Typographic Creatures are Back

January 15, 2008
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    Wow. This looks so amazing!

    Alex Placito / 15/01/2008

    Very pretty - Jared Tarbell does some amazing things - I’ve recreating his stuff for years. This looks cool, when do we get a demo?

    Jon B / 15/01/2008

    beautiful, could we try this?

    JM / 22/01/2008

    Do you mean from a source code point of view? I’ll have to do some tidying up of the code in order to release it, then again I don’t want to see typographic creatures all over the web. I’d rather this piece inspire people to try new things with wordpress. The php script I use to get the wordpress data is available here: http://www.brendandawes.com/news/version-35-2

    bren / 22/01/2008

    hi i am new to using things like these creatures, i was wondering if it would be possible to produce something similar but just have them on a start page and not linked to a database? also does any1 know how i install ape to flash cs3 as i cant find out how thanks/

    davy t / 23/01/2008

    @ bren
    Personally I wasn’t referring to code - I hadn’t realised the creatures where running on your homepage and not here - apologies.

    From the screenshots I thought you were refering to Jared Tarbell’s Flagellum code - I think that would work well for this effect too as the creatures are naturally segmented for movement.

    Jon B / 26/01/2008

    No problem - I should have pointed out that these things where on the home page!

    bren / 27/01/2008

    Comment

    I just couldn’t leave it alone, but those pesky typographic creatures made from the titles of the posts on this site are back having been completely rewritten in ActionScript 3!

    Each creature is made up from the letters from the title of each post, and the speed is dependant on their age - younger = quicker. They also become more blurry the older they are and the letters grow in size dependant on the amount of comments a post gets.

    creatures1.jpg

    In this version I completely rewrote Jared Tarbel’s original creature code in AS3 as the old version sent the CPU through the roof when there was a lot of posts. While that still happens to some extent, there’s now only one onEnterFrame for the entire thing which updates the movement of each letter, whereas before each letter had it’s own loop attached. Now your computer’s fan can work a bit less harder!

    I’ve also added in a “tame” button which displays the creatures in a more uniform way for easier navigation.

    creatures2.jpg

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