- Sep 30
Wario Land Shake It!
- Design, Technology, Video Games
I’ve been sitting on this one for a week now and kept forgetting to post about it. The new Wario Land video at YouTube is probably the best use of a Flash ad I’ve seen on the web in a long time. I’m incredibly impressed with just how functional and accurate everything is. I didn’t suspect for a minute that anything was amiss.You really should go see it for yourself if you haven’t already. I’m also very intrigued by the game and it’s cartoony graphics. It takes me back to the days of games like Battletoads and The Simpsons Arcade.
I’m really at a loss as to why this is happening. Everything is blurry when I use the Mac shortcut to take a screenshot. If I do the same thing with Skitch I don’t have any issues. I’m going to try and duplicate this on other Macs around the office. Has anyone else ever had this problem before?
- Sep 22
Refreshed the Site
- Design, Personal, Technology
If you can’t tell I’ve been doing a bit of cleanup on the site for the past few days. I was getting a bit bored of the dark and dreary but I also didn’t want to completely dump everything about my old design. I’ve traded in the dark greys for some clean whites and crisp grey lines. I decided to keep the green as it’s simply one of my favorite colors. I’m still trying to decide if the new header is too bright. Perhaps it lacks a bit of contrast?
Overall I am very happy with it. I’ve also begun to put my portfolio back online. I developed a new Expression Engine backend driving all the thumbnails and imagery. It’s still a bit more manual than I’d like but I’m pretty happy for the most part. My next step is to get a few more sites up along with some of my print, illustration and identity work. After that I plan on moving on to my logo. The fleur-de-lis will stick around but I’ve got some ideas for some interesting twist on it.
Let me know if you find any bugs. I’m also very open to suggestions and criticism.
Talk about a kick to the ego. These are some of my first projects out of college. I plan on keeping these around to remind me where I was when I started, especially when evaluating job candidates.
These were made as part of a loop for an arcade machine called the GATE. We had hooked up a webcam, mouse trackball and a keyboard to a computer in a custom cabinet. The idea was that you could play new computer games with people in arcades around the world. You could hear them and watch them in little windows around the game you were playing.
This was back in 98-00, way before YouTube, podcasts and ventrillo. It was pretty amazing that we could squeeze 8 videos through a tiny pipe along with game data. Alas, noone told the owner, an old exec from Atari, that arcades were dead in America.
He should have put it in Japan.
Wizards of the Coast has been doing it’s damndest to convince us that they can provide an excellent online experience. They are offering up a new online magazine, character generator, mapping program and online game area.
Yet time and time again WotC has proven to us that they have absolutely no idea what their doing with the web. They’ve failed us with their website and I’ll show you why.
Welcome
I am Michael Sigler and this is my blog. I am a designer, artist, art director, writer, dungeon master and all around geek. I live in Portland, OR with my wife Joleine. During the day I work for the fine folks at Jive Software.
On the interwebs
Projects
These are the communities and projects that I proudly help lead and maintain.
Dragon Avenue
A community and news site for fans of Dungeons and Dragons and other role-playing games.
Refresh Portland
A monthly gathering focused on spreading a little design knowledge to the dark corners of Portland, OR.