Rainbow lines

Stay tuned for the new tutorial on how to make some cool rainbow lines.

While i was reading an interview with Stefan Sagmeister, founter of Sagmeister Inc. there was one question there about books that he reads.


“Q:  Do you read a lot?


A:  Yes.  The two books I could recommend to my students are both not graphic design books.  One book that was extremely helpful to me was written by Edward DeBono called Thinking Course.  Edward DeBono is a philosopher from Malta—he wrote a lot of books about thinking.  And he shows many exercises about how you can improve your thinking.  There are a good number of tricks in there that I use all the time that help me come up with ideas.  He says our brain is an incredibly sophisticated computer which is best in thinking in repetition.  It has to be that way, otherwise, if you want to pick up, say, a business card, if the brain would be creative all the time, I would have to think: oh, hands go forward, go down fingers, move, now lift it up.  It would be too complicated.  The brain, by necessity is very good at thinking automatically.  But when it comes to creative ideas, the brain also wants to think in repetition.  So DeBono shows you some ways to trick the brain out of thinking in repetitions, to throw it out of its regular paths.
The other book is written by Brian Eno.  He is a very important electronic musician, who had invented ambient music and produced the Talking Heads and U2.  He wrote a diary for one year.  The way he goes about making his music and thinking about music is very helpful for graphic designers. “


So i’ve started looking for this Thinking Course that he was so passionate about. Fount it on this interesting page: www.okianul.ro .

Thinking Course

So if you live in Romania and are interested in this book, you can try at Okianul.


Sagmeister is one of the creatives i try to know more about, because of his attitude and calm style. I just love that he doesn’t want to have more then 2 other people to work with, and doesn’t do personal work at all. I do not know if that is a good or a bad thing but one thing I know for sure: if you have clients coming to you and no need to do “personal work”  just to grow your portfolio, that means you are someone in the the bizz.

Greetings ladies and gentlemen,

As we here at DVision Design like to tweak and play with all kinds of things, here’s the latest of our experiments.

Yes, I know that there are ready made solutions available out there, some of them that are nicer, have more features and make you sandwiches, but so it was that I had to create a solution from scratch as the project that needed it didn’t allow the usage of any piece of software that comes from the outside world…Don’t ask.

So what is it?  Basically this flash movie, reads the data from an XML file, and based on what is defined there, renders a number of bars on the screen, thus creating the beautiful Bar Chart that you see below.

Amazing, eh?  Further below you will find the link to the zip file containing all you need to study, use, replicate, and improve the movie. But before you download that file in such large numbers that our server bursts to flames; let me first explain the structure of the XML file and how to properly load the Flash movie.

The XML structure is the following

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<bars>
<bar value=”” color=”” name=”” info=”” />
</bars>

Okay, so, what you have to know about the parameters:

• value – numeric and pretty much self-explanatory
• color – the bar color. The value of this attribute must be entered in the form of: 0xRRGGBB. In fact, you can use any HTML color code and just replace # with 0x.
• name – the bar name, it will be printed at the bottom of the bar.
• info – text for the info bubble. Try to keep it short, as the bubble does not auto-size…yet

Seeing that sometimes it is necessary to have more than one movie loaded on the same page, the XML file is passed as an external variable to the movie. Here’s an example:

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<param name="FlashVars" value="xmlFile=Stats.xml" />

So there you go. Now you have all the necessary information required to implement this movie or to start building your own version based on it.

And by all means, show us your variants, if you end up improving/rebuilding this movie.

Happy coding.


Download link: here