by Andy Polaine on April 30, 2009
in General
Great to see magneticNorth’s new website live. Brendan gave me a sneak peek of it yesterday and I love it.
The navigation is very playful and intuitive. Actually it is intuitive because it is playful. You basically scribble a doodle and this makes a mask into which a piece from their portfolio opens. You can then click on that item to view more info about the work or simply make another scribble to look at a new piece. The navigation across the top is a history that you can move back and forth through or reset.
What is nice about the whole thing is that you just don’t have worry about doing anything ‘right’. You can scribble any shape and you can scribble over the top of other scribbles and everything automagically sorts itself out.
Go and have a play yourself and tell me what you think.
[UPDATE: Quite some debate started about this, which I'm very happy to be part of. I wrote a long response, which is almost a post in itself, but decided to leave it in the comments.]
Tagged as:
flash,
interaction,
interface,
magneticnorth,
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by Andy Polaine on April 19, 2009
in General
Inspired by the Tenori-On, Andre Michelle put together Tonematrix. Each square creates a wave force that spreads across the grid (I don’t think that affects the sound though).
It reminds me quite a bit of a piece Andy Allenson made at Antirom years ago that was a multi-user grid sequencer. The smart thing about it was that you could adjust the grid cell amounts to produce complex polyrhythms. It was done in Director and I can’t find it online anymore unfortunately, but it was very compelling. I was always amazed that he got it working over the network too – around 10 years ago now.
I am glad to see sound finally getting some attention in Flash (now that pixels have arrived too). The work Andre has been doing is amazing, but I’d really like to see it being used for more unique, unusual and playful experiments rather than reproducing vintage sequencers and synthesisers (that’s what Reason is for, right?). Somehow that seems to be a missed opportunity – Tonematrix is a more interesting direction.
More on Andre’s blog.
(Thanks to Matt Delprado for the heads up).
Tagged as:
audio,
flash,
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