[Ian Jones]

Well, for those of you who were anticipating my new website I'm sorry to say that this one isn't it.

I have uploaded an older design instead, one which I completed for my studies but it never actually went live. There isn't much content and the links don't all work. I uploaded it for Proclone, I needed to show him some of my work so I thought I may as well show you guys too.

c&c appreciated.

[Ian Jones]

OMG I'M AN IDIOT

I forgot the URL.

VIS-AUX

[wacky]

cool!
i like intro flash!!!!!
could you send the FLA file for me?!

i like it!!!

[Ian Jones]

Thx wacky,

I'm a bit hesitant to send you the file. Let me think about it. It's my first flash website and I can't gaurantee it is actually technically sound.

I'll give you some insight to start with.

I have used *.png imagery. Most of it is actually raster imagery instead of flash vectors (naughty, naughty!). Surprisingly it is only 54KB, I was very careful how I used the raster imagery, becuase of file size of course.

The awesome thing about the *.png format is that it has RGBA, the A is Alpha. That means you can get transparency! with mulitple levels, unlike the *.gif format and its all or nothing transparency.

Goto: Phong.com

Learn about how to use transparent *.png images in flash. Goto the tutorials > flash.. of course.

The two bars slide inwards with a simple tween, set with 'easing' to simulate deceleleration to where they stop. Then the actual menu slides out. This is done with a seperate movie clip symbol. Inside that movie clip is an animation of the menu sliding out and a mask to make it slide out of nothing. This makes it appear as if it slides out of a thin piece of those two bars. I then animated that movie clip in exactly the same way as the first bars, so that it would follow the movement of the bars and execute its animation at the same time. If you look carefully you'll see this, the bars slide out from the sides but before they get to the center the menu actually starts sliding out. I found this a really daunting task to begin with, but it really is very simple to make.

There is a little (little for filesize purposes) animation running in the middle, I made it in Adobe Imageready and saved it as a whole set of images, eg.. frame1.gif > frame2.gif etc...

The cool thing is that when you import the first image into Flash it recognises that you are importing a sequence and does the rest for you! It is such a timesaver.

Hope that dispells a few myths for you. I'm still wondering whether or not the send you the *.fla... hmmm... got a compelling argument?

[wacky]

thank you!!
it's ok!
nice page!!

[Gort]

I don't knowe if it's intentional, but you have gaps on the left and right margins of the page. If you want them flush, add leftmargin="0" rightmargin="0" to the body tag in the top. Disregard though if you're where you want to be.

You're popups...woe on the big window. I would explore a javascript function that pops a fixed, smaller size. It's not too hard to do. Email me if you need some direction on that - if you want to explore it.

Overall...
You get an A for good looks! Sharp looking and cool - my kind of stuff! Your portfolio rocks too - good work man! Groovy!

[Ian Jones]

thx guys,

Tom, your absolutely right.. you found all the problems with it. I forgot to mention that one of the reasons I wasn't going to use it for anything but my assessment, was that it had been tailor made to 1024*768 res. So that explains the gaps. I do actually know about that code to make it flush with the sides of the browser, thx anyway for mentioning it.

hehe, the pop ups... yeah I just realised I forgot to change that. Sorry for the torture!

Thx for the comments on the visuals, and my portfolio. It really means a lot to me. Glad you liked it.

[Sharper-Image]

Great work, and do *NOT* send him that file.