Current - Some Random Dude

Current TV Viewpoints Launches

Posted on 15 October, 2007 at 12:33pm with 2 comments

Finally, I can write about this. I am going to keep this relatively short today, but I will try to write more in-depth about this project later on. I had the fortune to be the lead on Current TV’s Viewpoints project on design and development. The design and interactive features are pretty simple, but we wanted to make the experience to be have rich motion and subtle stylistic informational cues. The application was built in Actionscript 3 and a lot of the motion design just could not have been done without AS3’s improved performance. There are a lot of pieces that are still to come in for this project, but my hope is people enjoy playing around on Viewpoints and end up leaving webcam opinions of their own. If you do in fact like the design, concept, content or a combination of them all, I would really appreciate you putting out the word to your friends/colleagues about this project – Viewpoints will not work without extensive participation. One easy way to do this would be to add it to your delicious bookmarks.

On a side note, I am in one of the topics, but you will have to look hard. :)

More to come.

Get Yo Current.com Beta Invite

Posted on 10 October, 2007 at 2:55pm with 8 comments

So my life has been consumed by my role in the Current TV Beta project – in fact, it is directly responsible for the lack of writing or content on this blog for the past month or two. All the being said, it has been a blast and I would love to share the work I have been a part of. Once all the dust settles, I will talk much more about what I did, but for now, I wanted to hand off my remaining 5 invitations into the private beta if anyone is interested. Considering I most likely have only 4 readers left from my absence, I do not foresee much fighting – still, first come, first serve.

Current.tv logo exploration in motion

Posted on 8 April, 2005 at 2:01pm with 7 comments

Current.tv had an open-submission for their logo that caught my attention. Instead of trying to re-design their logo, I wanted to push some interesting motion work with it. The thing that drew me to the concept behind Current is the idea is how community-centric it seems to be which theoretically allows anyone from anywhere can contribute to content of the station. This type of model will obviously be more fluid and to a certain extent, random compared to traditional network programming. From this, I decided to use the concept of randomness in the motion exploration of the Current logo.

All motion, movement, color and visibility sequences of each square is random; essentially making it so that every time you see the logo, it is slightly different. To a certain extent, the randomness supersedes the motion decided in each exploration. I wanted to attempt various methods of transitions to show the possibilities behind this concept and I feel the core idea of a randomly created/viewed logo ties in very powerfully with the concept of Current.

The Flash files use Actionscript for the random creation of each square and for the random color sequences. At this point, the logos have been tested on the Windows Platform and there are no performance issues. Due to the method of setting up the Flash file, making different methods of motion is quite easy and adjusting the speed of each square is easily changed as well.

Without further ado, here are the explorations: