Yes, South by Southwest Interactive 2008 is about to spring again in Austin, Texas, and I am again way behind on my preparation. However, I did finally decide to get business cards printed up beforehand, using Hotcards.com on the suggestion of the Twitterverse. I really liked the Hotcards website experience and the copywriting, so I am taking a chance on them, though it is pricier than some of the other business card services I've seen at $60/1000 plus shipping. Still, I have a penchant of putting my dollars where the user experience catches my eye.
Since this is the first time I've ever had the opportunity to print double-sided cards, I tried to put something together quickly. After a couple of hours of trying to put some Printable CEO-style graphics on the back, I remembered the old dot story concept on my really early cards. I never liked the way that design had worked, as it felt "all over the place" to me. With the extra room to play with, though, the dot story became viable.
Unfortunately, I thought of the "Structure / Story" tag pair after I had submitted the job to press; the cards I get will say "Structure / Design". This sort of works still, but it isn't as relevant to the story-based approach I take to design work. And, the alliteration sounds way better to my ear.
The front of the card is still the same general design I had from the previous round, though I have changed the text to reflect my incremental movement out of interactive and toward general design:
david seah - providing insight + ideation via information graphics and investigative design services
The text is broken with short lines, coor, and selected bold on keywords. It reads clunkily off the tongue, but it convey something. Not the greatest piece of marketing copy in terms of fluidity, but they may work better as conversational keyword starters. I'm not entirely happy with it:
Making these kinds of decisions can drive me nuts, as I'm prone to have long "should have / could have" internal conversations with myself. At some point, you just got to see how people react. Perhaps for my first double-sided card I should have used a cheaper service. Oh well!
I don't know if this is common around the world, but after Christmas Day there is a frenzy of returns at retail outlets across the United States, as people trade-in/trade-up their gifts to something they like better. To make exchanges easier, stores issue gift receipts to gift purchasers with the price omitted to maintain some semblance of propriety. Call me sentimental, but when someone gives me a present, I find it difficult to treat it as just another material asset to be cashed in. It just doesn't jibe with what I think of as The Spirit of Giving. Why not leave warm cups of "Drano" out for Santa instead of milk while we're at it, or have a nice reindeer venison stew for Christmas Dinner as we throw rocks at elves? But that's just my moral outrage masking the true issue at hand: sometimes I get terrible presents and I'm not sure what to do with them. The barbarian materialists exchange their presents and are materially happier afterwards. Traditionalists like me get principles stuck in their craw, muttering bitterly as their houses fill with junk they can't just throw away because "they were gifts."
There is another gift-related practice here in the States called the Yankee Swap, associated with office Christmas parties, where you can potentially bring all your unwanted junk and gift it away to some poor sucker. Each person brings a present, and gets one in return. The trick is that each person draws their present based on a number, and they have the option of exchanging whatever they got with whatever someone before them got. It's deliciously balances the Spirit of Giving with the Spirit of Taking Away, just the sort of spirit one needs to survive the modern corporate environment. We are what we are.
While this year I received no bad presents (in fact, they were all awesome), there was an interesting moment at one of these events when someone recognized a "real" gift from a Christmas many years in the past re-gifted to someone else. This created some awkwardness on the part of the re-gifter, though the original gift giver didn't mind at all. This got me to thinking: we already have gift receipts. Why not take it a step further and include a re-gift receipt that establishes once and for all that once you are given a present, it's yours to do with what you want?
Design of the Re-Gift Receipt
To create the Re-Gift Receipt, I used my Stockwell Rubber Stamp Kit (I'll have to write about this sometime later) to create the RE-GIFT RECEIPT: YOUR GUILT-FREE PASS lettering at top. I scanned this in, colored it to resemble the purplish ink on old-style receipts, and laid out some text using an 8-point monospaced font (Bitstream Vera Sans Mono if you are curious...it's one of my favorite console fonts).
