The first step was to do a lot of planning. How big should it be? What do I need to build it? How am I going to do something like this when I don’t know anything about the technology? Well, I decided to go ahead with it based on the list of parts that were in that tutorial plus a couple things of my own.

Once all of the parts were ordered, I decided to spec out and start building the box to house the screen and eventually the projector. Here are a couple pictures of the construction process.

Once that was built enough for me to start on the electrical aspects of the screen (and once all the parts arrived), I started on that. Cut out the corners of my acrylic and struggled with my first ever electrical circuit. Mounted the lasers in some air-drying clay and plugged it in. It worked on the first test (with a lot of little adjustments) and I have the following video to show you my first test.

There is still a lot to do with the setup, including adding the projector and a screen to touch, but it is on its way and I am very happy with it thus far. Stay tuned for more updates in the coming weeks.

thanks, marc

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In March 2008, I decided that I needed to actually start my own blog, it was something that I had thought about for a while but I never really pictured myself writing anything. It ended up being a great idea because it has pushed me to try new things so that I have something to post about. I have tried to use my blog as a place to share code and thoughts about the industry. So far, I would say that it has been a success and I thank all of you for staying with me through the year.

I thought that today I would mix things up a little bit by switching up my theme for my site. I wanted something with more room for the side columns now that I have my tweets feeding in to my site as well. So I hope this doesn’t screw anything up!

anyways, have a good one. Marc

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A couple of years ago, when I was working at Critical Mass in Calgary, AB and noticed a couple things with the team that I was with that could make everything go faster. When I took a step back to evaluate what was happening I noticed that all of the issues that I was experiencing were rooted in having every person that was touching a project pay a little bit more attention to detail.

When I started my web career, I was at a smaller company that didn’t have the ability to get a huge account and throw 70 people at it to get it done; there were just a few of us on every account. So many projects were just pushed through that we didn’t have all the time in the world to make sure that layers were named and all code was documented.

As I got into the world of larger agencies I started to notice how detrimental this was to the efficiency of future projects, as well as the maintenance of past projects (already kind of knew that one). So what I did was I set up a meeting with most of the team and we talked about what people’s roles were, where they fit into the greater scheme of things, and all of the little things that individuals could be doing to make everything easier for all involved.

Some of it was obvious, just follow best practices and standards and things will run smoothly but it really seemed like people needed a reminder of a lot of things. I am not innocent on this either, I have been rushed through countless projects that just kept getting messier as the days went by. I thought that I would write this to remind people of the basics and hopefully get them to pay a little bit more attention to even the smallest things.

Names:

When creating anything, whether it be a Photoshop file or a Flash file make sure that you name everything clearly. Build everything as though someone else is going to have to look at it and understand it at some point down the line. Name all layers and assets with descriptive names, try and group similar assets and layers so that every bit of the file is quickly and easily accessible.

Layer Comps:

If you are working in Photoshop and passing files to designers, layer comps are a great resource for working with your content. If you haven’t heard of layer comps I strongly recommend looking into how to work with them. You can keep things organized, cut down file size, and make sure that it is clear what your thoughts were when designing.

Documentation:

I tend to write a little too much documentation in my code these days, just to be certain that anyone that touches my files know what was going on in my mind. One key thing to keep in mind with documentation is that it is not just for you, so keep it a little bit descriptive for others to understand. When documenting your code try to picture that your code is going online, not just what is produced by it, use this as a motivation to keep it clean and documented. That always helps motivate me because I have always been a little self-conscious about my code so I write a lot of documentation to help out.

Clean Code:

Don’t go through your files and name things randomly x and y. Come up with some short, succinct names and always follow a naming convention. This comes in handy a lot because you don’t have to go looking through all the definitions in the script to find that gameTimer is a game timer as opposed to having a variable named gt.

Know Your Team:

I have worked (and still work) at companies with multiple offices where I haven’t had the chance to meet many of my team members. This doesn’t have to be a problem thanks to other forms of communication, but communication is something that should really be pushed. When starting on a project, I always find it best to layout the some sort of plan for putting everything together. If you are a programmer just blindly getting files from a designer then you may not get what you want. If you are a designer preparing files for a developer, you may be doing more than you have to.

