No antiques today, just ghosts — Ansel.tv is way overdue to go live but I cannot launch in good conscience with these sloppy grafix representing my Personal Brand. See here: I did the bottom version of this graphic 2018 in good old Adobe Flash, and I must have thought it looked pretty dang good. I opened it up today in 2023 and yelped like a kicked dog. Nothing to do but leap right into Affinity Designer and rebury the dead.

This is also illustrative of just how underpowered and weird the vector tools have always been in Flash. I learned how to do a lot of things the wrong way and had to unlearn it all when I started messing around with big boy’s toys. That buttery black outline on the 2023 image is a built-in layer effect in Designer — five seconds to pick a color & thickness and forget about it. If I was 500% sure I was really done with it and wouldn’t want to move things around, I could achieve a more permanent result by unifying the different letterforms into a single curve and putting a single stroke on the whole thing. Doing this same effect in Flash (which doesn’t even follow the stroke/fill paradigm of Illustrator or Designer) required a tiresome workaround with multiple steps/layers and the end result wasn’t “live,” so any changes to the pink fills would mean doing the workaround process again or manually tweaking the black outline to match.

You can get so used to dancing around like this that you start to feel pretty clever, when in fact you are playing with a broken Swiss Army knife in the firing range parking lot, hearing the muffled pops and booms from inside and really not grasping the desperation of your position.

cat & battlestation for your enjoyment:

That’s all for now.

—A∙