Since I wanted to reproduce the length of the typical gift receipt---they are often filled with legal mumbo jumbo---I had to write some filler. I figured it wouldn't hurt to cover some of the basic scenarios that lead to "poor gifting". Here's what it says:
RE-GIFT RECEIPT POLICY
This present has been given to you by your (CIRCLE ONE):
CO-WORKER(S)
CASUAL BUDDY
REALLY BUSY BEST FRIEND
SIGNIFICANT OTHER
OTHER ACQUAINTANCE
If you like it, great! However, in the event that dismay and polite confusion ensued rather than joy, please allow that (CIRCLE ALL THAT APPLY):
I DON'T REALLY KNOW YOU THAT WELL SO I JUST WINGED IT
IT LOOKED MUCH BETTER ONLINE / IN THE STORE
I'M A CLUELESS GUY/GAL WHAT DO I KNOW ABOUT PRESENTS
I GENUINELY THOUGHT YOU LIKED THIS KIND OF STUPID CRAP
I DID ALL MY SHOPPING AT THE SAME STORE THIS IS WHAT THEY HAD
I THOUGHT YOU COULD USE IT FOR HOBBY/WORK BUT WHAT DO I REALLY KNOW ABOUT IT
MOM SAID "IT IS THE THOUGHT THAT COUNTS" AND I BELIEVED HERE
In the True Spirit of American Giving, this RE-GIFT RECEIPT entitles you to pass this item guilt-free to a third party, no questions asked.
AUTHORIZING GIFT GIVER:
RECIPIENT:
by re-gifting this present, you agree that there is no reason to ever mention this again
I think this covers about 80% of all bad-gifting scenarios, and having it in an easy "circle your excuse" format really captures the Spirit of Exchanging Gifts For Better Ones: convenient, cheerfully impersonal, with no hard feelings at all.
After I got this text laid out in Illustrator, I noticed that the overly-crisp quality of the text was at-odds with my scanned rubber-stamp letterings. I applied a 1-pixel gaussian blur over all the text using a raster-based effect. It's cool that you can do this stuff now; back in the old days, I'd have had to convert the whole file to a high-resolution TIFF file and that would have been a pain in the butt. Blurring the text slightly made everything fit together visually. I was pleased that the file size didn't get too large either. At about 250KB for the PDF it's about 100K larger than the non-blurred version, but that's acceptable I think for the visual result. On the minus side, there's a good chance that non-Adobe PDF readers will render the file incorrectly; let me know in the comments if you come across this problem. I'm curious.
Download the Re-Gift Receipt Forms
There's three Re-Gift Receipts per 8.5"x11" sheet. Just trim along the print marks and you'll be ready to start disavowing any intended thoughtfulness to your gift giving. You could also use these forms to legitimately (sigh) let your friends know that you did your best, but there is no obligation to hold on to it...just don't give it BACK. :-)
If you appreciated the dubious value of this download, you might also like my Chain Letter Nullification Certificate, Arm-Mounted Task Nagger, Procrastinator's Clock, and Social Yardstick designs. Enjoy! :-)
If you've been reading this blog for a while, you may have noticed how it's changed its focus from the personal to the productive. In the beginning, when I first started blogging out of a kind of quiet desperation to once and for all figure myself out, the entries were short clippings of my thoughts on whatever happened to catch my eye and interest. As time went on, and I discovered that long-lost friends were starting to stumble upon the webby shores of my site, I grew a little bolder and started writing in more depth about topics that were interesting to me. Blogging for that small audience was the outlet I needed.
At the beginning of 2005, I was starting to just come out of a two-year period of negativity, and was comfortable enough about writing online to make a few rambling journeys into personal introspection. These felt quite daring because they were so out of character with the other posts, which tended to be more detailed, hard-edged and technical. I remember posting about feeling negative, and a couple of my friends actually emailed me to make sure I wasn't about to lose it. While I find those posts to be somewhat embarrassing in retrospect, they are also as honest as I could make them, so I leave them up as signposts of my online journey. And it was through this journey that I really started getting to the bottom of what was important to me so I could create solutions to my problems. This is what lead to the original Printable CEO article, with its bizarre merging of psychology via video game design philosophy. I think one reason people like it, other than its sheer geekiness, is that it was designed to help you care about yourself. Fundamentally, I think of it as a design that is all about caring, inspiring, and empowering individuals.
