About

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Thanks to Adobe for the Developer Spotlight, what an honor: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/spotlight/spotlight_twilliams.html

My name is Todd Williams, a partner, creative Director and lead Flash/Flex Developer at HD Interactive in Tampa Florida.

How did I get here?
As most young artists, I wanted to build a career drawing comics and designing t-shirts. Shortly after art school, I had the opportunity to design and produce artwork for NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL and Nascar licensed apparel. It was a great job, working almost exclusively with Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop. You could say I mastered them. My work also included training, managing a team of artists, developing new color separation techniques and optimizing work flows.

The job was great, we worked on many great properties, but there was something missing. Returning to school to study 3-D animation and video production, I hoped an animation and film career would tide me over until my comic book career to took off. After the first few 3-D animations were ready, I needed a way to show them off on the web. This was the early to mid 90’s, when there were not very many HTML development applications around; so I picked up a HTML book and designed my first website using notepad. After finishing the homepage and a couple sub-pages, I realized that I really hated HTML and declared, “I’m an artist, not a programmer! I never want to do that again.”

At this point, my training consisted of 2D and 3D illustration, design, 3D animation, video production and editing, yet I kept coming back to interactive applications. Director worked very well, but when Flash came out, I really felt at home. The timeline worked similar to Adobe After Effects and other animation programs I was used to, the illustration tools, though very cumbersome, felt like Adobe Illustrator.

My illustration and animation skills help land my first Flash job. Compared to the other Flash developers, I was very inexperienced, but I could animate. After a couple years of learning and thinking I had this Flash thing licked, a co-worker sat down with me and showed me how to do a for( loop ) in action script. That literally blew my mind and opened a whole new world or interactive awesomeness. I was no longer a gotoAndPlay/Timeline based Flash guy. 

A short time later, Sean Carey from HD Interactive called and asked for some Flash help on a project. That went so well we have been working together ever since. While working with HDI, this designer has progressed from the timeline Flash animator into an full fledged Flash develop, now working on Flex projects, Air applications and all kinds of other crazy technologies.

This Blog was put together as a way to give back to the community that has given so much to me. I have literally learned everything I know through online research and a great deal of trial and error. So many people have blogs, tutorials and other scraps of knowledge online that has helped me through almost every Flash, design and development issue I have faced. Thank You!

I feel I have a unique perspective coming from a design/animation background and hope to help other artists learn the possibilities of interactive design through ActionScript and other technologies.

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