Banner Dev Process Presentation for the ICA
I had the chance to do my HTML5 Banner Dev process for the ICA on Monday in downtown Toronto. People there seemed to be very engaged, and I had some very positive feedback. I had a great time! Hopefully will get a chance to do it again.
Banners for PMs and Designers - In Person!
I've started doing my article in person at agencies in the Toronto area. Going pretty well so far. Anyone interested in having me come in and teach some basics of the banner process, please contact me. No cost to the agency.
After Effects
Why did I wait so long to start doing After Effects? It's basically Flash without worrying about compatibility. Having a lot of fun with it so far!
Google Creative Partner Day
Always an honour speaking at Google's Creative Partner conference. I always find it amusing that there are several people in the audience that I know well, but have no idea what they look like because i've always worked offsite. Great to finally meet some PM's I've been working with for years in person!
ASAP
Really... what does ASAP mean? ASAP as in next week if it's convenient? ASAP as in tomorrow morning? ASAP as in I need to hire some extra help to get it done within an hour or we lose the project? Can we in the Advertising industry all agree to stop using the term ASAP? It tells me nothing about when anything needs to be done. Just tell me when you want it and I'll let you know if it's possible.
Flexative not all it's made out to be
I've heard a lot about Flexative in the past 6 months or so. The concept is that you prepare one banner size on their online system, using one background image, one cta, typing the copy once, etc, and then Flexative handles the remaining sizes automatically. It's being pushed as a very fast way to get out a campaign to as many different platforms as possible.
But I can't buy into it. I come from a world of animation, and making things look as beautiful as possible to draw in viewers. This system has so many limitations that it physically hurts me trying to make it look nice. Want to anything more than a pre-packaged fade-in or slide-in, it's out of the question. You can't even change the colour of the legal mice type from size to size to make it more legible based on what the background crop is.
Seems like such a fast-food way of doing banners, with no regard for quality or pride of workmanship.
Tween Engines
Back in the Flash days, there seemed to be a lot of popular tween engines. TweenLite, GTween, Tweener, FuseKit... all of which were used regularly. It wasn't a surprise if you saw a project using one. But now, it's Greensock (TweenLite) or JQuery. Any other is strange. At least for banners. Im sure that in the bigger scheme of things, nothing is a surprise. But seeing as how Im a banner developer, thats the realm Im talking about.
Does anyone have another low weight tween engine that is good in banners that we should make a regular thing?
Google Creative Partner Day Presentation Complete!
Presentation at Google's Toronto Head Office went well yesterday. I hope everyone there got inspired with some great stuff they can do with Dynamic banners, or at least learned more about what they are capable of. Although my part of the presentation was small, it was good to be involved with a great event, and an honour to be invited to speak.
Finally updated my Guide to Banner Dev for PMs and Designers
The guide I wrote for PMs and Designers to understand the technical aspect of Banner dev has finally been updated to include HTML5 banners instead of the now outdated Flash banners. Hope it helps!
Google Conference
Looks like I have been penciled in to present at the upcoming Google conference in Toronto to discuss Advanced Dynamic banners. Have to try to find some presentable work I've done in that area to show. That might actually be a challenge... Most of those kinds of banners Im not allowed to show because of NDAs for some reason. Hoping I can find something.