Lately I've been avoiding writing the long introspective posts, because I've been aware of the growing contingent of productivity enthusiasts who have come here through sites like LifeHacker and Web Worker Daily. These are very popular, tip-focused sites that link to the various forms I've created to address the different inefficiencies I've faced in my freelancing career. Every time one of these sites links to an article here, I see a bump in RSS subscriptions. A few days later, I see a corresponding dip as people realize that I tend to write about other stuff like sandwiches and they unsubscribe. This used to bum me out, but I would tell myself that my writing is not for everyone. It's hard to describe exactly what keeps people here, actually, but I figure the people who stay are the ones I want to talk to in the first place. It's been tougher recently to stick to that line because I'm starting to realize that there is a lot I could do to drive traffic and build a real "web property". I'm starting my 4th year of blogging, and over those years I've learned quite a bit about how to write content and how to maintain a website. I've seen other websites that have started at around the same time I have flourish and explode into full-fledged enterprises, far beyond what I've done here. It was for this reason that I switched from WordPress to Expression Engine, because Expression Engine offers me the ability to start expanding my site facilities without a whole of painful integration work. It will allow me to start compartmentalizing my writing into focused, ad-friendly packets of content. It's a good media strategy.
You might be surprised to know that I don't spend every day reading RSS feeds to suck down the latest productivity and design news. I know that stuff is out there, but I get most of what I know through other people mentioning what's hot in passing. The sites that I do visit are ones that share the stories of someone's life. If there are any tips, they're offered in context to what someone has done and how it affected them. This is what I am drawn to, and recognizing that changes the way I deploy my shiny technical skills. I design because I like stories. And the kind of stories I like best are ones where someone has a dream, meets an obstacle that seems unsurmountable, then finds that greatness in themselves somehow to get past it.
I recently reread Po Bronson's What Should I Do With My Life?, which is his book about ordinary people who have asked this question and what they did about it. I originally read the book sometime in 2003, before I knew what a blog was and before I knew what was important to me. All I knew was that I wasn't particularly happy or inspired or motivated, though I wanted to feel that way. I wanted a calling, and the book reassured me that I wasn't alone or crazy in desiring this. Then I forgot about the book and went on with my life. 2004 kind of sucked, but 2005 offered possibility. 2006 was pretty good, and 2007 was better still because I've met people who have made a difference in my life, and have given me fresh perspective. What I lacked, though, was a sense of being part of a greater movement. What Should I Do With My Life? (a book about individual calling), along with Why Do I Love These People (a related book about family bonds) has reconnected me with the notion that it's really the people making their lives work that inspire me every day. And so, if what I can do with my life can help them make their stories better and make a good life...that's precisely what I want to do. I just need to make it pay.
I'm not exactly sure why I wrote this, though I suspect it's partly a reaction to my NOT having written a rambling personal post in quite some time, and it's probably also part of my processing of my Po Bronson weekend. I think maybe this is an affirmation of faith, and maybe it's also a beacon. As an experiment I've tried linking this post to the forum that I just installed this weekend for the C# Study Group. If there's anything I've learned, it's the small offerings to connect that lead to surprising opportunities. You just need to keep making the offer, and not have expectations on what comes back. It's both scary and exciting. It doesn't always work out or last, but heck let's see if anything happens. You can register here.
It's not that often that I get to re-relive a childhood fantasy. In this case, it's creating video games, or rather, using the technology to tell some kind of story.
Let me back up first: I worked as a video game developer about ten years ago, in a variety of artist, designer, and developer roles. Working in games was a natural progression, so it seemed, from my childhood fascination with computers. When I was deciding what to study in college, it was a toss-up between English or Computer Engineering; I figured I could always write stories, but I didn't know anything about how computers really worked at the hardware level. That ate at me. Computer circuitry fascinated me, because I couldn’t understand how it worked. So I got sidetracked for 10 years, gradually switching from computers to computer graphics then to interactive media, until I realized that I liked people and rediscovered writing.
Despite my recent focus on design, I’ve still maintained an healthy interest in the hardware and software, because I love the power that technology brings to storytelling. In particular, I like how video games can make you forget you’re just looking at bunch of glowing dots moving around on a flat screen. When a game is done right, you are fully drawn into its world as an active participant. The very best games use tons of presentational tricks to augment the experience so every pixel and every frame pulses with life.
I have a chance to revisit this world now, being in the process of picking up a new project for a large scale interactive for a museum in Illinois. The goal of this particular exhibit, which is targeted at younger children, is to convey the concept of how our choices and actions---and lack thereof---effect changes in the world. We think this can be done by creating a participatory interactive environment where groups of children spontaneously cooperate to create the world together. We’ll know we’ve done our job if children leave with a memory of their actions having made a difference that really mattered to them. This is a project that I can totally get behind, and the company developing the concept, understands the educational and philosophical issues that are important for an exhibit of this nature.