A good example of this is when there are a couple of different stages in design/development that are sharing assets. Let’s say a designer creates a PSD and passes that off to a motion designer who spends days animating things over and over again. This might prove to be a waste of time because the developer can re-use just the first animation and do the rest. These are things that should be discussed beforehand. With experience, you will eventually start picking up on aspects that can be coded and those that should be manually done. Until then, just talk.

Know Your Own Role:

This one has always been a big one for me. Being a developer, I am generally one of the last touch-points on a project before it gets out the door. This means that towards the end of the project if anyone has an issue with the way something looks or works, they generally come to me first. This is where I have to make the decision if that is something that I should do. I can make little revisions to positioning and layout but I know that anything even slightly beyond that should be done by or with a designer to ensure that it is done right and won’t have to be done again.

Knowing your role basically comes down to knowing your strengths in a given project and knowing when to go to others to use their strengths. If you are at an agency, there is generally someone that you can turn to that can do something quicker and better than you if the task is not in your specific area.

Overall, Just Pay Attention

In the end, it all comes down to just paying attention and spending the extra couple minutes on the fine details. Once you get into the habit of doing things that I listed above, they become easier and quicker and you may even find that your work is not just getting easier to work with but it is getting better and you are getting things done faster.

- Thanks, Marc

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For the past 6 months he has been talking to me about the organization and asked that I build a website for him. Due to time restrictions I have been unable to make a site that is as solid as NCEP is deserving of but last night I finally got the first launch of the site up and running at http://www.nceponline.org/.

The Nepali Children’s Education Project’s mission is to provide poor and orphaned children with the financial means to access and complete primary and secondary education in Kathmandu, Nepal, facilitated through fund raising initiatives in Canada. I ask you to take a look at the site and consider making a contribution to the cause. The members of the organization are very passionate about what they are doing and after hearing stories from Luke about his reasons for getting the ball rolling with the organization, I believe that they have started something great for the children of Nepal.

thank you and happy holidays !

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Last week I was able to find some time for playing with a couple of the libraries that interest me in order to see what they can do. I grabbed the OpenCV Processing library and a couple others and started playing with my video camera. I don’t know if the issues that I had are related to the fact that I am on a Macbook Pro with Windows Vista on it but for the life of me I couldn’t get my webcam to work with the OpenCV capture methods. But I managed to get it up and running with a different library and then grabbed the incoming image with OpenCV to process it.

Take a look and let me know what you think: www.marcpelland.com/application.windows.zip (you need a webcam). It isn’t much, but it was good to finally get in there and write some code in Processing. I don’t really know if I am going to pursue this much further after discovering that I cannot access the webcam VIA a java applet. If there is anyone out there with more java / processing experience that may have a way to use this type of app online I would be very greatful.

thanks, marc

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I picked this book up at a bookstore in Calgary a couple months ago and finally decided to dig into it, and I am very happy that I did! While I could see how a lot of people could find that the contents either outraged them or was really breakthrough, I was a little bit different.

I found the God Delusion to be a very well written book with lots of solid arguments against religious belief. What was not groundbreaking for me was that I had formed a lot of these opinions on my own over the past while.

Growing up in Canada must be different than growing up in the United States. When I was a child I was put in a Roman Catholic school system and my family went to church every Sunday. As time went by we all started forming our own lives apart from each other and over time religion played a smaller role in our lives. I saw this as normal amongst my friends and their families despite most being raised Roman Catholic. From the sounds of the book there is a LOT more pressure in other countries to conform to religious beliefs from family, school and friends. I have no doubt that if I told my family I am an atheist they would think no less of me (but who knows).

There were some smaller pieces of this book, little tid-bits of information about different religions, which I had no idea about and was grateful to learn about. A great amount of time was dedicated to the theory of evolution, but what I found really intrigued me were the details regarding the Bible. I have never read the Bible and have only heard select passages from it. I had no idea how violent a book it actually it.

That is all for now! If you get the chance, I suggest reading this book no matter what your beliefs may be. It is always good to have some knowledge of what is going on outside of your personal beliefs. I am starting on Sophie’s World tonight. It is a book that has been recommended to me numerous times and I am finally going to find the time to read it. It is fairly easy to find time to read these days, having just moved to another country and being busy with work. Whenever I need a break I just sit back in a coffee shop and read for a bit, very relaxing.

