The Designer – My Passion for Eye Candy and Pushing Pixels

I was a kid when I played with my first computer in the mid 80′s. It was a Commodore 64 (a really old computer). I was inspired at a young age to push pixels around and no joke that is; as some of those old video games we all use to play involved doing just that. Pushing a pixel around while trying to avoid colliding into other pixels. What a great pleasure it was to watch the evolution of the dull 1-bit monochromatic screen with just enough resolution to fit 64 blocky characters across it, to life-like color in 3-Dimensional space, recreating for anyone with imagination an infinite amount of visual possibilities. I couldn’t resist. I knew what I was meant to do.

The Developer – My Passion for Telling Pixels What to Do

After being inspired by the colorful pixel creations of my childhood and the value they have added to my world, it was only inevitable for me to want to find out how they were constructed and told what to do. I decided to combine my technical know-how with my talent for Art and see what was going on behind the scenes. How can I manipulate these little guys to create what I want. My answer came in the form of a graphics/animation program made by Macromedia called Flash. It was only in version 4 at the time. I immediately knew this was the wave of the future. However, to fully utilize the power of the program, one had to learn Actionscript which, in its early days was practical but, more of a scripting language than the full fledged programming language it has become today. What could be better. A graphics software package with an extendable dedicated language for controlling every pixel on the screen while at the same time giving other people the benefit of interacting with those pixels and using their own imaginations. It was breathtaking… it was magic!

Tom Haschenburger – I tell pixels what to do and when.