Design Explorations

When we first learned about the design exploration blog assignment I wasn’t too worried about finding content. Every time I spend more than five minutes online I see a flash site. There are many great examples out there, here are a few I found while poking around on social news sites Digg.com and Reddit.com.
The first site I found was an evolutionary timeline built in flash. The site had a great way of presenting information interactively so I decided to see who the designer was. That led me to this site: http://www.johnkyrk.com/. His entire website is composed in flash. In his profile he says that he is a biologist by education and an artist by disposition. On the front page he links to his various projects which include animations of cell biology, visual evolution charts, interactive PH charts, and architectural diagrams all done in flash. There are many studios out there but this person just wanting to share something interesting was able to publish this himself which I can really appreciate. To me the most interesting thing about his website was his style of presenting the information. He visualizes concepts in a unique ways to get his point across.
The Next website I found was on a little lighter side. Have you ever been at work and needed to zone out for awhile? Is solitaire getting boring? More and more people are finding online flash games. They are small games which can be loaded and played inside the browser using flash. I am not a big fan of computer games and don’t own a game console but the flash games online can be very fun and entertaining. One such game I found was from a company called maidmarian.com they have a game called Tank. It is found at www.maidmarian.com/Tank.htm . This is an addicting game completely done in flash. The game is multi player allowing your to interact and play with several opponents at once. The thing that really intrigued me about this game was the complexity of all the interactions. It must have been really difficult to make a symbol drive, shoot, and interact on a multi player 3D surface. There must also be a lot of physics at work to determine fluidity of motion between the characters.