design


Today I checked out the new mall. It’s an out-of-the-way location, but it’s pretty cool. I suppose its construction will eventually spawn the regular horde of strip malls and fast-food shrines. The architecture is nice; the inside is all really edgy-modern. The overhang above the entranceway is tilted almost to the ground — looks like it could fall on you any second. It’s something you don’t really see everyday. Even the inside is nice. The fast food court looks like the inside of a Maggiano’s: booths with dimly lit lamps and random fauna.

I tried looking for jeans. Let me tell you, jeans look like crap right now. Every single store I went to had only ripped-up jeans. It’s like some weird viral marketing scheme. It’s funny because there are actually people who buy this stuff, and it’s even funnier to realize that all the jeans that you’re buying have the same rip in the same place. There’s an actual assembly line somewhere that goes to the effort of making jeans, and then rips them. The effort to gain any sort of “individuality” is completely shot when you’re standing there and you realize, “wow, all these jeans have an oil stain under the left pocket. Cool.” So I bought some khakis from AE and left. I’ll wait and see what the next fad is. Don’t know if that’s good or bad…

I would show you the one with oil stains, but you can see it for yourself at Aeropostale.

Just as a side note, i’m working on the new website for my dance team at UNC. We’re mostly hip hop, but we also do some pop/lock and break. This is my second site done entirely in flash… the first was actually the older version of the site. Flash is probably one of the most frustrating things to work with. Once you get it though, it can be pretty powerful. As i’ve come to realize, it starts with an understanding of the way the basic symbols work — movies, graphics, and buttons. This new site employs a lot of advanced features including:

  • Dynamic Binary Content (external swfs)
  • Dynamic ASCII Content (external html files)
  • PHP interaction (using getVariables)
  • MySQL interaction
  • Transition masking

Flash, to me, seems like the sort of “exception” to the standardization phenomenon sweeping the web right now. Or rather, it seems like a tool that allows for standardization but still allows companies to instill that competitive advantage. It can support XML almost fully — Flash even has a parser and an object for it — as well as CSS. However, it allows companies like Sean John and Nike to maintain, and sometimes even benefit, their presentation layer, while still keeping a strong handle on their server-side scripting.

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