Jimimon Design / Dub Selector

I have been researching the Jimimon Design studio based in London. Jimimon’s lead designer is Jim Johnstone. They do illustration, web design, and the Dub Selector. Their web clients include Open House festival, Smith & Pye, Punk Rock Blues, Vacant Clothing, and Crusader Travel.

The main site is very clean and easy to navigate. The initial illustrations work really well at revealing what style of design they do best. It seems to be kind of cartoony, with an edgy sort of rock-and-roll feel. Due to the fact that they have hardly any text, a quality I love in websites, I am going to review Jim’s “pet flash project” called Infinite Wheel – Home of the Dub Selector.

Infinite wheel is a Flash-created doorway into all of the different Dub Selectors that Jim has designed. The Dub Selectors are interactive “games”, where you press things and move things to create a live dub song. (Dub is a style of music kind of like reggae but slower with no full vocals of any kind.) The entire Infinite Wheel website and each Dub Selector was created in Flash.

Now that we are learning about animation, I am starting to see what composes each Dub Selector. I would love to see how many placed movie clips they are using. Each individual moving thing is probably a movie clip that is motion-tweened across the screen. I can tell that the graphics and audio react specifically to what the mouse does. It seems like the samples and music are quantized (timed up), and that the echo’s of the sounds you play are quantized as well. I can’t wait to learn how to use music and sound in Flash. I am anxious to learn how the mouse interacts and controls graphics and sound.

I play with the Dub Selectors all the time. I am definitely not alone in this, as the Infinite Wheel pages have been viewed over 4 million times. This concept represents the direction I want to go with Flash, which is music + interaction! This site is an endless source of inspiration for me, not to mention totally fun!