If you were designing back then, I’m sure you remember Gabocorp. TechRadar lists it as one of the 20 websites that changed the world – right up there with Wikipedia and YouTube. My team and I were working with Authorware, Director, and After Effects in those days, so Gabocorp’s super-smooth vector goodness blew our minds. I mean, it blew everyone’s mind. We wanted Flash. Badly.

By January of 1998, we finally convinced our manager to order a copy of Flash 2. When it arrived, my dear friend Tim Sisco and I huddled around my PC and began to play. We naturally tried to build something similar to Gabocorp, and spent about 30 minutes making what was basically a Flash doodle (turn your speakers on and see below). Don’t get me wrong, it’s horrible – but this new platform had set us free. Tweening from color to color, mixing multiple audio tracks on the fly, and running things full screen felt like magic. It was crazy. The world would soon grow tired of Flash sites, but you gotta give Gabocorp credit for propelling the Internet several giant steps forward.

Here it is, my first Flash movie from 1998 (sorry about the auto-play):

Also, here are some bonus screen shots from Flash 2. If you’ve worked in the platform, you’ll be blown away that there are only eight commands in ActionScript. And I just love that Macromedia icon – I miss that company. In fact, I still have the Flash 2 user guide and original CD – it meant that much to me!

I used these slides for an eight minute into on listening. I’m not sure how well they hold up without me ranting, but here they are nevertheless:

I got my photos uploaded to Flickr last night, so I went ahead and made an Animoto clip for the photostream impaired (music by Lake Trout). Enjoy!

Today I had my camera slung over my shoulder, so while the boys were taking on an entire division of droids, I  captured some of the textures on the island. The diversity was amazing for such a small area, yet the palette was noticeably consistent. Here are a few slices from the survey:

*UPDATE: Now I’m the #1 result. Nice.

Each March for the last few years, I’ve been throwing down with some of the best designers in amazing PhotoShop battle modeled after the NCAA basketball tournament. I looooooves me some PhotoShop tennis, and adding a format like this makes it extra fine.

This happens over in The Arena at Flashkit.com, where the rest of the year you’ll find typical PhotoShop tennis-style battles happening. The regulars are incredible designers, and this tournament brings out their best.

A pool of 32 entries is seeded into a bracket by reputation, and designers share stock and go head-to-head in a battle of PhotoShop skills. The community members vote on each pairing, and after 4 elimination rounds, the final pairing competes to become the champ. Bragging rights and mad respect are the bounty, but the experience is always where it’s at.

These are my images from round one and two…not even close to my normal output and I pretty much got routed. So as usual, I was in way over my head (I’m 6-4 overall), but that’s what makes it…um, educational!

You can see some of my past March Madness entries here and here, and a couple of other battle images here and here.

WhereIsClem.com is a user-generated site featuring stories about Clem the traveling gnome. This Clemson garden gnome really gets around, as photos have already been posted from Toronto and NYC. Rumor has it the site will officially launch at the October 6th home game against Virginia Tech. So if you get a shot of Clem, be sure to register and share with other Tiger fans.

ILoveMeebee.com was part of a massive disinformation campaign culminating with the release of an employee intranet. The site allows visitors to register and share stories about meebee. It had good traffic, but little participation.