Don’t Be Sad It’s Over, Be Glad It Happened

I am retiring this blog now as a lot of the content is Edge Animate related which is no longer relevant. I’ve found blogging on WordPress to be a bit fragmented (and expensive keeping it ad-free) so now I’ve moved my site over to SquareSpace.

I don’t blog that often but when I do I’ll be doing it here – I might even blog more often because it’s much easier for me to get it looking the way I want – I can also embed CodePen stuff properly too. Plus I’m busier than ever so I’ll hopefully have lots of cool stuff to share.

So if you’re reading this and have followed any of the stuff I’ve put out over the past years, thank you. I’ve started a mailing list over on Gannon.tv (at the bottom) so if you’re a subscriber here I’d be honoured if you hopped over and joined that list 🙂

Cheers and Happy New Year, 2017!

Designing in Code

I don’t do interviews very often partly because I tend to go off on tangents quite a lot and rabbit on about things I wasn’t asked. It’s an affliction I’m trying to overcome 🙂

Over the past few months I have become friendly with Matt Aussaguel from MaterialUp, UpLabs (and many others) and when he asked me for an interview about my process of designing in code I was pretty excited to talk about it.

Designing in code is not a new thing and with the unstoppable resurgence and popularity of SVG it has never been easier to design and build projects almost solely in the browser using some fairly standard tools.

So without wishing to blabber on I invite you to go and read it – I made a very special effort to stick to answering the questions (which was very hard for me!). I hope you enjoy it.

Read about how I design in code

Reasons Remix

As some of you may know I am a big fan of the Reasons To conference in Brighton. I have attended it on and off for the past 10 years (it was originally called Flash On The Beach but we don’t talk about that ;)) and in 2014 I was given the opportunity to create a 3 minute pitch for the Elevator Pitch.

I was lucky enough to be chosen to come back to do a full hour in 2015 where I had the most fun demonstrating how you animate SVG toast.

This year Reasons is celebrating 10 years and the speaker line up is killer. Along with the celebrations they’ve designed a new logo and asked friends of the conference to remix it.

So after several terrible attempts I finally came up with an animation I liked and I’m proud to say it’s featured on the Reasons Remix page.

If you want to recharge and get inspired you should definitely come along. It’ll be the best one ever! ( I say that every year and every year it is).

Spin2Win Wheel is finally here!

 

Today I am thrilled to announce my new product called Spin2Win Wheel!

Following months of focused development and customer feedback on my first wheel game, Spin2Win Wheel is not only responsive and beautiful but also chock full of useful (and requested) features.

Here’s some info:

Built using Scalable Vector Graphics Spin2Win Wheel is a responsive, flexible, customisable, resolution independent spin wheel game whose outcomes you control.

Spin results, prizes, win/lose, number of spins and more can be controlled using JSON data. You can also customise the look and feel of Spin2Win Wheel to bring it in line with your brand or color scheme and it even has an anti-cheat mechanism to prevent players placing the wheel on a chosen segment.

Features

• API for game progress, tracking and results
• Populated and controlled with JSON for dynamic instances
• Spin destinations can be set to ensure a specific outcome
• Anti-cheat mechanism
• Supports infinite random spins
• Smooth intuitive spin/throw physics
• Customizable colors with unique or alternating pattern
• Customizable size, position and style of the graphics
• Responsive and scalable
• Customizable number of wheel segments
• Use text or images (or both!) as the prize on each segment
• Supports animated GIFs as segment prize
• Touch and mouse input
• Supports desktop and mobile
• Resolution independent SVG graphics means it Spin2Win Wheel looks beautiful on high density displays
• Supports tick sound on/off while spinning
• Supports shadows to add depth
• Info popups can be styled via CSS
• Supports emojis

 

You can read more in the official documentation here.

For those of you who follow my blog you may know that I have been selling items on CodeCanyon for a few years now. I began selling Edge Animate templates and thankfully they have sold, and continue to sell, very well.

You may also know that Edge Animate has now been discontinued and so I have moved my focus onto SVG and JavaScript. So this new product marks a new dawn for me as I move into building items that don’t rely on any third party software.

As I was building it I realised it can actually be used for all sorts of applications – quizzes, games, UI, information points, kiosks, apps and more – and because it’s built with responsive SVG it always looks great.

A lot of blood sweat and tears has gone into this so I hope you like it (and buy it obviously 🙂