Things have been hectic last week when I started the Flash 8 Actionscripting course. It was quite an experience and I’ve met some really nice people. I thought I wouldn’t be able to follow but I realised I actually learned a lot when I explained some of the scripting to A.. During those three days I learned to build a game entirely in coding. On Friday, the last day of the course, the game contained only four movieclips, everything else was code.
It was a very interesting course and my brain was fried each day when I left Holborn to go home by Tube but it was definitely worth it! I’m just feeling slightly uncertain about whether I will use coding or not; I’m a visual person, therefore I chose to become a graphic designer, I have a trained eye for design subtleties and find myself nagging about letter spacing or kerning whenever I see something totally wrong design-wise.
I can easily point out five centimetre between my two index fingers, if I would ask you to measure it, it would be exact five centimetre [or any length]. This is caused by the fact that at graphic art school I have been drilled to draw exact 5mm by 5mm squares with exact diagonals within a 10 by 10 centimetre square. And if one would be slightly [read plus or minus 0.1 mm] wrong I had to start all over again. I had to draw characters [typography/display typography and typeface design] by hand in different sizes using different techniques, ink, paint and a Burmester Curve Drawing Aid Set aka a French Curve.
Coding is not a visual thing, it’s more or less a maths thing, typing lines while using certain methods to create actions/output. Actionscripting is object oriented programming, you could create a simple circle by coding it instead of drawing and I’m still not sure if I would rather draw or use coding to create the same object. According to Matt Weisfeld [The Object-Oriented Thought Process] learning Object Oriented concepts is not accomplished by learning a specific development method or a set of tools. Doing things in an Object Oriented manner is, simply put, a way of thinking…
I’m trained to be visual and not a programmer, although I now understand the concept it still doesn’t make me a programmer, I will probably end up being a mixture of both. It was a hectic course and I’m glad I did it, I have another certificate to mention on my CV. For now I will re-read the book and start practicing what I’ve learned but I’ve promised myself if I won’t be able to code that circle within a certain amount of time I will allow myself to simply use the drawing tool…