So what’s the problem? We want to push the envelope, just like we used to do in the game industry. However, the perception out there is that this is "too hard" or "too expensive". People are comfortable with their existing tools. What we want to do, however, is turn that thinking on its ear, and bring some ass-kicking tools into the educational / museum interactive space to raise the bar. Of course, that's easier said than done; I’m trying to figure out the best way of finding the right people and technologies that are intrigued by the possibilities. I’ll be picking up my rusty game development toolbelt again, using what I know to to redefine new workflows so we can wow the crowd, on time and on budget.
A tall order. I'm wrapping my head around it still, and I figured I might as well write a blog post about it and state my case. Read onward!
TYPICAL INTERACTION TECHNOLOGY
I’ve done a few interactives in my time, using programs like Director. Director is what we New Media Designers call an authoring tool. It's sort of like a fancy version of PowerPoint; you don’t need to be a programmer and build everything from absolute scratch, because the tool provides ways to animate things on the screen, play sounds, and respond to mouse clicks and key presses. Director and tools like it allow you to create much more sophisticated behaviors than you can with Powerpoint; you can think of it as the difference between Microsoft Word and a professional Page Layout program like InDesign or Quark XPress.
Director is showing its age, so Flash has started to replace it in several areas. As it turns out, most interactives share a lot of common DNA:
- Some set of related ideas is presented through words and moving images
- Keyboard and mouse actions cause something to react differently on the screen
- The behavior of the interactive depends a lot on what the user does
More "advanced" interactives typically incorporate novel presentational and input elements:
Director can also incorporate elements created with the other major authoring tool, Flash. Flash has the advantage of animation quality and a "better" programming language (Actionscript), but it lacks the extensibility of Director's Xtras to interface with barcode scanners, burn CDs...heck, just about anything you need to do. You can also write your own with the Xtra Software Development Kit (SDK) Flash can do some of these things by using 3rd-party extenders, but it’s not built-in functionality.
The great advantage of using an authoring tool like Director or Flash is that they create programs that will run on practically any computer, either as a desktop program or in a web browser that has the Shockwave or Flash Player plugin installed. This simplifies deployment and installation quite a bit. However, this universality comes at the expense of using the really cool cutting-edge capabilities already built-into your computer:
Don’t get me wrong: the general-purpose graphics and audio engines in Flash are very fast and capable, and clever interactive designers are doing astonishingly great stuff with them. However, sometimes you want something that's more specialized. Metaphorically speaking, you can think of the Flash graphics engine as the "computer software equivalent" of a nice 2007 Toyota Camry. It’s fast, powerful, comfortable, and refined: a great daily driver. However, you would never think of driving your Camry through a slurry of rock and mud in a rally race, or doing 500 laps against highly-tuned purpose-built race cars. It would be futile. Your Camry is a perfectly fine general-purpose automobile, but there are times when the level of performance can not be delivered.
THE HOLY GRAIL: 60 FRAMES PER SECOND
The kind of performance I am thinking of, with regards to museum interactives, is to achieve a digital semblance of life. This is a combination of aesthetics and speed: meticulous pixel-level craftsmanship, highly optimized graphics and special effects engines, and super smooth animation.
I know, I know...I said general-purpose graphics engines are pretty darn good already, so can't we just use our existing tools? This is where I have to introduce some personal design philosophy: I can feel my pulse beat faster when engaged by nuanced silky-smooth animation. To me, that’s achieving, at minimum, a rock-solid 30 frames per second (fps) refresh rate; in other words, the screen is redrawn ("refreshed") 30 times every second. Even better is 60 frames per second; the old Atari 2600 console refreshed its crude graphics display at 60 frames per second because the game designers didn’t have a choice; the 1970s-era design dictated this as a major design constraint. If you’ve ever been struck by the eerie smoothness of early video games, the high frame rate is why. 60 frames per second is awesome. 60 frames per second is ALIVE. There is something much more visceral about graphics projected at this speed.
