neithercorp.us

Neither Corporation is a brand I came up with while attending college at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. It became my first website: neithercorp.us. That website no longer exists (so don’t try to go there!). However, I did salvage some of the components to publish here as examples of my early UI/UX work.

The Musical Banner

Try rolling over the letters with your cursor. They will also react to corresponding keystrokes. This allows the user to play the banner, sort of like a musical instrument. (If it doesn’t work right away, try clicking on one of the letters to give focus to the Flash element.)

The Home Portal
The following is a full screen interactive page that references an external XML file to populate dynamic text fields and links. This technique I used to use quite often in my Flash days, because it prevents the need to re-author the .swf file when making simple edits. Feel free to scroll and click around to see how it reacts. I’ve disabled all the external links.

[View the full screen version on a separate page].

The rest of the neithercorp.us website followed an extremely minimalist design style indicative of my personal tastes at the time. (It was also littered with pixel fonts.) I am not going to include any of that today.

But there is one more thing I would like to share. An experiment in creating a highly unorthodox and unusual site navigation…

The Organic Navi
Obviously, this breaks many common sense rules of usability and usefulness. But I was young. I was aware of the rules I was breaking, but I was determined to do something really different. So here it is…

…and I’m glad you’d have to decompile it to see the source code, because this was one of my first ever Flash projects, and the ActionScript is pretty sloppy by my current standards! (The best word I can conjure is “Exacting”).

But we all have to start somewhere, right?

I received a number of compliments on this from users who thought this was clever, and also a few complaints from users who couldn’t figure it out. Either way, it made an impression, and I still think it’s kind of fun to play with. So I just had to bring it back! But don’t count on me ever making an interface like this again.

Will there ever be anything new under the Neither Corporation brand? No!

I’d like to thank my friends who contributed artworks for publication there, and all the members and visitors who made the forum such an interesting little niche community. This page is, for now, the final resting place of neithercorp.us.

Long live neithercorp.us!

A few notes on Flash
Flash is pretty clearly on its way out. And I’m cool with that. Had I built Neithercorp.us last week instead of 7 years ago, I would have probably used a combination of CSS and JavaScript to produce similar results (especially now that CSS3 transitions and transforms are becoming more widely supported). I am excited by the promise of HTML5 Canvas as a vector animation platform and a possible successor to Flash for game development, but Canvas is not quite ready yet. While Flash has taken some major torpedo hits in the past couple years, and its future is not bright, it’s still a very big ship, and it’s going to take a very long time to sink.

Will I start any new Flash projects? Perhaps, if it’s a game, meant to be played on a browser, and I have a very aggressive deadline. But probably not. The next time I try to develop a game for fun, I will most likely use Java, target the Android OS, and be published on Google Play. But this is a subject for another day…