Let's talk about tweens...

On a misty morning in March, we had a visit from Adrian, who works for Jam3Media in Toronto. He had a great presentation for us about making things look good and always pushing to make everything cooler. I have a hard time doing this sometimes since "cool" is such a hard concept to convey. I know it when I see it, know it when I don't - but making it cool is a whole other bag of potatoes.

He talked a lot about ways to make design more effective and interesting, especially flash based work. I hadn't really considered how awesome tweening could be. I mean I know that it certainly looks cool (see there's that word again), but I hadn't really thought about tweening every single element. On the other hand, any excuse to use TweenMax more is fine by me. He even talked about different tweens that he thought worked better than others. For example:

Cool Tweens = Quint, Expo and Back
Cheesy Tweens = Bounce and Elastic
Tweens that should NEVER be used = Linear



He also showed us some examples of sites that he was impressed by and we oohed and awed like dutiful students. They were, without a doubt, very cool. On example was the UFC site done by Red Interactive. Sites that are done this well really blow my mind and make me try that much harder to try and execute amazing design.

Overall it was a really great talk and I think all of the class really appreciated Adrian coming in.