If we were able to have 60fps games in the 1970s, we should be doing pretty well today, right? Well, not quite. Modern computers are tens of thousands of times more powerful than those early video games, but the technical necessity for 60fps animation has long past. Back then, the screen needed to be updated that quickly because if you didn’t draw fast enough, the screen would literally flicker and look terrible. Since computer memory was very expensive, the graphics were created "just in time" for the television electron beam to draw them. Other early game systems used what are called vector displays, which control the screen's electron gun directly. Today, just about all computers use a framebuffer, which is sort of like a "drawing slate" inside the computer, compromised of a whole bunch of pixels. There are often two framebuffers: one is shown by the computer monitor, redrawn from 60 to 120 frames per second. The other is used for new graphics, say the next frame of your animation. When the computer is done drawing the new frame, it tells the monitor to "switch framebuffer", thus showing the newly-completed slate. Because switching framebuffers is practically instantaneous, the screen appears to change immediately. The framerate of the animation is determined by how fast the computer can keep drawing and flipping those framebuffers; if the computer takes a long time to draw each new frame, the result is a slower stream of images. The result: a lower framerate.
In practical terms, you can still maintain the illusion of smooth motion with as little as 12 frames per second. In hand-drawn animation terms, this would be like watching an old Bugs Bunny cartoon; at 12 frames per second on a 24 frame-per-second film reel (the standard for film projection), you are drawing an entirely new image on every other frame (this is called animating on twos). Japanese animation tends to be animated with fewer frames, perhaps on 3s or 4s (corresponding to 8 and 6 frames per second). If you’ve noticed that Japanese TV animation looks a lot choppier than "American" animation from Disney or some other studio, this is probably what you're seeing.
Other than frame rate, the other main contributor to animation smoothness is consistency of the frame rate. It's far better to have a consistent 10fps than 30fps half the time and 15fps the other half. Many new interactive designers don’t understand how the graphics engine works, and sometimes create situations where frame rate variations cause "jerkiness" and "hitching". They just heap graphic after graphic on the overloaded graphics engine, like Dad loading 1000 pounds of cinderblocks in the back of his Camry, then wondering why the car’s making that weird noise and it’s driving so slow. Every graphic element has its own cost, and the savvy interactive designer knows how to account for every overdrawn pixel to maximize available computing power.
HITTING 60
Humor me and presume that 60fps is the holy grail of framerates. There are only three ways you can do this:
Draw fewer objects -- the fewer graphics you draw, the faster each frame is drawn. However, you lose visual richness.
Be clever about HOW you draw -- You might only update a few things at a time, or update different parts of the screen at different framerates; you just need a few things moving at 60fps to start to benefit. You can avoid "overdrawing". You can pre-render some graphics sequences to avoid real-time compositing. The disadvantage: the optimization techniques start to get in the way of implementing new ideas.
Get a faster graphics engine -- Oh, yeah :-)
So let's look at the graphics engine choices we have!
PEERING INTO THE TECHNICAL ABYSS
Compared to 10 years ago, there are a lot more game development tools available, both commercial and open source. They fall into three general categories:
- Tools that expose the raw underlying power of the hardware to programmers. For example, DirectX.
- Tools that provide a mature implementation of a useful game element. Simulating physics and gravity, for example.
- Tools that provide the framework for a typical type of game. For example, there are game toolkits that are targeted toward First Person Shooters, so developers can focus more on creating the customized game experience, as opposed to first building one from scratch.
There's a lot of tools out there. Unfortunately, they require that you are a game programmer! This, of course, is is the domain of intense individuals who have learned to deconstruct their very existence into constructs of optimized code to recreate entire worlds in their own image. It’s pretty heady stuff. I can’t do it myself, but I’ve had occasion to peer into the abyss.
That said, there’s not really any reason we can’t apply some of that technology to our interactive work. We just need to know that the tools are not quite as forgiving as Photoshop, and that there is new workflow to learn.
BUT ISN'T THIS WAY TOO EXPENSIVE?
