This is the first of two interactive floor plans that I’m developing for a local building project. I’ll be using an image map and coordinates to define the clickable areas, and the Maphilight javascript by David Lynch to get some neat mouseover indicators. The light blue area around half of the building is meant to represent a glass façade, seen from above but on a slight angle. This is a vector file exported as a PNG with transparency, so it has a slightly different effect on a darker/textured background.

The website is still in the early stages of development, but we’re getting there.

I’ve been experimenting with some glass/dark metal looking icons lately. The battery icons are, obviously, very inspired by the iPhone battery icon. They’re all based on fairly simple shapes—but I’ll try some more organic ones soon. I realise the date display on the clock won’t scale very well, but then again you wouldn’t use an analogue clock much smaller than that.

Let me know if you want the vectors.

Also, does anybody know which Illustrator effects are likely to break when imported to Flash? Gradients created with the Mesh tool definitively will, but what about Appearance effects like glows or shadows?

Image Swirl (really?) is Google’s new clever search thingy, launched at the end of last year. It organises image search results based on visual similarities, and groups related results. Image Swirl is still highly experimental, and will only display results for a restricted number of keywords, but it is already working very well. The above search for apple, returns results for both apple the fruit, and Apple the brand. The results are displayed in stacks of grouped images, which then can be expanded to a very intuitive map/cloud view. Pretty cool!

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1. Google ‘Streaming’ search
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Nice one, Adobe.

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