneydigitalbooks.go.com

I am a big fan of all things Disney including the innovative ideas of their Imagineers. The new media technology found on DisneyDigital.com is a preview of tomorrow for the kids of today. There is a library of over 600 digital books to choose from the Disney traditional stories and newer franchises such as Nemo, Toy Story, Winnie The Pooh, Hannah Montanna, Cars and others, in a fun interactive experience. The amazing technological features of Look and Listen digital books are read aloud with music, sound effects, and a magic pen that will give you an age appropriate definition of any word when you click on it. You also have the option of reading the books yourself and get help from the magic pen when you need help with the pronunciation or definition of words as needed. The pages turn similar to real page turning and there is a sound like chimes to indicate when it is time to turn the page. Disney magic makes kids want to enjoy books and learn new words. No more being discouraged from being stuck on a word.

Another great technological advancement within this site is the Story Builder feature where kids can become authors of their own books. You choose from a category of Disney books, say Tinkerbell. As you read the general story there are blanks where you are allowed to fill in your own words from a list of provided nouns or verbs etc., which in itself is a great additional educational feature. You can also drop and drag pictures from a photo gallery pertaining to your category such as Tinkerbell’s friends or Tinkerbell in different poses and costumes. When you roll over the pictures with your mouse a brief description of the picture appears. After you build your book you can make your own customized cover with your name and print it or save it. Like magic you have your own personalized 12 page book and cover. Is that great or what???? There is also a rewards area and a section for parents to go to in order to select and suggest books to be put in My Place. My Place is a virtual study room to set your favorite, completed and Now Reading books. You are able to choose from several Disney themes that have book cases that house your books, message boards to keep up with your other reader friends, books you have authored in Story Builder and a place to keep the badges you’ve earned.

The design, look and feel of the site is another blog in itself. There is a carousel of main book categories and another floating carousel of books within that category. For instance the main category is Mickey Mouse and the floating category are all the books about Mickey. There is a bookcase that has Disney type icon characters to get to Look and Listen, Story Builder, My Books, etc. As you move the mouse over the icons they animate and a description appears. Home is Mickey reading a book, and the pre-loader is a book turning pages with little stars twinkling as they turn. The design is Disney brilliance.

I hope this new media is an addition to a child’s library. I love the animated stories and sound effects, but I can’t help but remember the bond I had with my mother as she read to me as a child. I have fond memories of looking at all the books on the shelf in my bedroom and I knew at any given moment I could go into another world just by looking at the beautiful artwork on the cover. I went to my six year old nephew’s birthday party recently, and marveled at how excited he got over all of the books he had received as gifts. This new technology has advantages especially for the kids with special needs. Digital books enhance the reading experience with sounds and animation, but the disadvantage is they are on virtual shelves in a virtual library that can disappear if your subscription lapse.

-jv

RESOURCES EXPLORATION

The four websites I discovered that provide a wealth of resources for any Flash designer or developer are: hotscripts.com, ultrashock.com, flashdevils.com and soundbible.com. Each of these websites was fun to explore and educational as well. The first website, hotscripts.com, is a website that provides the newest, top rated and most popular scripts for Flash, various computer languages, web hosting, XML and a few other areas. There are Flash tutorials, templates and resources as well as sub-categories which have available components, fla archives, programming books and software for downloading. The HotScript forums have a flash and actionscript area where you can post your questions, problems and/or solutions as a designer/developer. This site is easy to navigate and offers resources that are on the leading edge of Flash development and design.

The next site, ultrashock.com, has a wide range of creative assets that it offers to designers and developers. There are flash files that have been created by the flash community and are available for download. The files are comprised of photos, vector images, various scrollbars, sound clips, random movie clip positioning and much more. This website would be great for designers who do not want to have to create all of the content that they use in their web design or flash applications. There are a lot of files which contain decorative backgrounds, patterns and vector graphics that have a universal appeal. The sound library is not very large but has a diversity of sounds that are well suited for commercial purposes. Ultrashock offers quality resources at comparatively low prices and is a well-rounded source for flash designers.

The flashdevils.com website lists itself as an "Adobe Flash Resource Community with a helpful Flash Forum, Fla Files and Tutorials." I found this to be true as I navigated the site to find tutorials on drop down menus and website navigation, functions and OOP, limited animation and other areas. There are many actionscript files related to using arrays, bezier curves, collision detection, friction and gravity. The forums were full of designers asking questions about buttons, movie clips and interfaces so that it was easy to see this would be a great community for newer flash designers to belong to and explore. It also appeared that this site is in its early stages of development as some of the categories were empty, like text/visual effects, flash cartoons, interfaces and so forth. The cartoon section would be a great place for many of us to upload our animated flash movies for other flash designers to see and experience. I will be visiting this site more in the future as it grows and becomes a real asset to the flash community.

The last site, soundbible.com, was my favorite for two reasons. The first is because the concept of sound clips in my flash movies is fascinating to me AND this site offers free sound clips as their attitude is, "Our project supports teachers, students, faculty and starving artists who can't afford to buy them so we are forced to give them away for free." This is an amusing and generous way to provide sound to everyone who is involved in flash design and development. A caveat is that the Royalty Free Sounds can be used for commercial use. This makes this website a great resource for designers who may be operating on a modest budget. The royalty free sound library boasts 94 pages of diverse sound effects from a dying robot, moose calls, computer sci fi and rain forest ambience. The free sound effects library is 135 pages of equally engaging and fun sounds for use in a designer's flash movies, websites or commercial applications. I immediately bookmarked this website once I found that it offered such a variety of quality sound clips for free. The creators of the SoundBible website are to be commended for their generosity and willingness to share sound creations and effects among the designers/developers of the Flash community. This spirit of generosity is one that needs to be shared by more flash websites within the community.

