We thought it might be nice to put up some experiments, ideas & sketches of things we are playing with at the moment. So we have created this new 'Labs' section.

Hopefully you'll find it interesting, maybe inspiring, but at the very least it'll keep us out of trouble over the long winter months.

We'll be posting new Flash & .NET experiments every now & again, so 'keep em peeled' and don't forget to check back soon...

I have recently discovered that if you need to embed a large number of characters form a distressed font into flash, ready for use in dynamic text fields, they can swell your file size quite considerably.

So here is a possible solution... Just use a clean font (which is much smaller), create your text field within a MovieClip, and then apply a tiled mask of distortion texture across the front of it.

This is an AS2 solution, and I'm sure with Flash Player 10's ability to support custom filters, a more efficient method could be created, but if you are limited to Player 8 and AS2 then this works quite well.

You can select your font face & size, add your text, and finally select the texture & the size of the distortion mask... This would work with any font, and any vector pattern of distortion you would like to create.

I needed a project to get my teeth fully into Widgets, and how they can be grabbed, shared & tracked on Facebook, IGoogle, MySpace, Wordpress, Bebo etc..

We had recently worked on a web site for Zone Magazine, which is a lifestyle magazine, publishing through PDF Downloads.
The site templates we built, lets Zone update their microsite every month, to display an overview of the latest edition.

From the homepage, you can view the cover image, download the PDF, view an XML/Flash slideshow of the pages and sign up as a subscriber to the magazine.

So I decided to see how quickly I could develop a widget that hooks into this existing content, and so, as Zone change their monthly information, so the widget would update with the latest content feeds, and also allow widget users to signup and download the latest edition directly.

Well, it turns out, after I had it designed, it took a day to build and about half a day to get to grips with the Clearspring interface, register the widget, publish it, set up it's homepage and even convert it into a proper facebook application... nice!

Zone Magazine is the brainchild of Andy Newson, and is a free lifestyle monthly publication produced for Crowborough, Uckfield and Heathfield areas. It is a quality publication, full of great content, design & photography.

Feel free to grab, share and publish this widget to your own sites / blogs etc...

So here's the first experiment...

I recently needed to create a series of halftone dots from an image, as you would with the Colour Halftone filter in Photoshop. However I wanted the dots to be created as paths for use in illustrator, and couldn't find any way that exactly suited what I wanted.

So, I took the opportunity to write my own filter using the BitmapData object in Flash and see what I could do with that.

In combination with my filter and printing as a PDF file (using the Adobe PDF printer option installed with Adobe CS3), I can now generate my own vector based halftone effect. You can also print to an installed Apple LaserWriter 12/640 PS, to generate a PostScript (.ps) file, using Joshua Davis' instructions here...

(WARNING: Printing to .PDF / .PS with a high level of 'Sample Grid Divisions' may take a couple of minutes to generate)

I hope to be able to allow image uploads soon, so you can upload and convert your own images...