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Here is a little history as to why I decided to read this book. A couple months back I had read a book called Linked (Albert-Laszlo Barabasi) and found it interesting how so many things are interconnected and how I, someone in a different world than the author, was able to relate to and understand the material. After reading Linked I decided that I wanted to continue learning about connectedness in the world, partly as research for social online systems and partly out of personal interest that I have developed in the topic. That is when I decided that my next read would be Sync.

Through the first couple of chapters in Sync, I discovered my brain working in an interesting way. It was coming up with application and visualization ideas to represent what the author was talking about. Thanks to this, I think that I was really able to dive into the book and learn a lot. From extensive discussions of fireflies to explanations of the Circadian rhythm, I learned not only about the overall topic but have a new way to look at these sorts of things.

The latter part of the book was also quite interesting, it was quite parallel to the thoughts brought forth by Barabasi in his book Linked. Linked was actually referenced in a couple sections of Sync. Both books were similar in my mind because they kept most equations and math separate from their writings (Sync more so) and just focused on getting the ideas to the forefront.

Overall, I would recommend this book to anyone that is interested in learning a little bit about the physical world. I find that I look at things just a little bit differently when I finish a book like this one and I am greatful to the author for this.

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My time (27 months) at Critical Mass as a Flash Developer was a wonderful rollercoaster of ups and downs. I had a great time there, working with brilliant individuals, under great leadership, working with some of the worlds best clients. I learned a lot during my stay with Critical Mass and the decision to leave was not an easy one. I had to leave behind friends, colleagues, comfort, and an all around fun working environment (not to mention leaving Canada)!

I have now moved to Boulder, Colorado! To work with another monster agency (Crispin Porter + Bogusky) as an Interactive Developer. I look forward to this new role and hope to learn a lot an maybe contribute a little bit more to my blog as I learn to try and share some knowledge and insight that I gain in this new place.

I left Calgary for Boulder on Friday of last week and made the drive in two days. I drove day and night through Montana and Wyoming and finally into Colorado. This was a challenge for me because I have rarely ever travelled to the US (or anywhere for that matter). I drove through rainstorms, crazy fog at night which scared the hell out of me, and lots of gorgeous sunlight.

I arrived here on Saturday evening to a gorgeous night and a cold. I haven’t been able to truly enjoy the area yet because I have been fighting this pesky cold since arriving but I am working on it. Boulder appears to be a beautiful place in a country and seems very proud of its new president and political direction. I look forward to living here and absorbing all the I can in the process; both knowledge and culture alike.

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This plugin allows users of FireBug to load images into the plugin and overlay them atop developed HTML. This is proving to be very useful for me, as a developer to get a perfect match to the designer’s comps.

I highly recommend checking it out at http://www.pixelperfectplugin.com/ . Good work guys !

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I started out in the industry as a graphic designer and web developer but quickly came to realize that the more code I wrote, the less design prowess I had. The trend in the industry to find a hybrid developer / designer is a good idea on the surface but has many flaws. I have always been a fan of the phrase “jack of all trades, master of none”. While it is a great asset to know a little bit about what is happening on the other side of the fence, it should stay on the other side of the fence.

Both designers and developers are creative and skillful in their own ways so why should they try to do it all? I have worked on countless projects where I have been put on a project that was “almost completed” by a designer. Upon getting the files, I am told that I just have to do a little bit of optimization and get the files delivered ASAP. More often than not, once I take a look at the files it is obvious that they need a LOT of work. The designers that I work with are spectacular at what they do, but when they try writing code I am given files that take hours just to understand.

If you would like to be a developer, take a course or two and practice. I didn’t learn to write code over night, nor do I try and create complex designs expecting a designer to pick it up and think it was a job well done. There is a lot more than just being able to write a frame script in Flash that goes into being a good developer, especially when you are creating international pieces.

When I am busy and on a tight deadline, I don’t want to (nor do I have the time to) spend hour after hour ripping apart a project just to re-write 90% of the code that went into the “almost completed” version.

An ideal situation for me is to be able to sit down with a designer as they are starting to work on a project and come up with boundaries and share ideas. I respect their skills and would like to utilize them as much as possible. Just as it isn’t efficient for me to rewrite an application from them, it isn’t efficient for them to spend days creating things that could have been automated with a little bit of code. It is also inefficient for them to realize that it can be done with code and try to do it on their own.

So next time you are thinking about becoming a hybrid or hiring one, take into account the fact that it isn’t as easy or productive as you might think.

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