Other than the technical complexity, there's the perception that game development is very expensive. And yes, it is. Modern commercial game development budgets regularly exceed a million dollars, and require dozens of specialists---these are the experienced programmers, artists, animators, and producers that you’re unlikely to find on the street. The high cost of game development is sometimes cited as a reason why this would never work for something like a museum interactive, which can have much more modest budgets. However, a great deal of the development cost is from creating content for hours lavish gameplay. That’s expensive to produce, and why a lot of artwork creation is going overseas. A second expense is all the play balancing, refinement, and testing to make sure the game is a commercial success. A museum interactive, by comparison, needs enough content to fulfill maybe 5-10 minutes of interaction, is "successful" if it integrates with a larger supporting educational experience, and doesn't cause a maintenance problem. With the lower content requirements and less brutal fitness metrics, cost can be contained within a reasonable (that is, doable) scope. Theoretically, anyway :-)
There's a second advantage: we're designing for a specific computer. Developing for the mass market requires a defensive programming mentality to ensure that the code runs on every supported machine. There are thousands of small-but-deadly variations between video cards, motherboard bugs, installed software, and operating system variations. This is where using Flash Player shines: the hard engineering work to make sure the player works on all computers has already been done by Macromedia's engineers, so it will run pretty much the same on all supported computing platforms. If we were developing a product for use by individuals, this would be very important. However, for a museum interactive, we get to specify the hardware ourselves and control what's installed on it. Our interactive will run on a machine of our designated speed, with a particular video card, and our own code libraries. This is absolutely controllable, if you know what you’re doing.
THE WORKFLOW CHALLENGE
What is a challenge is acquiring the know-how to work with game development technologies. There is no click-and-play application that you can use to create an awesome cutting-edge game experience, though I’ve been very intrigued by Unity as a potential solution.
The great advantage that visual authoring tools like Flash and Director has over "traditional" game development is:
The common workflow -- Flash is in broad use, and there's a lot of books and tutorials available. It is less the case for game development tools, though it's actually getting a lot better because this is a popular subject.
The refined user interface for integrating artwork and code -- You can do just about everything you need with Flash, Photoshop, and Illustrator and a decent sound editor like Sound Forge. Not so with game engines…you’ll be learning how to model and rig elaborately-textured 3D models and export them as esoteric file formats that you’ve never heard of, using utilities that work maybe 80% of the time. You’ll have to learn all the messy details of how the graphics engine really works and bend it to your will. Otherwise nothing will work at all, and you'll be wondering why.
Game development is kind of like building a race car that you're learning to drive at the same time. When it works , it’s fast and exhilarating. When it doesn’t work, nothing works at all. However, you’re building a specialized machine that will do things that just aren’t possible with general-purpose authoring tools.
THE HOLY GRAIL
This post seems to have become an introduction to interactive technologies, so I should bring it home and explain why all this is important to me.
60 Frames Per Second. Beautiful, compelling, living motion. If you want to attract kids, you need to make something pretty compelling. Some of this you can just do with bright colors (kids are suckers for that), but holding their interest requires animation talent and enough graphics horsepower to move a lot of objects on the screen.
Advanced Graphics. I’m a big fan of Flash, and I also know how to code up a rock-solid Director app for a kiosk application. Video game technologies, however, are a quantum leap in visualization capability...if I can get them to work right. I’m tired of seeing ratty 2D graphics, amateurishly hacked out of a low-quality JPEG file, lurching across the screen at 7 frames per second in a freakish parody of "fun". I believe that things can be much better. It's time to push harder on this.
Parity of Experience with Other Media. Kids can tell the difference between a gimpy 12 fps Flash animation and a professionally-produced game running on their PlayStation 3. They can rent 20 million dollars worth of production for 3 bucks at the local Blockbuster. As small interactive producers, we can’t possibly compete with those massive budgets and teams, but we can apply some of the same techniques with less money. We have an advantage in having a controlled space in the museum, and thus we can employ environmental graphics and attraction design techniques to our advantage.
Magic. It really doesn’t matter what kind of tools you’re using; what counts is your ability to wield your presentation techniques with graceful surety. This is showmanship. However, there is something to be said for having that awesome explosion effect, that bone-crushing sound system, and novel visual ideas that have never been seen before. This kind of spectacle often requires some investment in serious hardware and software.
For the next few months, I’ll be looking at ways of trying to achieve this higher level of interaction. I’ve started to look at open source game engines and some commercial products, re-immersing myself into technologies that I haven’t looked at in a long time. If there are people out there with the interest and the skills, I’d like to hear from you to see how we might combine forces and do some cross-education. Leave a comment!
NOTE: The views expressed in this post are mine, not necessarily that of the company I'm working with! :-)
