Anthony Mattox Interaction Design + Digital Art

I put up a little site to host the games I’ve been working on. Check it out at games.anthonymattox.com. Right now it features Pulsus, Orbit: currently a flash prototype of an eventual iOS game, and Plong: a little two player flash game.

I hope to be adding some more soon.

Some old friends of mine are in a fantastic band, Reptar. I’m working on a larger scale website for them, but in the meantime I built a quick one pager with basic information and a couple tracks. Check out the site and their music at ReptarMusic.com.

For more information on Reptar, check out their myspace page. They’re currently touring around the southeast, but I hear they’re heading up north soon.

HowWeBuildTheWeb is an informal research piece which explores how web designers and developers learn their craft. I had hypothesized that most learned primarily outside of institutions from their peers, either in person or through the web. So far this is overwhelmingly the case.

Visit the site.

The site asks designers and developers how and when they first learned their skills and graphs the data over time, showing time horizontally and educational source by the color. Each participant is shown as a block on the timeline. Clicking on each will show more detailed information including answers to a number of qualitative questions about their experience and the web in general.

Check out the site to see peoples responses and how the education of web designers has changed over time. If you make websites, contribute and share your experience.

On a technical side, the site consists of two main components, a form and a set of data visualizations. Form design is a complex art. I used a few common techniques to make it easier to use. The form is organized by the type of information, large fields are shrunk while they are empty, and lists are extended as necessary. There’s also a sneaky login system that I did my best to hide. After submitting, users can edit their information and resubmit. If they return to the page much later, clicking the edit link will let them enter their email and password.

The data visualizations are primarily handled with PHP, HTML, and CSS. The timeline is a table (the first html table I’ve ever made ever). Cells that represent individuals have classes and other attributes so they are colored and clickable. The table handles all of the scaling. The area graph is just a couple of divs with style attributes dropped in for the width. Nothing too fancy.

The site is built on my favorite frameworks: Codeigniter, a php library, and jQuery, for a few javascript touches.

Oh wow. Look at this cool new website. Yes, for sure, it is both of those things.

I’ve been working on this new website for quite a while. It’s still, of course, a bit of a work in progress, but with a little luck everything is working. I’m still building my portfolio here. The system I have set up, again using WordPress, is fairly flexible so I can do some nice things in the future. You’ll also find a much better homepage which does a better job, I think, of showing off my work. You’ll also find some nice little changes such as a fancy new favicon, which now makes some sense, and keyboard navigation in the portfolio.

If you catch any bugs or if you have any suggestions let me know.

The List List is net art* piece I’ve been working on for the past few months. It is a collaborative list of lists, an open platform for everyones favorite superlatives.*the deacons of new media art might not agree as it isn’t ugly as sin and the concept isn’t unbelievable convoluted and yet meaningless.

On the site, you can create lists and vote lists and items within them up and down. The goal is just to build a collection of fun and humorous lists.

The site has been an enormous technical exercise in precisely executing a complex web page. Despite the apparent simplicity, it is one of the more involved sites I’ve built. Including a number of interactions with the database and an extensive collection of ajax scripts so that all the site’s functions can be used without reloading the page and with a flourish of sleek animations.

It’s very easy to get burned out on a piece with just a few details left to go. I did my best to polish every detail of the The List List, making every transition smooth and considering every graphic, semantic, and functional minutia.

I built the site using CodeIgniter, a php framework, and jQuery. CodeIgniter was probably not necessary, but it made laying out the foundation super fast. jQuery is of course great for animations and simplifying Ajax scripts.

Go have some fun with it.

I began programming about a year ago, primarily working a language called Processing. Much of the programming I have been doing has be to create generative or algorithmic artwork. Such works involve writing a script to dynamically generate images based on a variety of systems and inputs. One of the thoughts behind this type of work is that a piece is not manifested as a single image, but in a method which creates an image. What is important is style, texture, motion, and the relationships between elements and colors. The particular composition is generated dynamically each time the piece is viewed. For the past year I’ve been documenting most of this work as still images in this site, a trail of my development, but not a full representation of the work.

www.anthonymattox.com/interactive is a little site I’ve made to display my interactive works in one place. Take some time to explore the projects. I’ll keep adding more work as I create it as well as a number of other projects that still need to be cleaned up and put into the site.

Enjoy!

Most of the projects in it are created with processing and your browser will have to have the java plugin installed to run them. To run the 3d applets you will have to click trust in the dialogue box that appears. There still might be some bugs in the site so let me know if you have any issues.

Once again, It was time for a complete re-design of my website.

After a few frustrating iterations, my previous design was just something created to be as simple as possible so I didn’t screw anything up. White background, black text, lots of pictures. It worked out pretty well, but it didn’t exactly sell me as a web designer (to be fair this one isn’t very web-designer-ish either). It was also a little cold and unfriendly. It also had some formal issues, such as wide text columns.

This new site fixes these issues, and is also generally more visually interesting.

The Blog layout stayed more or less the same. The post meta-data is in the left column followed by the main column for the post content. A third column, on the right hand side, can be used to annotate images and other elements within a post. I’ve also added a fancy tag cloud and page numbers thanks to a nifty plugin. I’ve been struggling between having a wide column with nice big images, and a thinner, easier to read, column, with smaller images. To try and get the best of both, I added Thickbox (sorry Lokesh, I was already using jQuery).

I feel my work is much more effective when it is larger and I had to sacrifice larger images in my blog for the sake of the layout. Thickbox helped this some, but just to make sure, I added the option to add a custom background to every blog post and page. Someone with a larger screen looking at on of my projects will see an elegant column of images, but will also have it filling in the background around the page. To enhance this I also have custom highlight colors to match the background image. Any page that shows multiple posts pulls these custom options from the top post.

The Home Page has grown substantially. A work from my portfolio is still featured at the top and it’s background pulled. I’ve also added more links to other parts of my site and around the web, and a silly picture of me, just for fun.

My Portfolio now has three viewing modes (large images, excerpts, and thumbnails) and benefited from other site wide additions.

As of right now I still have some little tweaks to make, but everything seems to be pretty much in place. I hope to get some feedback from everyone on the new page look. Comment below, or try my fancy new contact form.

In my quest to master the web I’ve redesigned my site a few times. Unfortunately I keep coming across new things to learn and after finishing each re-design i find something wrong with it. So here it is for the eighth (give or take) time. My goal was to make the site a little more professional and show off my work a little better. The results not so bad, so maybe I’ll give it a rest for a few months.

Alex Wein is a phenomenal photographer, working with a variety of subjects, from skateboarders to abstract formations of light. I’ve just finished this website for his work. The page is built with WordPress to allow all the content on the site to be edited without touching the code. The portfolio utilizes Adobe’s Spry JavaScript Framework for the sliding effect. Although WordPress is not specifically built for this situation a custom theme I built with a little custom PHP scripting places each post based on category into the Spry Sliding panels layout, and adds the navigation above. I also wrote a simple JavaScript to enhance the design and usability of the contact form by removing the default text and changing colors.

I personally look forward to seeing more of Alex’s work as he adds it and am quite happy with the design.