The Creative End Without End
The Frogans Player is an amazing piece of software, if only for it’s image-processing capabilities.
I come from a graphics background. I’ve been pushing pixels around for so long, it’s not even cool. A result of all this bloody experience is that I’ve now a lot of preconceptions about how images should be prepared and finalized before they can be considered “ready”. Ready for print, ready for multimedia, ready to go.
For instance, say I’m designing a web page. I’ll probably start out by getting creative with a pencil and paper, drawing the basic elements. Before long I’ll find myself in either Illustrator or Photoshop putting a more finalized look together. As I get further into the production, the less room I have to create spontaneously.
Now comes the glorious moment when I like what I see (and my client likes it too). At this point I think about how I’m going to slice it up into pieces which will be easily utilized in HTML. Imagine cutting into a decorated birthday cake. Creation is over, consumption begins.
This last week I’ve been helping out with the writing of the next major version of the Frogans Slide Description Language (FSDL), and it’s been a lot of fun. It’s meant looking closely at its basic principals, and it’s helped me realize that with FSDL you can extend the creative process further into the productive end when authoring frogans.
The Frogans Player is, in part, image manipulation software. That means that I can lighten, darken, rotate and flip, stretch and repeat, assign layers and masks to my images at the FSDL coding phase of my work. In effect, I can write into an FSDL source document commands for performing all sorts of image processing. These image processing tasks will be performed by the Frogans Player on the end-user’s computer when they navigates to that frogans.
This opens the door to new options in the creative process. Whereas before I would concentrate on having a maximum of visual resources handy to meet my varying production needs, I can now start thinking about minimizing my resources and getting the maximum effect out of them on the end-user’s side in real time. This also allows me more creative options, even when I’m far down the production line.
Say I want to put a roll-over effect on a button. With FSDL I’m not obliged to create a separate visual element for each button state. I can simply create one button image and with FSDL treat it differently depending on mouse behavior. For instance, I might change its opacity, hue, lightness, contrast, rotation, size, shadow presence and disposition, etc. when the mouse passes over it. This way, not only do I reduce the number and variety of image files associated with my frogans, but I now have fewer images to manage and update when I modify the structure and look of my frogans.
This is also good news for those who will create frogans using server applications because visual effects can be applied dynamically. For instance, let’s say that I wanted to make a frogans that highlighted the number of winter holiday fat burning days left before the first day of summer. On the appropriate slide I could generate a progress bar. In FSDL this progress bar could actually be a mask for a photo of a volleyball tournament in Malibu, a progress bar that extends to the right with each passing day, complete with a gradient overlay which turns from cold-blue to searing red. My only graphic resource here is the photo. The rest can be written in FSDL, manageable by a server application.
For the “casual” froganizer (Aunt Peg’s decorated birthday cake frogans – 101 unique designs), they know that they have a palette of options at their disposal even if their visual resources are limited. They can fit that picture into that frame, tweak the color, make that text fit just right… On second thought, don’t get me talking about text manipulation. Not today. That’s another (fascinating) subject, and you want to get on to the next entry.