These four websites are just some of the many Flash resources websites that I discovered in my research for this resources exploration. They offer useful sources for creative and technical solutions which flash designers can use whether the person is a novice or an expert user. They provide a wealth of material from flash website templates, fla files for specific functions to "how to tutorials" to guide flash users through the various applications. These websites are a great addition to the Adobe Flash website for user friendly information and communication.

cheathamlane.net

Patrick Cheatham is am interactive designer who specializes in 360° Flash Virtual Tours, and is internationally recognized as a pioneer in the Virtual Tour and 360° VR & rotational product photography industry, and is among the top tier of VR shooters/producers worldwide.

I loved the fluid interactivity. You can easily navigate to other 360° scenes, zoom in, rotate, look in every direction with either using the buttons or just a click of the mouse, or start the tour and let it run by itself and enjoy. Instead of just looking at galleries of photos, you to immerse yourself into the tour and truly get a feel for the area. Also the interactivity of viewing a object was amazing. You can essentially view every aspect of the object or area.

View Projects

Interactive Magazines - A New Media Exploration

I came across an interactive magazine about a year ago and thought it was an interesting alternative to printed materials. The only devices that were able to navigate through this kind of media were computers and the newer wave of cell phone devices. Now, with the introduction of the iPad, digital publishing has reached a new level of interactivity.

That magazine I came across was a digital version of a popular skateboarding magazine and it's interactive features included thumbnail navigation of the different spreads, zoom in/out capabilities, and the ability to 'grab and flip' pages with the click of a mouse. Companies like ZINIO.com seems to have digital publishing down. With over 50,000 digital books and magazines in 15 languages for portable devices like phones, laptops and the new iPads, they seem to be the largest 'online newstand.' They are on a mission to 'reinvent reading' while 'saving trees,' a clever strategy in my opinion. Some prices I saw were the same as you would pay for the printed versions, about $10 for 12 issues of a particular magazine, which seems reasonable enough.

What really blew me away were the features that are included in some of the newer interactive magazines that are being made available for Apple's new iPad. Magazines like VIVmag are making there issues interactive with video and full motion advertising which puts the age of interactive media at a whole new level. Readers are now viewers of published materials. To reach this level of visual sophistication, the people at VIVmag use an advanced digital camera called "Red," which can produce digital video with resolutions as high as those used for motion picture films. With this technology the producers can pause the video to create different interactive spreads that include text like an ordinary printed spread. The image link at the right includes a sneak peek at what VIVmag has to offer (Provided by "The New York Times" website, under the Technology section).

One downfall that I did come across was that each issue is made available at $6 per issue! VIVmag says the time spent on one digital issue is about the same as an ordinary printed issue.

As technology advances, devices like the iPad will become more and more accessible as their prices become more affordable for the average person. Sooner or later everyone is going to be walking around with a device like this reading their newspapers, magazines and books. Students will be able to carry all their textbooks and notes in a single device all while having the ability to access the web, make phone calls, watch videos and listen to music!

In my opinion, a time where everyone uses an iPad-like device is soon to happen as the newer generations become increasingly dependent on mobile hand-held devices. But for now there are some of us that still resist these new types of innovating technologies.

Resources
- VCAB.com allows anyone to convert their pdf files into working interactive media. (Although I think you need to pay.)

- If you're familiar with Indesign CS4, export your finished publications as fully functional "page flipping" Flash interactive media with no programing experience necessary! (Here is an example I created after finishing an exercise in my publishing class 'The Tea Catalog")

Neave.com

Today I am going to tell you about a flash developer named Paul Neave at www.neave.com

Its a pretty fun website, on the title of the page he wrote "neave.com the interactive playground".. Looks like he has been adding stuff since last time I went to this site about 2 years ago. There are traditional games on his site but most of the stuff on this site are more like toys you can play with for awhile then put down rather than achieving a goal and a score in a normal game.

The Neave Dandelion is particularly interesting.

It is a flash program where you can blow into a microphone attached to your computer and make the dandelion blow away in the wind depending on how loudly you blow into your mic. (You can also play with it if you don't have a mic by just clicking with your mouse)

The other one I thought was cool was the Flash Earth part of the site. Here you can view a few different versions of earth, you can choose from Nasa Updated Daily Photos, Microsoft Virtual Earth (with or without labels), Yahoo Maps. I like the Microsoft Virtual Earth because you can zoom in the farthest and it loads up new images for each layer of zoom. You can also type in your Latitude and Longitude and see your house, then press the view in planetarium button to view all the stars in the sky you can see from that location.




Just a really cool site with ALOT of content to explore. Each application you could take hours playing with and some of them are really unique and innovative. Gives you just a little bit of an idea of some of the things you can do with flash.

I forgot to mention in class that he has a link to download all the Source Code for all the games and different things he built in flash to let you see how he built it.

You can download the actionscript with notes by Paul Neave telling which part does what and one that is really cool that I was looking at is all the code to build a Mandlebrot Fractal in actionscript. You can zoom in on these things almost forever and it keeps loading up new graphics, and its all code, you don't have to draw anything and they end up looking like this.