About – taterboy
October 24th, 2007 | Filed under: Uncategorized

My name is Todd Williams. I am a consultant/partner to HDinteractive as a creative Director and lead Flash/Flex Developer.

How did I get here?
As most young artists my age, I wanted to build a career drawing comics and designing t-shirts. Shortly after art school, I got my chance to design and produce artwork for NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL and Nascar licensed apparel. It was a great job where I worked almost exclusively using Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop. You could say I mastered them.

Though the job was great and we got to work on many great properties, the pay was not that good. This inspired me to head back to school and study 3-D animation and  video production. These classes were the real deal, full linear editing, just before the industry moved over to the non-linear systems with multiple video tracks and undo. You had to have good timing to get those cuts and vocals lined up. It was like a performance art. I figured there was plenty of money in film, so I should try that industry while I waited for my comic book career to take off.
 
After my first couple 3-D animations, I needed a way to show them off. This was about the mid 90’s.  There were not very many worthwhile HTML apps at the time, so I picked up a HTML book and designed my first site using notepad. After finishing the homepage and a couple sub-pages, I realized that I really hated HTML and I put the book away and declared, “I am an artist, not a programmer! I never want to do that again.”
 
Though my training so far consisted of illustration, design, animation, video production and editing, I kept coming back to interactive applications. I tried Director, a little complex, but worked pretty well. Then a new app called Flash came out and the timeline worked very similar to Adobe After Effects. The illustration tools, though very cumbersome, felt like Adobe Illustrator. I built a few little interactive pieces with audio, animation and a couple button clicks.
 
It was my illustration and animation skills that landed my first Flash job. Compared to the other Flash developers, I was very inexperienced, but I could animate. Most of them came from a design background, so I was able to pull off some pretty impressive things. By this time in my career, life was great.  It was the height of the dot com swell, we all were going to become rich as soon as we went public. That never happened.  Both the rich part and the IPO. The company went bust, and I quickly jumped over to another sinking ship. But at least I was getting paid – for now. While working on the design, illustration, and animation side of a Flash development team, a co-worker sat down with me and showed me how to do a for( loop ) in action script. That literally blew my mind by opening a whole new world or interactive awesomeness. I was no longer a gotoAndPlay/Timeline based Flash guy.  I also made up with HTML and became pretty fluent at the whole web development thing.
 
After 2 more belly up companies in less then two years, I was officially independent with enough work coming in to keep my family fed. Life got even better when Sean Carey from HD Interactive called and asked for some Flash help on a project. That went well and we have been working together ever since. In the last 6 years, working with HDI, this designer’s transition from the timeline Flash animator into an full fledged Flash programmer, now working on Flex projects, Air apps and all kinds of crazy technologies, has come a long way.
 
So this site, simply put, is how a designer approaches programming and interactive projects. I feel I have developed a unique ability to bridge the chasm of designer and programmer. Also we will discuss the great internal debate of pre-built components and classes versus Custom. Based on our experience at HDI, we have spent a great amount of time building components and classes to save time on the next project. Unfortunately most of our jobs require custom solutions built on unique frameworks. But more on that later.

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