Recently I have just launched typoart.com.au a HTML/CSS/jQuery based website. Focusing on customised typographical based art, this relatively small e-commerce based website is something I haven’t done for a long time which is a complete website with no flash. One of the main reasons behind this is small budget, quick turnaround and low and behold it work on iOS!!!! So I’ve had a dabble now in jQuery which I find rather cool. However don’t get me wrong flash is not dead…. but it has it’s place and for somthing like this website, there is no need. My CSS is also improving, and I think one of the most important featrue in CSS is display:

Instead of handling the transaction internally, again I have opted for Paypal. I find it extremely annoying developing for paypal using there sandbox, it so non user friendly… well the whole paypal website is good example of frustration! Next e-commerce solution I would like to try something like eWAY.

I also designed the logotype and am about to start designing all the stationary ect….

‘Love projects are called love projects for one reason, they send you broke!’
Leon Wilson

I recently did a holding page for the Lighting Hospital UK, it was a basic page prior to a full website being built. Unfortunatly I didn’t have the time to built the full site due to AIAM100 commitments, however the landing page which I built in a day was the direction I would have wanted to go in.

This nature of this site lends itself for some nice flash experimental pieces, so it would have been nice to dabble.

Anyway this was just built using CSS and incorporates the recent CSS3 border-radius property… love it!

After a year and a half of telling people I’ve been building this site, we finally had the AIAM100.com website and exhibtion launch party on Friday night at Cooee Art Gallery in Lamrock Ave. Bondi.

Australian Indienous Art Market top 100 (AIAM100) is a website show casing the top Australian indigenous artists based on their market performance in the secondary art market. Over 130 profiles compiled by Adrian Newstead give the user a detailed view of each artist. Market Performance results are supplied by Australian Art Sales Digest (AASD), these results allow the AIAM100 to calculate the AIAM100 index and rank each artist accordingly. It also provides the overall health of the industry, for example the peak in 2007.

Adrian Newstead at the opening of the AIAM100 website and exhibiton

Ruth Hessey & Adrian Newstead

Being completely built in Flash I see this website as being a RIA rather than just a website. I know I know, it’s not the normal site to be completely built in Flash, and it raised numerous challenges along the way, especially regarding text layout, formatting and resizing (which are basic things we take for granted in developing an html based site). 50% of the site is it’s cutom built php based CMS, along with an extensive database, allowing AIAM administrators to easily publish new artists profiles.

Although i’ll still be working on adding a few more features it’s a great feeling to get AIAM100.com site live into the public.

I have just finished an intense flash workout at BMF in Sydney, I was hired as a freelance flash developer to develop an interactive colouring in competition for CBA Dollarmites Club. Created in AS3 this was my first agency project in AS3 working in collaboration with design, animators and other developers it was definately an intense coding moment. From my point of view I was bought in mid way into the project, with the designs, animations and a couple of class files already developed. I was given the task of pulling it all together and making it work.

On the first day arriving I was flooded with work, and told there was a strict deadline ect. The usual really, however, generally coming midway into a flash project you need a day or two to get your head around whats going on, especially now with AS3 and its strict datatyping adding timeline animations into code was a new experience… The problem with these ‘rush’ jobs, is it seems structure and planning are usually developed with the project.

After my usual, ‘work when I want’, to doing an initial 75hr first week, it was a brutal, yet invigorating jolt to the system. Magic Map Competition is now live (click on competition link here) and after finshing another flash landing page for AUS Star my work had dried up at BMF. Overall I enjoyed working there, it’s a good agency with really cool people, and hopefully they’ll want me back.